Should Giveaways Go Away?

It's Friday, so you know what that means! That's right. I've got my soapbox out and I'm ready to rant. (I was totally going to do this yesterday, but then I fell asleep at a normal time for a human being.) For those of you that are new, this is an IABB confession. It was submitted anonymously and neither IABB nor the graphics artist that created the image are responsible for the content. They merely provide the platform for publication. 

For once, I'm not going to be ranting about the attitude of the confessor (I know, I'm surprised too.) I have, however, spent most of the day trying to wrap my mind around the reaction of the giveaway winner. And I'm still largely baffled by it. So I just want to take a little bit to talk about why I find it so strange. 

First of all, I don't see how swag can ever be outdated. Unless the books are no longer in publication, the swag is still relevant in my opinion. Granted, swag that features part of a series that has since been completed is clearly a little older, but again, if the books are still available for purchase, it's not really outdated. And if they are books that the winner had never heard of before, then the swag was still doing it's job of bringing attention to them.

Secondly, do you know how bloggers typically get swag? They either get it by going to book signings or authors send it to us to give away. I've seen several authors offer to send out envelopes of swag to bloggers to include in giveaways in the past, and probably received some offers for swag ages ago when I still allowed people to send messages to my Facebook page, but I don't remember now. But while it would be beneficial to authors to send swag for their newest release to bloggers, financially it probably actually makes more sense for them to send older stuff that's otherwise sitting around their office collecting dust. Because honestly, how much attention are people likely to pay to this random swag? (I can honestly tell you that when I won swag in giveaways forever ago, I did not pay all that much attention to what was on it, although it's still possible that I'll grab a random bookmark and decide the book on it looks interesting at some point in the future and go buy it.) But bloggers cannot be expected to have all the newest swag, because oftentimes we're getting the cast-offs to begin with (which is fine, because authors spend quite a bit of money getting their swag made. They should absolutely be the ones benefiting most directly from the newest stuff.) But like I said before, swag can't really be outdated if the books referenced are still available for purchase.

What really gets me about the actions of the giveaway winner, though, is that they messaged the page to complain that the swag was less than new. And no, saying that you're not complaining is not the same thing as actually not complaining. The fact that they felt the need to send a message about it in the first place, is by it's very nature complaining. Like, dude, you got some free shit, you didn't pay jack squat for it, and the fact that it took you about a week to determine that the books and series featured on the swag were released a few years ago, means that those books weren't already on your radar. So what if they're older. Five bucks says that several of them are probably cheaper now than they were when they were brand new, so if they look interesting, you're going to spend less money to buy them than you would have before. How is that a bad thing?

But you know what, readers (and I realize most readers do not act this way), if you want to be this ungrateful for the free shit that authors and bloggers are giving away, we can just stop giving stuff away completely. I pretty much stopped doing giveaways entirely about two years ago because the brief interaction from y'all to enter a giveaway just wasn't doing much to help boost my reach on other posts, and that is the reason authors and bloggers do giveaways in the first place. But when y'all only want to interact on the giveaway posts and nothing else, it's just not worth it to keep spending the money for the giveaways. As a blogger, I can't even hope to sell a few extra copies of my new release because of the extra reach of the giveaway post.

And maybe that really is the answer here. It's certainly been suggested by others in the past (ungrateful giveaway winners is a somewhat common theme on Confessions.) Authors and bloggers should just stop doing giveaways on Facebook altogether. It was a strategy that used to work to build a fan base and boost interaction and post reach, but with Facebook's constantly changing algorithms, giveaways no longer have the same effect they used to. Add in to that readers that are only looking for free stuff and sometimes aren't even thankful for it, and what's the point? It really may be time to just cut our losses.

What do you think? - Katie

Oh, and before I go, I do have to commend the giveaway winner for sending the original message thanking the blogger for the goodies. Just in case you thought I missed that part of the confession.