Rafflecopter is a great (free) resource that makes it easy to collect entries and select winners. If you use this site, you can list the same contest on multiple blogs for the duration of the tour.
Keep in mind your goal for the tour when planning any contests. If your goal is to sell x number of books, you won't be doing yourself any favors to include your book in the giveaway. Why would someone buy it now if they have a chance to win it. And if they don't buy it now, will they remember to buy it next week? Right.
If you're looking to grow you mailing list, require readers to sign up to get an entry. If you want more twitter followers, require a follow. If you're going for exposure, ask them to tweet about the contest, or pin a picture of your book cover, or add your book to the Goodreads TBR list. There are lots of actions available. Stick to what will help you achieve the goal you've set for your tour.
Gift cards are always nice and prizes relevant to your story or characters can be fun and allows for a lot of creativity. Just don't go overboard. Big prizes tend to draw a lot of entries, but you'll find that very few of them are actually your target audience. People come out of the word work to win big stuff like a Kindle Fire or iPad. They may give you their email address, but they'll unsubscribe as soon as the contest is over.
Once you've got the contest set up, don't forget to share the link with your tour hosts and include it in the listed information on your hidden tour page.
Thanks for the great advice! Rafflecopter is so easy to use and it works great. As far as gift cards go, I think giving away enough to catch attention is probably fine. I agree that when the big prizes come out so do the giveaway stalkers (they enter the giveaway without even looking at anything else). On the other hand, there's a decent possibility that the giveaway will get blasted all over Twitter if the prize is memorable.
ReplyDeleteI've noticed that some authors are doing giveaways with big prizes and making buying their ebook the entry option with the most points (like 20 instead of the 2 someone earns to like a Facebook page). If someone is on the fence about the book I suppose this might push them over. I'd look into the legality of this before trying it though...