New Update: Boost Social Proof with Reviews & Automation
Introducing RafflePress's new leave-a-review giveaway actions. Boost customer engagement and build trust effortlessly by incentivizing reviews in WordPress.
New Update: Boost Social Proof with Reviews & Automation
Stacey Corrin
Stacey Corrin
John Turner
John Turner
Want to know how to do a book giveaway that actually works? I’ve used giveaways to grow my email list, boost book pre-orders, and get traction during launches. And yes, I’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way.
My first attempts barely got any entries. But over time, I figured out what works (and what totally flops). In this step-by-step guide, I’ll show you how to do a book giveaway in WordPress, including tools I’ve used, real examples, and tips that actually helped me get results.
Here’s a quick overview of everything you’ll learn about running a successful book giveaway:
A book giveaway is when someone gives out free books to spread the word and get people interested. Authors or publishers often do this online or at events like book fairs to grab attention and find new readers.
Hosting a book launch giveaway on your website is a great way to build excitement and bring in readers. It can help you get more visitors, early reviews, and create buzz to make your book stand out.
Hosting your own giveaway might take a little more work, but it’s a much better way to connect with readers and build your online presence with effective book marketing.
Follow the easy steps below to create and run your own book giveaway on your WordPress website.
Your goal determines the structure of the giveaway and how you’ll measure your results at the end.
Think about what you want the outcome to be. Here are a few goal suggestions to help you find what’s right for you:
Speaking of results, check out what happened with freelance writer Josh Earl. He ran a giveaway offering a Sublime Text license (worth $70!) and grew his email list from 5,500 subscribers to over 180,000 in just 11 days (Source: Neil Patel).
That kind of growth is incredible. While you’ll be giving away your book, not software, the principle is the same: offer a desirable prize and promote it effectively.
Giveaways can be a game-changer for building your audience, driving pre-orders, and ultimately selling more books.
Key Takeaway: Start with a clear goal for your book giveaway, whether it’s growing your email list, getting pre-orders, or boosting social engagement. This goal will shape every part of your giveaway.
To ensure your giveaway reaches the right audience, you need to understand how and where to reach them.
Authors and publishers might already have a good idea of who the contest will resonate with. But it’s always worth digging deeper to get the perfect picture of your audience.
Consider putting together a buyer profile of your ideal customers. Then, drill down into the aspects of their personality that lead them to visit your website.
Here are some ideas for what you can include in a book buyer profile:
Then, once you’ve uncovered your target audience, you can start brainstorming good book launch prize ideas.
Key Takeaway: Knowing your audience helps you create a giveaway they actually want to enter. Think about their age, interests, reading habits, and where they spend time online.
When choosing a prize for your giveaway, you need to ensure it’s relevant to your audience. Mediocre prizes won’t attract the attention you’ll need to attract those all-important book sales.
An easy option is to include an Amazon gift card as a prize. But then you’ll have an email list bursting with people interested only in that prize, not your new book.
So, you need to get creative and come up with prize ideas that your audience will love while promoting your book launch at the same time.
“Lots of people download freebies but never read them, so if it’s connected to something they have already read and is a prequel, bonus epilogue, or deleted scene, then it works better because they are already engaged in the book.”
Kelly Collins – Author, One Hundred Reasons
Let’s look at some suggestions for a prize you can use along with the type of audience they’ll suit:
But that’s not all. There are a ton of proven contest prize ideas in this article.
Key Takeaway: Pick a prize that aligns with your audience and your book. A great prize gets more entries and keeps your email list full of the right people, not just freebie hunters.
Successful book launch campaigns should have a powerful tool behind them. Having a giveaway platform that takes care of things for you reduces the time you have to spend gathering entries, marketing across social media, and even drawing a winner.
While there are many giveaway tools to choose from with varying benefits, RafflePress is one of the few giveaway tools designed primarily for WordPress websites.
RafflePress’s lightweight WordPress plugin is ideal for launching a book giveaway and is packed with features for gathering qualified leads, growing your audience, and creating viral giveaways.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t use it elsewhere, either. The giveaway landing page option lets you publish giveaways on your own landing page. So you can share the URL on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and anywhere else on the web.
So go ahead and grab your copy of RafflePress here.
Key Takeaway: Use a giveaway tool like RafflePress to run your contest without extra tech headaches. It handles entries, rules, winner selection, and more, all inside WordPress.
My Experience Running Book Giveaways
I’ve tested different giveaway setups over the years — from signed books to digital extras. One of my first giveaways barely got 10 entries. I’d picked a generic prize and didn’t promote it well. But once I focused on what my audience truly wanted (a signed book bundle plus a sneak peek of an upcoming release), the difference was huge.
The entry that performed best? Asking readers to refer a friend. Not only did it grow the giveaway organically, but it also brought in highly engaged new readers — the kind who actually stick around.
Everything I’ve included in this tutorial comes from real-world results — both the wins and the mistakes. If you’re just starting, I hope this saves you time and helps you skip the trial-and-error phase.
When you’ve downloaded your copy of RafflePress, you’ll need to install and activate the WordPress plugin. Then, follow these instructions on how to do a giveaway to set yourself up.
Next, decide how people will enter the giveaway. Remember this needs to align with your giveaway goals so the actions people take will result in your goals being met.
Here’s an example we’ve put together to give you an idea. For my giveaway, the goal is to get more people to pre-order the book. Therefore, I’ve chosen the following entry actions:
As you can see, each action leads the participant toward what I want them to do, which is to pre-order the book. And that’s why I’ve made it more desirable for them to act with 5 extra entries.
It gives them more opportunities to win.
Some other entries you can use for book giveaways include:
Next, you’ll need to confirm the settings for your giveaway. RafflePress comes with 7 different sections in the Settings tab: General, Giveaway Rules, Email Verification, Success Tracking, Success Redirect, Social Logins, GDPR, and Recaptcha.
The most important of these are the Giveaway Rules. It’s easy to get a head start putting your rules together. RafflePress has a Rules Generator Template that asks a few questions to generate a set of rules automatically. Just click the button to get started.
You can see our documentation for details on all the RafflePress settings.
Key Takeaway: With RafflePress, you can customize your entry actions, embed your contest on any page, and even build a dedicated giveaway landing page.
Now, it’s time to make your book launch competition live. Click Publish at the top of the screen, and you’ll see three publishing options.
You can publish your contest in the following ways:
We’ll choose the dedicated landing page option for this example because it’s distraction-free and more likely to encourage people to enter.
So go ahead and click the Giveaway Landing Page option.
You’ll be asked to set the permalink for the landing page, which is pretty simple. Just enter your preferred URL parameters. Then click the View button to see what your competition looks like.
Great job! You’ve now got an amazing landing page for your book giveaway.
Expert Tip
“Once you launch your giveaway, keep in mind that you have to stick with the rules you set. If the giveaway isn’t doing as well as you’d hoped, you can’t extend the deadline or change the terms or prize or anything else.
I ran one giveaway where I thought no one was going to enter at all. I ended up receiving one entry at the last minute and, well, that was the winner! It didn’t go nearly as well as I had expected, but I was able to learn from the experience and apply what I learned to the next giveaway I ran so I had much better results.”
Kelly Schuknecht – Author Coach
There are plenty of ways to promote your book launch, but one of the easiest is to share the giveaway on social media.
For example, this Instagram giveaway from Hayland and Whittle has a great photo showing followers what they could win and giveaway hashtags to widen their reach on Instagram.
Start promoting your giveaway a few weeks before it goes live, so you get heaps of entries on day 1.
Other giveaway promotion ideas include:
| Promotion Channel | How to Promote |
|---|---|
| Social Media | |
| Run targeted ads and lead generation campaigns. | |
| Share eye-catching posts and stories, use hashtags (e.g., #bookgiveaway), partner with bookstagrammers. | |
| Craft engaging tweets, use hashtags, and create a giveaway thread. | |
| Create pins with your book cover and giveaway details, pin to relevant boards (e.g., book recommendations). | |
| Communities | |
| Goodreads Groups | Share in groups dedicated to your genre or giveaways. |
| Facebook Groups | Join and promote in groups for book lovers. |
| Post in relevant subreddits like r/books or r/bookgiveaway. | |
| Influencer Outreach | |
| Book Bloggers/Reviewers | Offer free books for honest reviews and giveaway mentions. |
| Booktubers/Booktokers | Partner with them to share your giveaway. |
| Other Options | |
| Email Marketing | Send a dedicated email to your list. |
| Website Popups | Use popups to entice website visitors. |
| Sweepstakes Directories | List your giveaway for more visibility. |
| Paid Advertising | Consider targeted ads (e.g., Google Ads, social media ads) to reach a wider audience. |
| Cross-Promotion | Partner with other authors or businesses. |
Key Takeaway: Don’t wait until launch day. Promote your book giveaway early on social media, in newsletters, and through influencers to get more visibility and entries from day one.
The fairest way to choose a winner is to randomly draw a winner from all verified entrants.
It’s easy to do this with RafflePress. When the contest ends, head to RafflePress » Giveaways and click the Needs Winners link.
Here, you can see everyone who’s entered and how many entries they have. To randomly choose a winner, click the Pick Winner button, select your options, and click Choose Winner Now.
The winner is then highlighted so you can click to email them, deliver the good news, and make them feel special.
Pro Tip: Don’t forget to also announce the giveaway winner on your social media accounts and via email. This can give you an extra engagement and traffic boost.
The final step for your book launch contest is to analyze your results and see if everything went according to plan. This can also highlight areas for improvement to achieve greater success in the future.
The easiest way to collect actionable information for optimizing your giveaways is to use MonsterInsights, the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress.
It’s easy to track visits to your contest landing page, along with all site traffic, referral traffic, eCommerce sales, and much more. Even better, you can view all your reports within the WordPress dashboard.
MonsterInsights transforms raw data into actionable insights. See what’s working, what’s not, and how to improve your giveaway strategy for better results, just like The World Travel Guy did for his travel blog in this MonsterInsights case study.
By looking at your website data, you can see which book promotion strategies drive the most traffic to your contest page. Then, you can use it to improve upon your next giveaway. And with real-time statistics, you can monitor traffic during your contest and tweak settings while it’s live.
Key Takeaway: Use tools like MonsterInsights to track how your giveaway performed. Look at page views, entries, referral traffic, and conversions so you can improve your next launch.
Here are some exciting book giveaway ideas you can use as inspiration.
| Platform: Twitter |
| Goal: Book promo + follower growth |
| Entry Actions: Like, Retweet, Follow |
In this example, Copperpots used Twitter to promote a book by Charles Bronson. Users have to like and retweet the post that features the book cover design and follow their Twitter profile to enter.
By using giveaway hashtags like #giveaway and #win, they help their post reach a much larger audience than they typically would.
| Platform: Instagram |
| Goal: Audience expansion + product awareness |
| Entry Actions: Like post, Follow both accounts, Tag a friend |
In contrast, Herbal Academy used Instagram to promote its book and run an exciting giveaway. It also partnered with a relevant brand to increase its reach.
To enter, users had to:
This book launch idea is a great way to support non-competing partners in your industry. Everyone benefits from the promotion.
| Platform: Instagram |
| Goal: Promote seasonal book bundle |
| Entry Actions: Like post, Tag a friend, Follow account |
In this Instagram book giveaway example, Atria Books used Valentine’s Day to promote their romance book collection on Instagram. The lucky winner could receive a bundle of free romantic books to celebrate the big day.
This is an excellent book launch idea to raise awareness about your new publication.
| Platform: Facebook |
| Goal: Boost BookBub follows |
| Entry Actions: Follow BookBub profile, Post screenshot in comments |
Shaun Burgess promoted his author profile by running a book giveaway on his Facebook page. The winner could receive a free signed copy of a popular Stephen King book.
To enter, users had to follow Shaun’s author profile on BookBub and leave a screenshot confirming the follow in his Facebook comments.
So now you know how to do a book giveaway that actually works. I’ve walked you through the same steps I’ve used myself after a few flops and a few wins. If you’re feeling nervous about launching yours, you’re not alone. My first one didn’t go the way I hoped either.
But once I figured out what mattered—clear goals, a prize readers actually wanted, and a solid promotion plan—the results started to show up. It’s not about going viral. It’s about finding the right readers and giving them a reason to stick around.
If that sounds like something you want for your book, give RafflePress a try. It’s what I use, and it’s made the process easier every single time.
And if you want to learn about other contest types, take a look at these tutorials:
To get even more great tips for running a giveaway, subscribe to our YouTube Channel and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
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good day,
my kindle book is $6, if i run a campaign with a reward in gift card of $10 for 10 winners, is that a good campaign?
Hi Joy. If think your audience would appreciate that kind of reward, absolutely!