How to promote your books on Goodreads

27 Comments

Galaxy Girls by Edie RamerMy new sci fi romance, Galaxy Girls, is just out, my shiny new baby. I wanted to learn how to use Goodreads for promotion and thought some of you might want to know more about this, too. I put a call out, and a few people contacted me. If you’ve had any promo experiences on Goodreads, I hope you’ll share them in the comments.

What’s amazing is that I found out almost everything important by reading the How To Use the Author Program directions on Goodreads. Thanks to Amy Atwell for pointing me to it. The directions are easy to read, and everything appears simple to set up. By viewing my friends’ Author pages, I knew some of this, but not all.

You can do giveaways on Goodreads. Each giveaway that I looked at had hundreds of people commenting for a chance to win the books. But even more exciting, you can sell your books on Goodreads. You’ll get 70% royalties and Goodreads keeps 30%.

(Correction. Thanks to Michelle Diener, I found out that the giveaways are for Advanced Reading Copies and must be print books. You can see the directions here. I plan to do a print copy of Galaxy Girls, which will probably be out in the fall. Until then, I’ll have to do my giveaways elsewhere.)

You can also link to your blog so it shows up on Goodreads (I’d done that already), post excerpts (I didn’t know that), quizzes (I’d like to do that – if someone figures out how to add five hours to each day), and start a Q&A group (again, the hours thing).

Of course, you should set up your author profile, if you haven’t already, and add your books ( give them a 5-star rating!). You can add videos if you have them.

Goodreads offers advertising, too, but I’m passing on that for now. So is Marcia Colette. This is what she says about it:

For The Spider Inside Her, I purchased a $30 ad campaign (for Bittersweet it was $60) that will splash my book and a very short blurb up for various users who are interested in urban fantasy or similar genres.  I can tell you for the time it ran I didn’t make my $60 back.  Instead, I made it back after I put out The Spider Inside Her, which tells me the campaign (regardless of how many clicks) did nothing.  Still being hopeful is the only reason why I tried again with TSIH, but with half the money this time.  One thing I will say is that it was very easy to set it up.

…  I think the best thing Goodreads has been good for is getting the word-of-mouth out without the ads or events or anything like that.

 

From L.J. Charles:

I do use Goodreads to promote my books. I’ve done three giveaways and had hundreds of people sign up for each one, many of whom added my books to their TBR lists.

I also have a couple of blogs available on the site. They didn’t get much attention until I decided to share my first paranormal experience with readers. This was a suggestion from a friend. Her thinking: if you tell readers you’ve experienced some of these things first hand, they’ll want to read your books. I can’t say that I’ve suddenly had a jump in sales, but that post got 19 hits on Goodreads and the most I’d had on a few previous posts was 4, so something happened.

 

LJ told me that the giveaways were easy to set up. “I just click on the word ‘giveaway’ and fill in the information and Goodreads does the rest.” (The giveaway link is on your Author Dashboard page. You just need to scroll down and click on it.)

That’s all I have. I’ll probably do a giveaway soon. If anyone is interested, I hope you’ll follow me on my Goodreads author page. And let me know how many hours you’d like to add to each day.

27 Comments

  1. Thanks for including me in your blog post today, Edie. And for teaching me something new. I had no idea you could sell your books on Goodreads.

    Lucie j.

  2. Great post, Edie, thanks for sharing with us. I can see yet another place I need to get some work done. My hubby really wants my writing to succeed to take some pressure off him, so I’m hoping to talk him into doing some of the initial set-up things to free up some of my time. *grin*

  5. OMG! Galaxy Girls is out. Yayyyyyy! Even though I only crtiqued the synopsis for this, I can honestly say the plot stuck with me for a loooong time. I was scared it might never get published and I’d never get a chance to read it in its entirety. Man, oh man, I love self-publishing and this is the reason why.

    Oh, and thanks for including me in the article, Edie. What a nice surprise to wake up to this morning. 🙂

  6. Marcia, big smooches! One of the great things about self-publishing is that we never have to write a synopsis.

    Thanks for your contribution!

  7. Edie,
    Great post. I’m on Goodreads and have set up an author page and added my books. Please let us know how the giveaway works for you. Thank you for sharing your knowledge with us!

  8. Christy, I might wait until I get a review or two before doing the giveaway. Or I could even do one of an older book.

    Lots of choices! Let me know what you decide to do and how it’s working.

  9. Michelle Diener

    Edie, I recently wrote an article on Goodreads myself for the RWA-WF newsletter after using it to run a giveaway for my debut historical IN A TREACHEROUS COURT. The giveaway generated 1500 entries for 10 books and the number of people who added my book to their to-read list tripled. The only thing with the giveaways at the moment is they have to be for a new release and they have to be for print copies. You can see all the rules in the giveaway section of the site.

  10. Michelle, so cool about your giveaways! I didn’t know that about the rules. But I have to say that I looked at the giveaways, and I’m pretty sure that some were ebooks and others weren’t just released.

    I’ll check it out right away. Thanks for letting me know!

  11. Edie, Thanks for the details about promoting my book on Goodreads. I’ve been meaning to do that since the site began, but never got around to figuring out how. Now you have inspired me!

  13. Congrats on the new release, Edie! GG is on my Kindle and I can’t wait to read it. I’d like to add at least two more hours to the day, maybe add an entire day to the week!

  14. I also put my new releases out as an “event”. It’s part of the drop down boxes available at the top of your home page. I’m not sure I’ve seen any jump in sales, but I figure it can’t hurt.

    I did a book giveaway but I think people are just trolling for freebies rather than a new author. I know I never saw a review from the person who received my book. I’m not sure I would do it again.

  20. Mia, me, too. Even with the research I did, I missed the part about “Events” that Nina mentioned. And I get Event notices all the time from other authors. So that was a Duh moment.

  24. Hello –
    I just wanted to point out something that you mention here in this article (which is very good) –
    AUTHORS should NEVER give a review (including stars) of their own books (even under another pen name) under any website/review site. This is highly frowned upon by readers and potential readers. It will even make potential readers bypass your book altogether.
    If an author wants to communicate with potential readers, and the ‘review’ is the only means of quickly doing so, then it’s fine to use the area to explain something about the book, but never to ‘review’ it.
    (I do see that at least one person also commented on this – PD Singer on 11/07/11.)

  25. Lea-Ellen, good to know. I’ve never given a review of my books, though I have given stars. I’ve seen that done often by other authors. In the future, I won’t do it.

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