Just yesterday, Goodreads announced the beta launch of a new ebook discount deals program, Goodreads Deals.
Initially a US-only offer, Goodreads Deals participation is currently limited to publishers. Once out of beta, it will be offered to authors. It functions in a way that’s not unlike BookBub’s system.
- A publisher (or, later, an author) “nominates” a deal, such as a half-price offer.
- Nominations are curated by Goodreads staff.
- The chosen deals are advertised in email blasts for a fee. Pricing has not yet been announced.
- The emails go to Goodreads reader-members who are following a publisher (or author) as well as to reader-members who sign up to receive email notifications for a genre or category.
- Initially, the deals categories will be bestsellers, romance, mystery/thrillers, and fantasy/science fiction. More are to be added.
The advent of this deals program dovetails with the also new ebook giveaway feature announced earlier this month. Goodreads executives who spoke with us emphasize use of these tools in tandem:
- The ebook giveaway is a contest, and it’s how you expand your following and get on Want to Read shelves.
- The Goodreads deal then becomes the offer to woo that interest base.
Now with some 50 million members—that’s the size of South Korea (just a bit larger than Wattpad, incidentally)—Goodreads reports that six books are added to members’ Want to Read shelves every second. That’s 15 million books added per month.
Patrick Brown, Goodreads’ director of author marketing, and Suzanne Skyvara, global communications chief, spoke to just us as the beta was going live in San Francisco.
“If I’m an author,” Brown says, “and I’m putting my book out and nobody knows about me yet, nobody knows about my book, then I want to run my ebook giveaway first. By doing that, I build up some reviews, I get some people putting the book on their Want to Read shelves.
“Now I want to goose the sales by dropping the price in a deal. So now all the work I did building up the audience for my book using those ebook giveaways is there to capitalize on with the deal email because it goes to everybody who has shelved the book as Want to Read and it goes to everyone who’s following me. I’ve essentially built my own audience that I now can market effectively to.”
The ebook giveaway—right now available only to authors who work with Amazon Publishing—is something that author-members of Goodreads have requested for years. (Only print giveaways were available before now.) The response to its $119 price has triggered some pushback, however, as seen in the comments on the Goodreads post—e.g., “$119 is a slap in the face of indie authors.”
Brown says that objections to the cost aren’t completely unexpected. “Authors are on a budget, and we’re sympathetic to that,” he says. “But we wouldn’t have fixed that price on it if we didn’t think it was worth that price to the author…. You’re getting real estate on the Goodreads website, the promotional opportunity of getting people talking about it.”
We’ll go ahead and state the obvious, which has been discussed elsewhere: print book giveaways require the author or publisher to print and ship a physical copy, which restricts the pool of people willing to make such an investment. The ebook giveaway introduces a different type of cost. Either way, a little bit of friction can be helpful for a community and result in better-quality giveaways overall.
Bottom line: Because giveaways help spark reviews, and because Goodreads Deals will have a curatorial angle, Goodreads sees charging for both programs as fair. Skyvara says that, while the giveaway is still limited to authors with Amazon Publishing, they’re working actively to open it to all authors and publishers: “While we’re in beta, we wanted to start with a smaller number of titles and we’ll gradually expand over time. We want KDP authors and other publishers to have a great experience once we do open it up.”
It’ll take time to see how these new features benefit authors; Goodreads activity has generally been seen as productive for authors, but not always the paid advertising, unless it’s a campaign run by a traditional publisher. (See our August 2015 item for more discussion.) Stepping up this community’s promotional capabilities for authors, however, feels inevitable and right. (Fish where the fish are.) We don’t know what the deal pricing will look like yet, but we anticipate that it will be competitive with BookBub.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
