How to Do a Book Giveaway in WordPress (the Easy Way)

It sounds counterintuitive, right? You wrote a book to generate sales, not give it away for free. But in a crowded market, sometimes the most effective way to gain visibility and loyal readers is with a well-executed book giveaway.

In this guide, you’ll learn how running a book giveaway on your website can launch your book into the hands (and hearts) of eager readers.

Why Run a Book Giveaway on Your Website?

Think of your website as your home turf. It’s where you make the rules and have full control. When you run a giveaway on your website, instead of platforms like Goodreads or social media, you get some awesome benefits:

• Build Your Email List: Every person who enters your giveaway can become a new subscriber. This means you’ll have a bigger audience to tell about your next book!
• Get More Website Visitors: Giveaways bring people to your site. The more people who visit, the better they get to know you and your work.
• It’s All About You: Your giveaway page can be designed to match your brand. You can even include links to your books and other projects.
• You Keep the Data: You can see who’s interested in your books, which helps you better understand your readers.
• No Middleman: There are no rules from other platforms to follow. You decide how long the giveaway runs, what the prizes are, and how people enter.

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.

How to Do a Book Giveaway in WordPress

With the essentials aside, let’s look at how to run your book giveaway in WordPress.

Step 1. Define Your Book Giveaway Goal

Your book giveaway 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.

Once you’ve figured out the goal for your book giveaway, you can move on to the next step.

Step 2. Choose Your Target Audience

To ensure your book promotion 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 a Great Giveaway Prize

When choosing a prize for your book 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 at the same time.

Related: What Happened to Amazon Giveaways? (+ How to Still Run Them)

Let’s look at some suggestions for a prize you can use for your book giveaway, along with the type of audience they’ll suit:

• Free book giveaway bundles from a chosen author
• Bookends for design lovers
• Historical replicas for history buffs
• Tickets to a murder mystery dinner for fans of crime and mystery novels
• Tickets to a ghost tour for horror book lovers
• Sessions with a personal trainer for health-focused readers
• Spa days for the wellness crowd
• Free restaurant meals for the romantically inclined
• Movie props for sci-fi and fantasy enthusiasts

But that’s not all. There are a ton of proven contest prize ideas in this article.

Step 4. Choose a Powerful Giveaway Tool

Successful book giveaway 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 the ONLY giveaway tool designed primarily for WordPress websites.

Here’s a brief overview of RafflePress versus other top giveaway tools:

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 their 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, and then we can move on with the instructions to do a book giveaway.

Step 5. Create a Book Giveaway With RafflePress

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.

Add Ways to Enter

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 our book launch promotion, the goal is to get more people to pre-order the book. Therefore, we’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 – We’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 we want them to do, which is to pre-order the book. And that’s why we’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.

Configure the Settings

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 go live. Click Publish at the top of the screen, and you’ll see 3 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.

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

Step 7. Promote your Book Giveaway

There are plenty of ways to promote your book launch, but one of the easiest is to share the campaign 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 the contest goes live, so you get heaps of entries on day 1.

Other book launch giveaway promotion ideas include:

Step 8. Pick 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. 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.

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.

How to Do a Book Giveaway: Ideas and Examples

Here are some exciting book giveaway ideas you can use as inspiration.

Copperpots Twitter Book Giveaway Idea

In this example, Copperpots used Twitter to promote a book by Charles Bronson. Users have to like and retweet the post 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.

Herbal Academy Instagram Book Giveaway

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:

• Like the photo
• Follow them on Instagram
• Follow their partner’s account
• Tag a friend in the comments

This book launch idea is a great way to support non-competing partners in your industry. Everyone benefits from the promotion.

Valentine’s Instagram Book Promotion Giveaway

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.

Facebook Book Giveaway Example

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.

How to Do a Book Giveaway FAQs

And there you have it!

Today, you’ve learned how to hold a book giveaway on launch day to increase book sales, grow your audience, and gather many leads.

If you’d like even more leads, these lead-generation ideas are sure to explode your business’s growth.

And if you want to learn about other contest types, take a look at these tutorials:

• How to Run a Social Media Photo Contest
• How to Run a Photo Contest
• How to Run a Blog Giveaway
• How to Run an Influencer Giveaway
• How to Run a Free NFT Giveaway
• How to Do a Giveaway on Instagram
• How to Do a Giveaway on Etsy
• How to Make a WooCommerce Contest
• How to Do a TikTok Giveaway
• How to Do Giveaways on Twitch
• How to Run a Competition on LinkedIn

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

Stacey Corrin Writer

Stacey has been writing about WordPress and digital marketing for over 10 years and on other topics for much longer. Alongside this, she's fascinated with web design, user experience, and SEO.

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