How to Do a Book Launch Giveaway in WordPress

If you’re planning a book launch, a giveaway is one of the fastest ways to create buzz and connect with readers. I’ve used book giveaways to grow my list, boost pre-orders, and get reviews, but I also made mistakes before figuring out what works.

In this step-by-step guide, I’ll show you exactly how to do a book launch giveaway in WordPress, with tools, examples, and tips you can copy for your own launch.

TL;DR: To do a book giveaway, define your goal, choose a prize your readers actually want, use a tool like RafflePress to set it up on your WordPress site, and promote it across social media and email. I’ll walk you through every step below.

Here’s a quick overview of everything you’ll learn about running a successful book giveaway:

Book Giveaway vs. Book Launch Giveaway

Book Giveaway	Book Launch Giveaway
Ongoing contest used to grow readers and engagement	Timed contest tied to a new book release
Best For: Email list growth, social engagement, rewarding loyal readers	Best For: Driving pre-orders, gaining early reviews, creating launch buzz
Timing: Anytime (year-round)	Timing: Pre-launch and launch window
Primary Goal: Long-term audience growth and visibility	Primary Goal: Maximize sales momentum at launch

A book giveaway helps with long-term audience growth, while a book launch giveaway helps with immediate sales momentum. Many authors use both strategies: smaller giveaways to stay connected with readers and a bigger launch giveaway to maximize impact when releasing a new title.

Types of Book Giveaways

Before setting up your giveaway, it helps to know the different types of book giveaways you can run. Each has its own benefits depending on your launch goals.

• Signed Copy Giveaway – A classic choice where you give away an autographed edition. Great for building personal connections with readers.
• Book Bundle Giveaway – Offer a set of your own titles or partner with other authors in your genre to create a themed bundle.
• Exclusive Content Giveaway – Share bonus chapters, prequels, or behind-the-scenes extras as the prize.
• Merchandise + Book Giveaway – Pair your book with related swag like bookmarks, tote bags, or mugs to increase excitement.
• eBook Giveaway – A digital giveaway that’s inexpensive to run and can reach a global audience instantly.
• ARC Giveaway – Give away advance reader copies to generate early reviews before your launch.
• Social Media Giveaway – Run a platform-specific giveaway (Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or Twitter) to grow your following.

Choosing the right type of giveaway makes it easier to attract the readers you want and align the contest with your launch goals.

Benefits of Running a Book Giveaway on Your Website

While you can host a book giveaway on social media, running it on your own website gives you far more control and long-term benefits. Instead of relying on algorithms, you own the traffic, entries, and data you collect.

• Grow Your Email List – Collect reader emails during the giveaway so you can follow up with launch updates, promotions, and future releases.
• Boost Book Pre-Orders – Send participants directly to your sales or pre-order page as part of the entry process.
• Build Early Buzz – Generate excitement before your launch by showing your giveaway on a dedicated landing page.
• Improve Reader Engagement – Drive more comments, shares, and interactions on your site instead of just on social media.
• SEO Benefits – Every giveaway landing page can bring in organic search traffic and attract backlinks from blogs, forums, and book communities.
• Full Creative Control – Customize your giveaway page to match your book branding, add extras like videos or excerpts, and update it anytime.

By keeping your giveaway on your own website, you’re building an audience and a marketing asset you can use long after the contest ends.

How to Do a Book Giveaway in WordPress

Follow the easy steps below to create and run your own book giveaway on your WordPress website.

Step 1: Define Your Book Giveaway Goal

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:

• Generate a buzz – Your goal could be to raise awareness and create interest in your latest book on various social media platforms.
• Pre-order sales – You might want to encourage potential readers to pre-order your novel.
• Quality leads – Perhaps you want to gather verified leads like email addresses to use in email marketing campaigns.
• Social media engagement – You may want your audience to interact more on your social media channels.
• Expand your audience – Or you might wish to grow your audience on social media.
• Sell more books – And of course, it could be to sell more books.

For example, when Josh Earl ran a giveaway for a software license, his email list grew by 170K in 11 days. The principle is the same for authors: the right prize can fuel massive growth.

Step 2: Choose Your Target Audience

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:

• Age range – What’s the ideal age of your customers? Are they young adults, children, or more mature readers?
• Location – Where is their location, and what language do they speak?
• Social platforms – Which social networks do they use? Do they prefer to interact on a Facebook page, Instagram, or Twitter profile?
• Interests – Do they prefer to read sci-fi over romance authors, or are they horror fans?

Then, once you’ve uncovered your target audience, you can start brainstorming good book launch prize ideas.

Step 3: Select the Right Giveaway Prize

When choosing a prize for your giveaway, make sure it’s something your readers genuinely care about. Generic prizes like Amazon gift cards may bring in entries, but they often attract people who have no interest in your book.

The best prize connects directly to your book and your audience. In the Types of Book Giveaways section above, I shared common formats like signed copies, eBooks, and bundles. Here are a few extra twists you can add to stand out:

• Tickets to a ghost tour – Perfect for horror fans and thriller readers.
• Spa day voucher – Great for romance or wellness audiences.
• Mystery dinner tickets – Ideal for crime and mystery lovers.
• Movie props or collectibles – Fun for sci-fi and fantasy fans.

By pairing your book with an experience or themed item, you make the prize more memorable and relevant, which means more excitement and better results for your launch.

There are also more proven contest prize ideas in this article.

Step 4: Choose a Giveaway Tool

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.

Step 5: Create Your Book Giveaway

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:

• Refer-a-friend – This is a mandatory action where entrants have to share a link to the contest in order to unlock more ways to enter.
• Visit a Page – Here, entrants can visit the pre-order page to unlock a single entry.
• Pre-order – I’ve used the Invent Your Own action to set this up. To confirm the book’s pre-order, customers need to add their order number, which will unlock 5 extra entries for them.

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:

• Write a blog post – Ask users to write a book review on their blog to enter your contest.
• Leave a comment – You can add a bonus entry option to comment on a recent blog post.
• Subscribe to RSS – Ask people to subscribe to your RSS feed for new blog posts and updates.
• Join a Newsletter – Get users to subscribe to your email list for another bonus entry.

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.

Step 6: Publish Your Giveaway

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:

1. RafflePress Content Block – Embed the giveaway widget in a post or page with the new WordPress block editor.
2. WordPress Shortcode – Embed the giveaway in the classic WordPress editor, the sidebar, widgets, or theme with a simple shortcode.
3. Giveaway Landing Page – Create a landing page free of distractions on your site for the giveaway.

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.

Step 7: Promote Your Book Giveaway

You don’t need to promote everywhere, but you should share your book giveaway in the right places to reach readers. Here are the main channels that work best:

• Social Media – Post on Instagram, Twitter (X), Facebook, and Pinterest with clear entry rules and hashtags like #bookgiveaway.
• Reader Communities – Share in Goodreads groups, Reddit threads, or Facebook reader groups that match your genre.
• Influencers – Partner with Bookstagrammers, BookTubers, or BookTok creators to amplify your reach.
• Your Own Channels – Send an email to your list, use a popup on your website, or create a landing page with RafflePress.

Pick two or three of these to focus on, and you’ll get far better results than trying to promote everywhere at once.

See this guide for even more giveaway promotion ideas.

Step 8: Pick and Announce a Giveaway Winner

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.

Step 9: Track and Measure Your Results

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.

Book Giveaway Ideas and Real Examples

Here are a few real-world book giveaway examples to inspire your launch. Notice how each one ties the contest setup to a clear goal.

Twitter Book Giveaway Example

Platform: Twitter

Goal: Book promo + follower growth

Entry Actions: Like, Retweet, Follow

Lesson: Using giveaway hashtags like #giveaway and #win can expand your reach far beyond your normal followers.

Instagram Book Giveaway Example

Platform: Instagram

Goal: Audience expansion + product awareness

Entry Actions: Like post, Follow both accounts, Tag a friend

Lesson: Partnering with a complementary brand or influencer helps you double your exposure with the same effort.

Seasonal/Theme-Based Book Giveaway Example

Platform: Instagram

Goal: Promote seasonal book bundle

Entry Actions: Like post, Tag a friend, Follow account

Lesson: Tying your giveaway to holidays or seasonal events creates urgency and makes it more shareable.

Facebook Book Giveaway Example

Platform: Facebook

Goal: Boost BookBub follows

Entry Actions: Follow BookBub profile, Post screenshot in comments

Lesson: Keep entry methods simple. Asking for one clear action (like a follow or screenshot) reduces friction and increases participation.

FAQs About Book Launch Giveaways

Final Thoughts on Running a Book Launch Giveaway

Running a book launch giveaway is one of the fastest ways to get more readers, build buzz, and even drive pre-orders. The key is to set a clear goal, offer a prize your audience actually wants, and promote it where your readers spend time.

I’ve learned through trial and error that giveaways aren’t about going viral—they’re about finding the right readers and giving them a reason to stick around. With the right setup, you’ll turn a launch into lasting momentum.

If you’re ready to create your own, I recommend RafflePress. It’s what I use, and it makes running book giveaways simple, fast, and effective.

Want more inspiration? Check out these guides next:

• How to Run a Social Media Photo Contest
• How to Run a Blog Giveaway
• How to Run an Influencer Giveaway

To get even more great tips for running a giveaway, subscribe to our YouTube Channel and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.