Kindle giveaway for WEFT: October 26 & 27
Madrona Books is running a 48-hour Kindle giveaway for Weft: A Novel by Kevin Allardice. The giveaway will run from Thursday, October 26th at 12am Pacific through the end of the day on Friday, October 27th. During this promotion, anyone with an Amazon account can download the Kindle version. Click here to access the book’s Amazon page.
I wanted to talk a bit about this decision, both because I want Madrona Books to be as transparent as possible and because I think the rationale might be interesting to folks in the broader publishing community.
Weft published on August 1st and, from my perspective, the book has sold well so far. We sold enough direct-to-reader pre-orders to keep me running back and forth to the post office, and retailers steadily ordered the book via Ingram throughout August and early September. We also gave away many, many ARCs prior to the on-sale date, which I hope contributed to the retail ordering.
But at this point in the season, orders have slowed substantially. My sense is that, by now, the readers who knew they wanted the novel have already purchased it. My hope now is to engage with more readers—those who don’t know yet know about Weft, but who will find Kevin Allardice’s story as whip-smart, gripping, and resonant as I have during each read. (Side note: Have you read its blurbs? They’re so good! And these weren’t phone-in-favor blurbs—these were authors who didn’t know us, but took a chance on Weft and were won over by it.) Basically, I believe in this novel so fully that I want as many readers as possible to find their way to it. Giving it away for free certainly makes that a more attainable goal.
To find more readers, and make the book as accessible as possible, Kindle giveaways are a great tool. For one, Amazon’s KDP dashboard makes it incredibly straightforward: I basically just click a box. The Kindle giveaway also comes with no overhead. Yes, Madrona and the author won’t earn royalties from the copies we give away, but we won’t be sinking money into this promotion either. Compared to other giveaways like BookBub or Goodreads, that zero-cost upside seems all the more attractive. (Caveat: the ebook has to be exclusively distributed through Amazon to access this promotional feature, which is something Madrona has opted into for the time being.)
A second benefit of giving this novel away is that I hope it appropriately introduces more readers and writers to Madrona Books. In many ways, Weft is the company’s best attractant of quality submissions. In recent months, I have especially felt the negative impact of offering authors the chance to submit manuscripts for free via Submittable. On one hand, making submissions free is something that’s ethically important to me. I want Madrona Books to be universally accommodating to submitting authors, whether they have money to shell out on submissions or not. I plan to keep submissions free for as long as I possibly can. On the flip side, I have noticed that fewer authors will read my submission guidelines, consider their manuscript’s fit within Madrona’s stated aims, or even address me (or the company) by name in their cover letter.
As with free submissions, I hope that making Weft free (albeit for 48 hours) will likewise lower the barrier of access for authors. Submitting writers will be able to see the kinds of things Madrona publishes, which I hope encourages likeminded authors to submit their work. In that way, excellent work will give way to more excellent work.
If you are reading this, I hope you take the opportunity to read Weft as well. Of course, to call this a “free giveaway” is somewhat of a misnomer. Time is our most valuable commodity, and I’m aware that handing someone a free book is not a zero-cost gift. If you do take a chance on this wonderfully weird novel, then thank you for doing so. I hope it scratches the same itch in your brain that it has in mine.
Thank you,
Kevin Breen, editor and founder of Madrona Books