So…Long story short, I have more books to give away (Lord Ruin) and am looking for opinions about which way to go.

First a little set up so you understand my situation. Amazon has this feature called Giveaways where someone can give away an item and people signup for the giveaway in the hopes of being one of the randomly selected winners. They allow eBook giveaways.

Giveaway Sort of Gone Wrong?

I finally decided to try an Amazon Giveaway. Because I just released Surrender to Ruin, I chose book 1 in the series (Lord Ruin) as the book to give away. I chose to give away 50 copies — the cost to me was $250. That represents the cost of 50 books at $4.99, within a few cents.

As I was setting up the giveaway, the Amazon page glitched. I have no idea if it was my internet, which is not the greatest and has been particularly sucky of late, or Amazon or what. All I know is that my giveaway set up page vanished. I refreshed and there was still nothing. So I started over and succeeded. At no time did Amazon say anything like “You already have a giveaway for this item. Do you really want two?”

Anyway, there was my giveaway. I put out the word and then a little later I checked my giveaway page and there were TWO giveaways. One had entries (the second one that I had told people about) and the other had none. So I cancelled the one with no entries.

Then I asked asked Amazon for a refund for the giveaway I cancelled because it was a duplicate that was the result of whatever happened when I was setting up the first giveaway. Unfortunately for me, eBook giveaways are not refundable. Thinking about this, it makes a certain sense for Amazon to have this. (For reasons having to do with eBook sales numbers, and ranking, I imagine.)

Let me add that I am pleased with the Giveaway that I did not cancel. There were over 300 entries within just a day or two, and now that the Giveaway has ended, all but two of the books were claimed. Meaning, there are 48 presumably new readers who now have a copy of Lord Ruin free to them. Yay! Fingers crossed that they go on to read Books 2 and 3!

The Dilemma

You see my dilemma. I have been charged for 2 giveaways and one of them is in a cancelled state with no entries and no books given away. My options are limited. I’m not going to go down the rabbit hole of insisting that the first giveaway be backed out because worst case scenario, that does something horrible to the rank of Lord Ruin. There is no good time for a book to vanish from Amazon product pages. (I have a terrible, depressing story about what happens when a book’s rank disappears.)

My choices are this:

1. Un-cancel the giveaway and run a second one.
2. Ask for giveaway codes that I can personally give to readers.

Do I do another Amazon giveaway or ask for the codes and do some other promotion so that 52 people can get a code for a free copy of Lord Ruin? (52, because two of the books in the Giveaway I ran have not been claimed and I can get codes for them, too.) But I may let those sit because it’s only been 2 weeks since the end of the Giveaway and people may not have seen the email . . .

As a reader, do you have any preference? Another giveaway or something where I have codes to provide?

Because, quite literally, if I do not giveaway those books through another Giveaway or via codes, that’s $250 spent for nothing.

Tags: Dilemma, Lord Ruin, marketing, Surrender to Ruin

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 30th, 2017 at 10:06 am and is filed under Publishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.