The Goodreads giveaway of my debut novel Hell & Gone is finished. I just returned from the post office, where I sent out 10 paperbacks to the winners.
I didn’t realize until just before the giveaway ended that I could see the profiles of those who entered. I was rather disappointed that none of the folks I regularly interact with on Goodreads signed up, unless I missed them while skimming through the list. Oh well–my fiction certainly isn’t for everybody.
I would have been happy if only 10 people signed up, and all 10 won a paperback, if they were people truly interested in reading this kind of book (and then would write an Amazon review afterwards). But 504 people signed up, before all was said and done, and the ones I browsed didn’t appear to particularly like military thrillers. That leads me to worry that they signed up merely to get free stuff, not really caring what the free stuff is.
Maybe they’ll get the book and it will just sit around collecting dust for years until they host a garage sale. Maybe they’ll give it to somebody for Christmas or a birthday. Or maybe they’ll turn around immediately and sell it on E-Bay. Or maybe I’ll actually get a review something along the lines of, “I normally don’t read this genre, but I got the book for free. So I tried to read it but there just weren’t enough strong female characters…”
Or maybe I’ll just get a drive-by one star review the SJWs are so fond of giving: “This sucks. Couldn’t even finish the first page.” Yes, those reviews happen, all over Amazon.
I now have a list of giveaway winners. Nine out of ten are female. That would be great if the genre was romance or chick-lit or lesbian vampire paranormal urban coming-of-age fiction. But Jack Silkstone called Hell & Gone “A man’s book through and through,” which is precisely what I wrote it to be.
Here’s some depressing details about the winners: three of them haven’t bothered to post a single review on anything at all. One of them has posted one review, and one has posted three. Only four winners have reviews posted in the double digits and two of them are tied at 12.
Some of these folks haven’t added a single book to their shelf. It’s a little surprising they expended the energy to sign up for the giveaway.
This is building on my bad experience at Goodreads. Previously, in my ongoing quest for reviews, I offered free download codes for my audiobooks to anyone willing to post a review after listening. All those who volunteered took the free stuff and ran. Some even deleted their responses in the thread where they volunteered.
Ostensibly Goodreads is the perfect venue for finding reviewers, because everybody there allegedly likes to read. There are a couple strikes against me right away because…
- It’s mostly women (I write for men).
- It’s 90% left-leaning feminists.
I tried to counteract this by only advertising the giveaway in groups where my intended audience was likely to be. But alas, it would appear that none of those folks entered, while 500+ from the general Goodreads population did.
It’s beginning to look like this experiment is doomed to the same fate as every other marketing ploy I’ve tried.
Well, we’ll see. Maybe I’m not giving the winners enough credit, because I’ve been stung so much in the past. So far I still plan on a Goodreads giveaway for the sequel, Tier Zero. When it’s all over and the reviews come in (or don’t), we’ll have some data to determine whether Goodreads giveaways have any marketing value for an author.
An author who does not write lesbian vampire paranormal urban coming-of-age fiction, that is.