GoodThingAri

I got some bad news about a friend last night, so today I'm just sticking with the lighter tasks, among them sorting out what the heck I'm supposed to do now that I'm on Goodreads, Library Thing, and Shelfari.

You can give away review copies of your book on Goodreads and Library Thing. With Goodreads, it has to be a hard copy, which means I have to buy the copy from CreateSpace and pay for postage to send the copies out. If I do, say, 10 copies, that's going to cost more than BookRooster did, with equally little guarantee that I'll get reviews. However, I do think that's a reasonable expense--it's always the case that a lot of review copies get sent out, and while 90% end up doing nothing for you, the remaining 10% can do an awful lot.

With Library Thing you do e-books, so there's basically no cost to you. As a result, instead of people offering up, say, 5 or 10 copies of their book, they offer up 1,000 or 2,000 copies! I'm suddenly understanding why people would join that site--I guess as an author you just cross your fingers and hope that your entire potential audience isn't already on Library Thing!

Anyway, I think both giveaways are worth doing, although I'd rather wait until the proofreader gets Trang back to me, which should be soon.