This past week I completed a nonfiction book: On Homeschooling. As I have homeschooled my children for twelve years, and guided others into getting started many times over the years, I figured why not share this knowledge I have with the world. Although there is plenty more that I have to say on the subject, I kept it short and sweet. There are many other books and sites out there that get into any subject in-depth. My guide I wanted to be affordable (so it had to be small in word count) and I wanted to just get people started on understanding how, and where to get started. It's a pretty casual discussion that I have had many times. I think it will be received quite well.
Anyway, enough about the product. As I head-lined in the intro above, I decided to try Amazon's giveaway. It is a button at the bottom of your product page in Amazon. Its pretty easy to do. And really anyone can do this (hint: great birthday present right?) You have the option to run a poll, have the contestants follow you, or other options too. And you can include information(links) in the you won/lost subject lines. The contest can run for up to 7 days (I would make sure that you run it that long to gain enough exposure to make it worth it!) Plus, you want to keep the chances good enough for people to try to win the book. For instance, you don't want to give away 1 book and make it the odds to high. I have been reading other people's suggestions and they say the same. Don't make it so low that you don't get exposure at all (people winning too early). I chose 1000. We'll see how it goes and then I will let you know when the week is up. I will tell you if I made any sales out of it, and I will tell you if I got any exposure or not.
Here's how you should in the very least handle advertising this giveaway: Share it on twitter, email lists, websites such as contest overload.com, and website where your product is relevant to the audience of the website, Facebook (ask them to share it though!), and so on. I would recommend that you email the website's host before you post anything even in a message thread. You never want to come off as spam related. Don't give your self this bad name. Besides, if you take the time to write a nice letter telling the host a little about yourself and asking nicely, maybe they will run a nice blog about it for you!
One thing that I made the mistake of doing is setting up and running the giveaway before I had my list of websites lined up. So email everyone before you start the clock ticking on the giveaway! This way you can have a nice thank you note and include as a convenience a link to the url giveaway in the thank you note. It would be okay to have a personalized thank you letter that goes out to everyone. In other words you can make a general thankyou letter that you send to all participant hosts, but personalize it with one line. You do want to be as personal as possible.
When you fill out the form for the giveaway make sure that you remember to include some sort of way for them to follow up on you (especially the losers).
There are different ways to run the contest. I decided to run it on lucky number. I gave away two, and set the lucky number at 1000.
I have already had 345 entrants in 24 hours! Please feel free to enter even if for fun -but hurry, this link is only good for six more days from the date of this posting! Have a great day! ~LuAnne
https://giveaway.amazon.com/p/d9c1e5c533b1c707