The Blog Squad: A Blogger Collaboration - Part XXVI
We are a group of three book bloggers situated on different continents but brought together by our love for books and a penchant for talking about them. We’ve joined our forces to create a collaborative series of posts about book blogging and we hope you’ll enjoy the discussions.
I’m a Book Blogger - Where can I get prizes for Giveaways?
There are so many resources from where book bloggers can get prizes to use in giveaways! Like my Squad girls point out, one of the most common resource is having authors sponsor giveaways. I’ve hosted quite a few author sponsored giveaways and it’s a great way for vloggers to get started with holding giveaways. All you’re doing is hosting the giveaway and the author takes care of everything else. Same goes for publishers sponsoring giveaways!
The bestest way is though, to giveaway your own books. The best thing is you control many aspects and it’s probably a book you really liked. The biggest problem with this though, is shipping. International shipping is just crazy because of which many bloggers conduct country specific giveaways.
Gift vouchers are another great way of going about with it. I must point out here that this has it’s cons too. I’d love to giveaway a gift voucher of Book Depository but I live in India and while BD has “free international shipping” apparently, India is among those countries not in the list, which sucks for me guys!
- You can pay for the book and the shipping out of your own pocket (I’ve done that before). You can buy a new book to give away, but that’ll be expensive - maybe give away one of your own books you know you aren’t going to read anymore.
- - You can use Book Depository, which has free shipping worldwide so you don’t have to worry about shipping costs (just the book price). Or you can even give away a BD voucher - I know those are really popular among bloggers, and it gives your winner the opportunity to choose the book themselves.
- You can ask an author to sponsor a giveaway for your blog, but then you’re limited to that author’s books. Lots of bloggers do this and often the authors are happy to oblige since it gives them and their book some publicity, too, but personally I’ve never tried this route. I’ve been too nervous to ask an author ;)
- - Book swag is cheap to ship, and granted you can get hold of some, it’s also a really cool thing to give away.
Currently, I have about six books I want to use for giveaways, but because shipping internationally is SO EXPENSIVE I’m gonna have to do them ‘local only’. It’s such a pain when you have the prize, but can’t afford to give everyone a chance to win it!
Have you ever hosted a giveaway?
Rafflecopter is pretty much the easiest way to hold giveaways. It has all your information in a cloud and is quite effective with getting together all entries and picking random winners. I love how it can be used by people who know literally nothing about coding and stuff. They create a HTML code for your giveaway widget that can be used to share it on your blog!
I’ve held one giveaway that was sponsored by my good friend and author Emma Hamm. The prize was won by a fellow blogger Stefanie. Sending the prize to the winner was totally taken care of by the author and it was fun to hold a giveaway for a book I love!
I’ve also hosted a couple giveaways as part of blog tours and such which was also really fun to do!
I absolutely love using Rafflecopter. It’s so simple and effective.
If the publisher or author of the book you’re giving away isn’t sponsoring the book (they will sponsor it if it’s for a blog tour, for example) then I know bloggers usually pay for the book and the shipping out of their own pocket. I’ve done that before, but it is pricey. Another way to go is to ask the author or the publisher to sponsor the giving away of their book on your blog; I haven’t done that yet, but I know it’s a viable option.
For blog tours I’ve participated in, sometimes I never know who won because I don’t have access to the Rafflecopter set-up - only the publishers will know. In those cases I just set the thing up and watch it go. The one giveaway I ran completely by myself and with myself paying for the prize, Aneta @ Angelic Book Reviews won.
Have you ever won a Giveaway?
I’ve won a sum total of ONE giveaway so far! It was a giveaway for an ebook “Spells & Sorcery” that my fellow squad member Di hosted! It was pretty awesome to win it!
I really wish I’d win more giveaways though ‘cause comon guys, who doesn't like to get free bookish stuff?
My most exciting win was when I won a copy of one of my most anticipated 2017 reads: Into the Water by Paula Hawkins. I think I had a mini heart attack when I got the news I’d won ;)
To see my answers make sure to visit the other collab posts!
