Amazon Giveaway is a little known program that allows people to run giveaways on the fly and have Amazon ship out the products to the winners. Authors have been using this service in order to send out free books for people to follow them on Twitter. Today, Amazon has announced that Giveaways now supports Kindle e-books. This is especially good news for authors, who use Kindle Direct Publishing.
Amazon Giveaways launched in February 2015 and is a service that allows anyone to achieve their marketing goals using promotional giveaways (e.g., sweepstakes) that are easy to set up and run. Watch this short video. Amazon Giveaway supports securing your prizes, enforcing entry requirements like follow or watch a brief video, hosting your giveaway, determining winners instantly, getting prizes to winners, and handling certain income tax reporting responsibilities. As a host, you decide what you want to give away and why, and then use Amazon Giveaway to create awareness and engagement with your audience. Participants can enter your giveaway with confidence knowing that it will be run as described, prizes are real and will be delivered by Amazon, and their information will be protected.
Here are some of the updates that Amazon has unveiled for the Giveaway program with the recent inclusion of e-books.
- The Amazon Giveaway layout and entry experience has been redesigned with authors in mind, better highlighting both the author and their book.
- Every entrant who doesn’t win an eBook giveaway will be offered the free sample of the prize title as part of the experience.
- Authors will have more control over their Amazon Giveaway, with an extended time period of up to 30 days and the ability to cancel a giveaway before launching it.
- If any eBooks prizes are un-awarded when an Amazon Giveaway ends, authors can either roll those prizes into a new giveaway, at no additional cost, or download and distribute however they choose.
- For eBook Amazon Giveaways, Amazon ensures that entrants are new readers of the title by preventing those who already own the eBook title from entering the giveaway.
I think now that Amazon Giveaways supports Kindle e-books, it will allow authors to easily run fun little contests and sweepstakes. If anything, it should build more awareness that this program actually exists.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
