What Could Go Wrong? ~ My Storygraph Giveaway

When I signed up for a Storygraph giveaway, I chose to have my book delivered in-app. That way, I could upload my novel one time and the app would take care of distributing it to the 100 winners.

My first clue that nothing ever works out was when I received an email from the site with the subject line, "Urgent". It seems that several winners had complained that the PDF only included Chapter One.

How could this have happened? I don't even have a PDF on my hard drive with only one chapter, so I couldn't have possibly uploaded the wrong file. Does this glitch happen a lot?

Thus, I was instructed to email the winners the complete PDF. The email hit at just the wrong time. It was one of those rare days when I was pressed for time, but I couldn't not fulfill my obligation. How scammy would I have looked? "Oh, congrats on winning one chapter of my book."

Luckily, I had downloaded an Excel file with the list of winners. At the time, I wondered what use I could possibly have for it, but my subconscious apparently warned me that what could go wrong, would go wrong.

In my rush to get full copies to 100 people (I was advised to only choose 10 recipients at a time), I almost forgot a couple of times to attach the damn file! I was so worried about plopping the email addresses in and composing an appropriate message that I nearly neglected the most important part.

Pro Tip: If you ever choose to give your book away through Storygraph, handle the distribution yourself. 

I'm not going to point any fingers, but I'd obviously uploaded the entire book to the site, since I possess no one-chapter PDF. What use would I even have for such a thing? I had files like this in various iterations back when I was querying agents with other books. Some want one chapter, some three chapters, some a specific number of words, and on and on. But, of course, I stopped querying years ago, so...

It's all okay. I apologized to Storygraph. I wasn't about to start arguing. I also didn't ask them why I only had 95 winners, instead of 100, even though that seems odd. There's apparently a lot of things I don't understand about the app.

I also received a very nice response to my email from one of the winners that's confusing me even more:

Thank you for re-sending. But the initial PDF had a link that directed me to Amazon to purchase for free. I haven't tried reading it yet but it's present in my Kindle library. Just as a general FYI since I'm not sure if that's how it was supposed to work. And I want to be sure you're getting compensated as necessary. Or maybe it was already free via Kindle and I just got lucky? I don't have Kindle Unlimited.   

Okay, not only do I not possess a one-chapter PDF, but I sure don't possess a one-chapter PDF with a link to claim the book for free. I don't even know how I'd be able to do that. Its price is currently $2.99 and has been forever.

I've read some posts from other authors who've done giveaways, and not one of them mentioned any glitches. I guess it's just my usual good luck. 🍀(I'm awesome!)

Be that as it may, I've found that most people are really nice and quite understanding. And helpful. I received a couple of friendly replies to my email, and they warmed my heart. Writers spend so much time inside their own heads that they sometimes forget about real people (as opposed to our made-up people). Real-life interaction is gratifying.

Still not sending any newsletters, though. 😉