Status Update: Two Weeks Into a Month-Long Giveaway!

This is part of the Bittersweet Book Launch case study, where Dan Blank and Miranda Beverly-Whittemore share the yearlong process of launching her novel. You can view all posts here.


It’s funny how much a daily giveaway just becomes a normal part of your daily existence. Julia, Miranda and I now coordinate in the mornings and evenings every day, and there is often a flurry of emails with the participating authors to just check, double-check, and triple check a million details.

So how are things going so far? Well, let’s look at some basic data:

Included here are the number of entries per day, and then the TOTAL website traffic for this time period. We saw around 75 entries per day in the first week, and around 50 per day the second week. Also, you can see that the site overall had a lot more traffic in that first launch week.

Does this mean the giveaway is a roaring success or a pathetic failure? Well, for that, we have to consider the qualitative stuff:

  • To enter the giveaways, people need to answer a question related to the books being given away. The answers have been incredible to read. Many are very personal, and have been so much fun to read and share (anonymously) with the authors.
  • There is a lot of conversation about the contest on the authors’ social media feeds and the #OMGbooks hashtag on Twitter. That’s just fun to have a reason to promote these authors’ books each day.
  • Private emails between Julia, Miranda, myself and the authors have been so much fun. Lots of enthusiasm and encouragement.

The result: this feels like fun! And Google Analytics can never tell you that.
🙂

Thanks.
-Dan