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Goodreads Introduces Kindle Ebook Giveaways Beta Program (U.S. market)
Posted by Greg on May 3, 2016
Last year, Goodreads helped authors and publishers give away more than 300,000 print books in our popular Giveaways program! Thanks to this success, authors and publishers have been clamoring for the option to run ebook giveaways with Goodreads. Today, we have the news you’ve been waiting for! The beta launch of our new Kindle ebook giveaways program is now underway.
Here’s how it works: The author or publisher of a book – whoever controls the digital distribution rights to the book – can now offer up to 100 copies of the Kindle ebook in a giveaway. The author or publisher chooses how long the giveaway will run, and Goodreads does the rest. At the end of the giveaway, Goodreads randomly chooses winners and automatically sends the Kindle ebooks to their preferred devices and Cloud accounts. Winners receive real Kindle ebooks, complete with all the great features and security that Amazon’s Kindle platform provides.
Kindle ebook giveaways will initially be open to Goodreads members in the U.S. During this beta period, Goodreads is working with several publishers to host Kindle ebook giveaways, but once out of beta, the program will be open to any author or publisher - whoever owns the digital distribution rights for the book - who sells their ebooks on Amazon.
The cost of listing a Kindle book giveaway is $119, which allows you to offer up to 100 Kindle ebooks. Listing a print book giveaway will continue to be free. Why the difference? Both types of giveaways give authors and publishers a powerful way to market their books, reach lots of new readers, and drive buzz. With a Kindle ebook giveaway, we give you the opportunity to offer a large number of free books, reaching even more readers. We also save you on both costs and hassle. No more printing books, hauling them down to the post office, filling out address labels, and paying to ship them off to winners (which can cost hundreds of dollars for a 100-copy giveaway). No more delays in getting your books in winners’ hands. The readers who win your Kindle ebook giveaway will get their Kindle ebook instantly and will be able to start reading right away, which means you can get readers talking about your title faster than ever.
Authors and publishers have come to count on Goodreads print giveaways as a key part of their marketing plans. They are a powerful way to raise awareness of an upcoming book or reignite interest in a previously published book, and they generate the kind of engagement that makes readers take note. Giveaways are especially useful before a book is published, building the buzz and word-of-mouth excitement – through pre-release reviews and friends seeing their friends adding the book to their want to read shelves – that help successfully launch books.
Why should I run a Goodreads Giveaway?
The primary benefit of running a giveaway on Goodreads is generating excitement for your book. Many giveaway winners review the books they win, meaning that you can build word-of-mouth buzz early in your book’s life. The ability to offer up to 100 copies of a book will greatly increase your chances of receiving a good number of reviews.
Additionally, when a reader enters your giveaway, a post appears in all of their Goodreads friends’ and followers’ newsfeeds, which in turn, creates more entries, more people adding your book to their Want To Read shelves, and more awareness. That’s something you won’t get anywhere else.
Giving away 100 books or more is the technique that large publishers have been using for years with great success on Goodreads. For example, Riverhead Books has said that Goodreads played a major role in helping The Girl on the Train break out to early success. To help drive early reviews, they gave away 100 copies on Goodreads (case study). In total, they printed more than 4,000 advanced copies of the debut novel, as they knew that getting the book into a lot of readers’ hands was a key way to help make it a breakout hit.
Will I still be able to run print book giveaways?
If you love our print book giveaway program, don’t worry; it’s not going anywhere. Print book giveaways will remain free to list (though you are responsible for the costs of printing and shipping the books to the winners).
I’m an author and I want to run a Kindle book giveaway. What do I do?
For this initial beta, we are working exclusively with select publishing partners, but you’ll be able to list a Kindle ebook giveaway soon. We will open up Kindle ebook giveaways to all publishers and KDP authors with an ebook in the Amazon store in the near future. Stay tuned for more!
When will Kindle ebook giveaways be available outside the U.S.?
We’re starting off with the program in the U.S. Our goal is to make sure that we offer all of our features in other markets, but we do not have any timing on this.
My book isn’t published yet. Can I offer ebook ARCs?
You can run a giveaway for a book that has not yet been published yet. The only requirement is that the ARC must be in a Kindle ebook format and loaded into the Kindle store before you list your giveaway.
How are these giveaways different from Amazon Giveaways?
The two programs are completely separate. With Amazon Giveaways, you purchase each copy of whatever book you want to give away. With Kindle Ebook Giveaways, you pay a flat listing fee to give away up to 100 copies of your book. Additionally, Kindle Ebook Giveaways are available for pre-publication titles, while Amazon Giveaways are not.
Next: Six Lovely Lessons Learned at the Romantic Times Convention
You might also like: Five Tips for Running a Giveaway on Goodreads
Goodreads Authors can subscribe to the Monthly Author Newsletter by editing their account settings.
Comments Showing 151-200 of 323 (323 new)
D.A. • shelf! Shelf! SHELF! wrote: "But is it losing potential sales or is it reaching potential, new readers who would never have discovered the book otherwise so would never have purchased it?Part of the dilemma in putting books ..."
I'm not going to contradict you. It's a fine line between losing potential sales, and gaining potential new readers - and I suspect that what is happening in reality is a little bit of both. I'm sure there are people who enter existing giveaways, and if they don't win, then go and buy the book anyway. I'm also sure that by having that same person's entry visible on their feed, someone else will learn about the book who wouldn't have heard about it otherwise.
There are some serious positive outcomes for a larger giveaway that a smaller giveaway could not accomplish. Greater reach, greater potential returns. I don't think anyone's denying that, and the questions and concerns you raise about the program's viability are good ones.
But there are a whole lot of people in this conversation who have been saying the same thing, over and over. $119 is too expensive, 100 books is too many. For many of us, that is a HUGE leap of faith, one which we are not willing or prepared to take. More than a leap of faith really - it's a gamble, just like any form of advertising out there, from BookBub to Fivvr to paid review sites. I'm paying a fee to get exposure, but there's no guarantee that exposure will end in more sales.
Sometimes gambling pays off. Sometimes it doesn't. Heck, Goodreads is making a gamble by even launching an ebook giveaway program; who knows if it'll succeed at all.
And yeah, maybe a smaller giveaway would end up producing a smaller return for the author. (In fact, I agree - it absolutely would, compared to a large giveaway, because of course more people will enter a larger giveaway under the theory that there's more prizes to go around, and therefore a larger chance of winning, whether or not that is actually the case.)
But I'd rather test the waters within my genre with a smaller, less expensive giveaway, than with a larger, more expensive one.
LOL, that sums up a lot of marketing and advertising. Someone seeing the brand, the ad, the promotion may not result in a sale or even discoverability--but you generally do want to advertise where the ad will be potentially seen by likely customers. And certainly no guarantee that a reader viewing the ad will be in the mood to read that book or if buying when they'll be in the mood to read it after purchase...that if losing a giveaway they would/wouldn't then purchase ...It's in beta so no possible way yet to tell how it will do. Or if magnificent or disappointing results will be because random winners selected were or weren't followed enough to really reach a lot of other readers, if random winners chosen just happened to be ones who would/wouldn't read or review the win any time soon, if the book's genre had any bearing on the success ... at least one of the beta test books was very popular and highly anticipated before the giveaway with lots of shelvings from readers who were likely to eventually read/review it based on doing so for earlier books in series even before the giveaway plus the ARC netted a lot of NetGalley and Eidelweiss reviews ($395 and an annual $1K+ respectively for those ARC review programs).
I still doubt many sites with high traffic offer the same impressions, click thru or shares as goodreads for under $119, much less shares out to such a targeted audience (presumably most members here are in some way interested in books). Even with fivver that's $5 per review unless paying one fivver account to fake x number of reviews as if came from multiple people instead of just that person -- not that I have any idea yet how many reviews a particular giveaway of even a hundred books generate, heck some winners might take a year to review it. (Of course paid fivver reviews can not post on goodreads, only quoted in editorial description on Amazon, and no where legally in with any U.S. consumer reviews without disclosing the payments plus any conditions.)
Does the book HAVE to be a KDP Select ebook in order to do a free giveaway in the Goodreads program? Or will it be okay to have the book listed at $.99 (or $1.99 or $2.99, etc.) in the Kindle store and still give away a free copy in the Goodreads program? This is important because as you know, in order to offer the ebook for free on Amazon, it MUST be a KDP Select ebook -- which also means the ebook can't be offered for sale anywhere else (BN.com, iTunes, Smashwords, etc.). Thanks.
Robin wrote: "The other problem with this is Goodreads restricts you from using the address again of the winner. So here you are paying $119.00 and you can't even reuse the addresses of the winners. Why not invest that $119.00 in Facebook ads and be able to keep the email addresses you acquire. Seems like a more sound investment to me..."I'm curious if many other sites share their member emails with authors running promotions including but not limited to giveaways (leaving aside that I'm not even sure it's legal to reuse the addresses once the transaction is finished).
It seems like it would be a particularly destructive business practice for a site/business collecting revenue from authors signing up to have their book advertised in the site's mailing lists (for example, Ereader News Today, freebooksy, Pixel of Ink, etc.) to provide author with that mailing list.
A bad business practice for a site TOS and policies to tell participants their emails won't be shared -- and no one is allowed to spam them on site or via email -- then to provide emails and permit on site contact to commercial interests.
A common practice for sites to tell participants what if any of their contact information and details will be shared with third parties plus if those commercial interests can contact them on that site. A more common practice during signup or under account settings to allow participants to opt in or out of third party contact.
For goodreads, that would require a rewrite of TOS (then member would have to agree to new TOS) and then a change in giveaway terms where entrants had to signup for author mailing lists (they couldn't just change the giveaways to tell authors it was now permitted to reuse addresses after transaction completed except if restricting giveaway to the countries that do permit that).
(I'm assuming by acquiring emails on Facebook responders to the original poster's ad were asked/required to provide to sign up for their mailing list rather than someone went to their profiles and harvested email,addresses .)
Mike wrote: "Does the book HAVE to be a KDP Select ebook in order to do a free giveaway in the Goodreads program? Or will it be okay to have the book listed at $.99 (or $1.99 or $2.99, etc.) in the Kindle store..."Nope, staff said just has to be available for in Amazon.com store. They also said if it is in KDP select, listing in a giveaway doesn't violate that program's exclusivity requirement.
I'll edit this to link to that staff post as soon as I track it down again.
ETA: Staff post at https://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/6...
There seems to be a disconnect here, at least in my mind. Unless I'm missing something, (and I may well be) it costs Goodreads nothing to list a book as a giveaway, and one would think that expanding the reader base for an Amazon KDP giveaway would be beneficial, at least indirectly, for both Goodreads and Amazon.I'm not opposed to paying for marketing if I see that there is an active service that is being provided, I just don't see that in a flat listing fee, particularly when the fee exceeds the annual gross revenue history of much of the contributing author base. If you can guarantee 119 reviews for $119, then I'll sign up today. But, like any other Amazon giveaway period, a bunch of lost copies followed by no reviews is pointless. But at least from the Amazon proper end it's free so there is no loss.
I hope this feature becomes available for countries outside the U.S soon! *fingers crossed*
I want to sign up for this, but when I click on the "List a giveaway" button, I get this message, "Want to list a Kindle Ebook Giveaway? Stay tuned. We plan to expand the program soon."This confuses me because there are already ebooks listed, so why can't I list mine yet?
Lanette wrote: "....so why can't I list mine yet?..."Because this blog post you are commenting on is announcing the beta test for the program and said:
"...During this beta period, Goodreads is working with Amazon Publishing to host Kindle ebook giveaways, but once out of beta, the program will be open to any author or publisher - whoever owns the digital distribution rights for the book - who sells their ebooks on Amazon. ...All the ebook giveaways you see currently are from Amazon publishing (see their imprints at https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.htm... )
I’m an author and I want to run a Kindle book giveaway. What do I do?
For this initial beta, we are working exclusively with Amazon Publishing, but you’ll be able to list a Kindle ebook giveaway soon. We will open up Kindle ebook giveaways to all publishers and KDP authors with an ebook in the Amazon store in the near future. Stay tuned for more!"
Susan wrote: "$199? Yeah, no. Few indie, self-published, or small press authors have that kind of money. And who does giveaways of a hundred e-books? Authors can't and don't do this work for free, people! We got..."I agree, I'm an independent publisher and I don't even make enough money to do this for my authors. I can give away their books without a fee on Librarything there's no way I'm going to pay $119 to give books away on Goodreads. I was thinking at first this was awesome but now that I know there is a fee... forget it. It's hard enough getting reviews as it is giving the e-books away but when you have to pay a fee just to give the book away that's just highway robbery!
Kitty wrote: "... I can give away their books without a fee on Librarything, ..."If approved; their ebook giveaways are not inundated with allowing every member who wants to giveaway the ebooks they have the right to giveaway.
I was really excited to read about this until I saw the $119 price tag. Why on earth would I want to pay out so much money to give out my work for free? I am sure it would be a boost in exposure but ultimately authors will be out of pocket and in return just be ensuring 100 more people will never buy their book.I suppose it may work better with the first in a series, but that is assuming everyone who enters the scheme likes the book. From my experience giveaways will often bring a lot of people out of your demographic to the table who might not be the best people to review your work. I feel this scheme really exploits indie authors and I expected better from Goodreads.
My friends at Goodreads---My new book, The Device Trial, will be released in a couple of weeks.
I would like to sign up for the Kindle Giveaway as soon as possible.
Please tell me how to sign up and start the process.
I am a Goodreads author and did three Giveaways of my first novel, The Complaint.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Tom Breen
Eric wrote: "This is absolutely insane when you consider that LibraryThing allows any author to do the exact same thing for FREE. You might as well go over there if you want to give away ebooks."Maybe, maybe not. My experience with LibraryThing giveaways has been very poor in terms of getting reviews, good or bad. Not worth the effort even if free. Maybe Goodreads giveaways will be different.
Let's see $119 to give 100 ebooks away. It does not count toward the ranking, we don't get the email addresses of the requester, we may get a review or two. Why not offer the ebook for free through Amazon, advertise for free and give more than 100 ebooks away?
Library Thing does this for free, and we get the e-mail addresses.
My concern is that people treat free books (particularly free Kindle books) like they're worth what they paid for them (and let's face it, there are a lot of free Kindle books out there). People load them on their Kindle and then never look at them again.That said, I will at least give it a try. Is there any way we can get on a list to be notified when it starts?
I was stoked when I started reading this. But after reading all the details it sounds like - no, it is - just Goodreads jumping on the exploitative bandwagon. Although Goodreads IS Amazon, owned by it, connected to it, et cetera, for some reason Goodreads/Amazon can't/won't class the ebook giveaways as "verified purchases". Why? But the crunch for me is the $119. I can and have paid $5 to run a giveaway gig through Fiverr which resulted in twice as many downloads as Goodreads is limiting here (100), and I know other authors have enjoyed over 2000 downloads for the same, low price.No thanks, Goodreads. Not until it's free or a VERY low price.
Well? How soon is soon? It's been more than a month since this was posted.
I'd like to know the answer to Gary's question.
I agree ... I agree ... I agree !!!! Charging a $119 fee is outrageously ridiculous. Yes, we know the benefits of being on Goodreads. I ran two print giveaways and it cost me a lot of money. I haven't since then, and it's been years. I would give away 100 eBooks gladly for FREE. Give us Indie Authors a break, will you please? And why just Amazon, why not include Smashwords, Barnes & Nobel too? Amazon isn't the only game in town, and why should we exclude all those other users? Do you think everyone on here owns a Kindle? I think not.
Its sad and somewhat despicable that paperback authors get free giveaways but ebook authors have to dig into their invisible pile of dough and pay up! #Unfair #SMH
Maggie wrote: "$119? Surely you jest!"Amen Maggie! It's waaay too much!
Jacquelyn wrote: "Its sad and somewhat despicable that paperback authors get free giveaways but ebook authors have to dig into their invisible pile of dough and pay up! #Unfair #SMH"Eh...you do realize, paperback authors have to buy and ship their books to winners, often at international postage rates?
Miss M wrote: "Jacquelyn wrote: "Its sad and somewhat despicable that paperback authors get free giveaways but ebook authors have to dig into their invisible pile of dough and pay up! #Unfair #SMH"Eh...you do r..."
There are so many angry about this. Just wish GR would see the frustration.
check out the comments on Publisher's Weekly page:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by...
To be honest, I can understand why they would charge. If they didn't charge, they'd be flooded and it might just be a mess. If everybody was offering give-aways, authors would be lost in the crowd and readers would be swamped with more free books than they could handle. Some sort of fee makes sense to keep the numbers down some. Is $119 too much? Too little? I don't know and Goodreads probably doesn't either. They'll probably have to try it and see what happens. I think it's better to have this option than nothing, but as I mentioned earlier, I don't know if it will be worth the cost for me. I have a feeling 99 of the 100 books we give away will never get read (easy come, easy ignore) and if that's even close to being true, you're paying an awful lot of money to get one person to read your book. But it doesn't matter to Goodreads how many people are actually reading the books. All that matters to them are how many authors are actually willing to participate. Goodreads will get their money even if 99% of the books are ignored.
Jacquelyn wrote: "You do realize that they can get large discounts (at least in my state). the average cost of sending out 250 books would cost about $50."$50 to mail 250 packages across the country, perhaps across the globe? (20 cents per package!?)
But even before you get to the cost of mailing out the copies (whatever that might be) the price to buy the books in the first place would be so high! Just 100 print copies would cost me about 4 times the price of a goodreads Kindle giveaway. Tack on the cost of sending them to the winners (not to mention the effort) and $119 to give away 100 copies starts sounding like a pretty good deal.
Whether offering 100 e-books will be worth it to me or not, I can’t say until I’ve seen the results, but even if it does stretch my budget, I intend to try it and find out.
James wrote: "Jacquelyn wrote: "You do realize that they can get large discounts (at least in my state). the average cost of sending out 250 books would cost about $50."$50 to mail 250 packages across the coun..."
This program doesn't even seem to be active. I agree with others that $119 is too high (for that many potential reviewers it should be $25 or $50 at most, based on how many will actually leave a review). Having said that, I'd give it a whirl just to test results if there actually WAS a way to sign up for this beta.
I just checked and there are currently ZERO kindle giveaways available, so either they've suspended it or people don't know how to try it (me, I assume it's by invite in beta or something) or they won't pay the freight, which is absurdly high.
The same amount of money at Freebooksy will get a few thousand downloads. Same with e-reader news today.
Scott wrote: "I was stoked when I started reading this. But after reading all the details it sounds like - no, it is - just Goodreads jumping on the exploitative bandwagon. Although Goodreads IS Amazon, owned by..."How does that work on Fiverr Scott? I've never used it due to the stigma over purchased reviews. Can people download giveaways there?
Alex wrote: "There seems to be a disconnect here, at least in my mind. Unless I'm missing something, (and I may well be) it costs Goodreads nothing to list a book as a giveaway, and one would think that expandi..."Charlie wrote: "Eric wrote: "This is absolutely insane when you consider that LibraryThing allows any author to do the exact same thing for FREE. You might as well go over there if you want to give away ebooks."
..."
I suspect they're aiming this at folks like myself who sell enough books to be full-time but still struggle to step up from lower-middle-market sales. I buy $250-500 in advertising a month. But that's usually spread across four or five major advertisers, IF I can even get them.
It's too high a price if you don't get emails and verified purchase sales. In fact, without the latter it's basically useless to you, as Amazon's algorithm doesn't take non-verified purchases into account anymore in rankings.
L.H. wrote: "This program doesn't even seem to be active.I just checked and there are currently ZERO kindle giveaways available, so either they've suspended it or people don't know how to try it (me, I assume it's by invite in beta or something)"
You can only see the Kindle giveaways if you're in the US, because that's who the contests are open to (for now.) Currently there are over a dozen running, but it's still in beta and only open to Amazon Publishing.
Hopefully it'll soon be out of beta and open to all Kindle authors.
Hi!It is great that also eBooks can participate in a giveaway now, but sad that small eBook self publisher, not connected to Amazon, still fall through :/
I'm sorry, but I don't understand why it costs $119 for ebooks, and printed books are free???? How fair is that!!!! I'm going to stick to Amazon's FREE Giveaways where you can choose how many books you want to offer, whether it's one or 100, and how the winners are chosen.Thanks but no thanks.
I'm British author but my book sales are in the USA - why can I not join in? I have a normal KDP account on Amazon.com.
Doesn't seem like it would be a good ROI for authors (Good revenue stream for Goodreads/Amazon though), but am sure some may get lucky with it. Almost like an old banner ad, that you're paying for it to be displayed, whether book is ever opened/read or not
John wrote: "Doesn't seem like it would be a good ROI for authors (Good revenue stream for Goodreads/Amazon though), but am sure some may get lucky with it. Almost like an old banner ad, that you're paying for ..."Yeah, I think a lot of authors will try anything and Goodreads recognizes that and they'll do very well. And if you could actually get 100 new readers for $119, that would be worth it, but I suspect we'll be lucky if 2 or 3 people actually read the free books. So $119 for 2 or 3 new readers won't give a very good ROI . . . but I'd also bet Goodreads will have more authors signing up than they know what to do with.
I think you're 100% right Gary. I know when I gave out 10 free paper copies during a giveaway on good reads I only ended getting one review out of that, and would think with ebooks it would be considerably less reads/review per product.Again you're right they'll have a ton of sign ups, no matter what the ROI is just based on the brand. Time to start our own giveaway company
Jim wrote: "Will these count as sales on my Amazon dashboard? Will I be able to give away books that are in KDP select, or is that a violation of exclusivity terms? Do I have to purchase the books in addition ..."This is what I want to know. Did you get an answer?
$119 is too much for indie author. Some times, it takes years to make such money in book sales. Goodreads should consider charging variable pay
Starla wrote: "I'm curious if these gifted copies will show up as Verified Purchases on Amazon, which would be very helpful review-wise."Same question here. I hope they answer.
Could you notify me when it will be possible to add my Kindle books ?It seems to me that it's written that it will be available "soon" for an eternity. ;( lollll
you can get more information about ebook/novellas and marketing strategies visit at.... http://deshigypsy.com/
Will the book need to be in Kindle Select to get the 100 free copies to give away without additional cost to the author over and above the $119.00?
The giveaway copies NEED TO BE countable as Amazon sales for this to be really useful for the author since only that will increase visibility to potential Amazon book purchasers.
That issue was already covered by Goodreads staff in post #5 of this thread:"Books you give away through this program will not count as sales on Amazon or count towards your sales rank."
Nowadays, Amazon is hardly going to set up a program to make it easier for authors to buy copies of their work in bulk and influence sales ranks/charts.
Maggie wrote: "$119? Surely you jest!"I know, right? Who are they kidding? Yet another way for the rich to succeed while the rest of us are once more left out in the cold.
What about audiobook giveaways? Will audiobooks be supported by the new program?
After reading all of this, I think I'll be trying Amazon's version of giveaways and select how many books I want to giveaway. My question is, does Goodreads do anything to help promote the giveaway? Like ads or something? If we're paying $119 for a giveaway, they should be doing more to get people to it. Some of the promo sites I use put the money they charge towards ads. It would be nice if Goodreads did the same. I'd be more apt to pay the fee if they did. Just my two cents.
Part of the dilemma in putting books on giveaway is if you would have sold the five or twenty-five or one-hundred copies you gave away if the book wasn't discovered by being on a goodreads giveaway.
If you have sure sales of 100+ copies of a book, how much more promotion do you want to do? Which promotions? Which promotions are likely going to be seen by more potential readers and/or shared out to more readers?
Decisions authors have to make individually for their budgets, their sales, etc. -- but, do you count the copies given away on a site like goodreads as lost sales or as discoverability or even viral marketing to readers here?
If you are going to count them as lost sales, then don't participate. If counting as marketing and book discoverability, choose to use giveaways or not use giveaways here.
Generally, in the past it seems like most authors have felt that the giveaway itself, not the number of copies, was good for discoverability. You'll see that repeatedly on threads here. However, it's unlikely many indie authors bought, gave away and shipped even ten copies much less 100. So will that still hold true now that ebook giveaways will encourage authors to give away larger number of copies? Months from now when any reviews roll in, will those reviews be almost a mini-promotion campaign once more increasing book's visibility or even adding to Amazon visibility campaign review requirements if echoed there (and if those reviews do prove useful would authors get more reviews from giving away 50 to 100 kindle ebook copies than if listing 1-5 print or kindle editions)?
Will more or fewer readers be drawn to kindle ebook giveaways than a print giveaway of same book (because prefer, because for a while will be "new," because no weighting, because no potential lost or damaged shipments, because not requiring them to give an Internet stranger -- even if stranger uploaded a file to Amazon -- their contact info, ...)
ETA: typos (and autocorrect can be an ugly thing ; sheesh, when I typed "indue authors" I didn't really mean for autocorrect to change that to "nude authors"...).
I know, I'm acting like ways to promote on goodreads is to books what other products would consider having a Super Bowl commercial -- which is actually what I'd consider top visibility on Amazon or possibly some library/industry publications. But in terms of reaching readers who review, share out reviews, cross post reviews and read reviews (or getting into other visibility programs looking reviews only from certain sites) -- goodreads is a major venue.