On March 2nd, Amazon posted an announcement on the Amazon Author Central homepage stating the Amazon Giveaway program is now available for Kindle ebooks. For books, it was previously only available for hardcopies, which seemed strange considering that digital copies are quite easily sent to readers. Enough people must have spoken up that Amazon finally did something about it: the announcement cites “authors have been asking for this feature” as one of the reasons for the change. It’s good to know Amazon is listening.
If you don’t know about Amazon’s Giveaway program, check out the homepage here and the FAQ here. As others have pointed out, an Amazon Giveaway could be very beneficial for authors, especially since you are not required to be enrolled with KDP Select. Want to make an Amazon Giveaway of your own? Launching one yourself is pretty simple, as I will show you.
Note: Amazon Giveaway is only available to residents of the United States.
How to launch an Amazon Giveaway
To launch a giveaway on your own ebook, first go to your book’s product page on Amazon and scroll to the very bottom. You should see a section titled “Set up an Amazon Giveaway.” Here is an example from the page for my book, The Joining:
Click the button “Set up a giveaway” and you will be taken to next page where you will choose the details of your giveaway.