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Book giveaways are an essential part of book marketing and it’s best if you set them up before the book is even published.  Our favorite two places to setup a giveaway is GoodReads and LibraryThing.  GoodReads is now owned by Amazon.com and they allow giveaways only for physical books.  LibraryThing is independently owned and allows giveaways for physical and e-books. It sounds strange but giving away a few books helps sales by exposing your book to more potential readers who may purchase when they don’t win.  Check both of these sites out to see if they will work for your books!

Courtesy of GoodReads (recently acquired by Amazon.com) we have a list of past USA Best Book Award Winners.  If you’ve ever wanted to be on this list read the list of award winners and you’ll get a good idea of what a winning book looks like.  Some of the books on the list include reviews from GoodReads readers.

We love GoodReads.  It is a great resource for both authors and for readers.  We regularly run giveaways for our new books and we always get a good response so we are happy to see that Goodreads doubled in size in 2012.  To learn all the good news from Goodreads click here and let us know how you use the site to promote your books.

We are always looking for new ways to promote our books at 42Rules.  One way we’ve discovered to get more traffic to our site and sell more books is to participate in book contests.  For example, Good Reads runs contests for authors and publishers to give books away to readers.  Once you list a book you get to decide the duration of the contest and how many books you want to give away.  In return you get to feature your book title, picture, description and a link back to your site.  Good Reads runs the contest, picks the winners and all you have to do is ship the books!  This is a great way to get almost free publicity for your books.