Advice on a Giveaway?

Giving away a story a week means you'll get through fifty two stories a year. This is a lot. Your husband is going to have to write those stories on top of the works you're hoping to sell as a result of this promotion, and unless he's super-prolific or has a stockpile of stories ready to go, the quality of his work is likely to suffer under such pressure.

What books are you hoping to promote in this way? Unless your husband has a significant backlist he'd probably spend his time more profitably writing more books to put up for sale: free promotions only really benefit existing books (and then only if the free stories are really good) so if your husband doesn't have that backlist available, this isn't going to achieve much.

However, if you're determined to do this, you should probably make the books available in all formats.

A question to ask yourself is why would people enter this contest? It takes work to enter a contest, even if the entry is something like post a reply to a post. Why would people do that for an author they don't know? I say this because I've watched people running contests for books and having virtually no response, because no one knew who they were, so no one cared. This increased when the contest required more like giving a reason for wanting the book or drawing a picture. These are contests that work when someone has fans, not to generate fans.

A side issue is that it means your social networks will be filled with you constantly promoting the contests, which will put people off as quickly as posting "buy my book" all the time.

Given this and the other thread about the online store, my overall concern would be you're looking at options that will take fabulous amounts of work for very little return. And even for the things with better work to return ratios, you want to run them constantly which will mean diminishing returns. Rather than endless free giveaways or constant contests, maybe consider running one of each thing.

You might want to use this to build your social media profiles though. I am a big fan of viral giveaways. It think Rafflecopter does a good job of this so does contest domination. Typically you need a pretty big prize to make this work really well for you though and constant traffic to your website.

Generally, if I enter a competition for an ebook, I expect to be offered a choice of formats, whether emailed as an attachment or a voucher code to download it from somewhere. Being sent a pdf annoys me, because then I have to convert it into an epub myself, and all the formatting gets screwed up. Be aware people may be entering from around the world - I think Smashwords is available internationally, but it's worth checking.

If you don't already have a big readership, there is a good chance you'll get the same winner more than once, especially if you're running 52 competitions. I'd probably go monthly, and maybe come up with an extra incentive - a grand prize at the end of the year that includes all the entries (so if someone enters every competition they've got 12 entries to the grand prize) and something a bit flashier, like a large amazon gift card.

Since most people have kindles, you'll probably need at least .mobi. I've been doing a mental tally of giveaways I've done as part of blog hops and what not, and the majority of people ask for kindle copies, with a handful of others wanting .epub (nook). I've actually never had anyone ask for a PDF, but that's what a lot of review sites request. In other words, if you've got .mobi, .epub, and PDF, you've covered all the bases.

I don't know how much mileage you'll get on this. From what little promo I've done (and I'm sort of promo-phobic, so take this with a grain of salt), contests that have yielded measurable results (site traffic, social media likes, a sale or two) are ones where I've participated as part of a group, and we pooled our resources to giveaway something significant ($50 gift card, Kindle, etc.). eBooks, and even eBook bundles (5+ different authors), don't seem to get much traction (in this age of blog tours, there's someone giving away an eBook every day it seems).

Over the last six years I've tried all kinds of giveaways, including the kindle KDP, then monitored the hit statistics. The result? If there's a return on investment of time and money, I didn't see it. JMO, but I stopped doing all contests except when I'm invited by a review site to do a participative one where the readers must come to my site and find an answer to a question. I do get benefit from those.

I've had the best luck, and the fewest headaches, offering a code for Smashwords.

I vote for Smashwords, that will give the winner a variety of formats to choose from and an easy way to access it.