5 Free Websites for Promoting Your Book (and the Catch on Each One)

Five websites will list your book, show your face to readers and email people when you publish the next one. None of them charges for the basics. The catch is that each has a paid layer, a set of house rules or an audience mismatch that trips up authors expecting a free megaphone. Get it wrong and the cost is rarely money. It is a giveaway nobody enters, a ban on the Reddit account you meant to build, or an Amazon author page that has shown readers a blank since 2023.

This post covers five sites, as the 2022 version did, with one swap. Wattpad is out and BookBub is in. The reason is near the end. Every price and rule below was checked against the site’s own pages on 16 September 2026.

1. Goodreads

Goodreads is Amazon’s reader network, and your book almost certainly has a page there already, because Goodreads pulls listings from Amazon. The Goodreads Author Program is free and open worldwide. Sign in, find your book by ISBN, ASIN or title, click your author name, scroll to the bottom and choose “Is this you? Let us know”. Approval takes up to two business days and brings a verified badge, a dashboard, an editable bio, a blog feed and Ask the Author.

Giveaways are the paid layer. They have cost money since January 2018. The current program, relaunched on 9 January 2025, offers Standard at $119 and Premium at $599, each for up to 100 copies. Kindle giveaways need a KDP account and are US only. Print giveaways are open to any author, in the US and Canada. During September Giveaways Month the prices drop to $99 and $399. What you are buying is the shelf: everyone who enters gets the book added to their Want to Read list, and their friends see it.

In your first hour, claim the profile, use the same photo as on Amazon, write a short bio, and check that every edition is combined under one work so ratings do not split. Then review three books in your genre that you have read.

The mistake is replying to reviews. Any reply from the author turns a reader’s space into an author’s space, and Goodreads readers remember who does it. Read them, learn, say nothing.

2. Amazon Author Central

Author Central builds the page behind your name on every Amazon listing. It is free, uses your KDP login, and can be fully edited on Amazon.com, .co.uk, .de, .fr, .co.jp and .com.br.

The feature that matters is the Follow button. Amazon emails your followers when a new book of yours goes on sale or up for preorder, provided the book is eligible, the follower accepts marketing email and they have not already bought it. The dashboard also shows your Best Sellers Rank, reviews, follower count and, for the US store, NielsenIQ BookScan print sales. Editorial reviews can be added in the US store only.

In your first hour, claim the page, add every edition so a search for your name shows one author rather than three, write the bio, add the photo and paste your best blurbs into the editorial reviews. Then open your book’s page and confirm the Follow button appears under your name.

The mistake is treating the page as a form you fill in once. The button does nothing until readers press it, and Amazon will not ask them to. Link to your author page, not the book page, at the end of your ebook and in your email signature. Every follower is a launch email you never have to send.

3. BookBub author profile

BookBub is known for paid Featured Deals that most self-published authors never get accepted for. The free part is easy to miss. BookBub says it has more than 10 million members, and any author can claim a profile through a free BookBub Partners account after identity verification.

Readers follow you, and when you release a new ebook BookBub sends every follower a dedicated New Release Alert at no charge, so long as the book is on your profile before, on, or within seven days after release. Alerts go to US readers and only ebooks qualify. BookBub’s own figure is that 73 percent of its readers want alerts from authors they like. Preorder Alerts, Ads and New Releases for Less are paid and easy to confuse with this.

In your first hour, set up the Partners account, claim the profile, add every ebook with correct retailer links, then write three recommendations of comparable books you have read. Recommendations reach readers who follow those authors, which is how strangers end up following you. Add the BookBub follow button to your website.

The mistake is adding the new book after the seven-day window. The alert never sends and cannot be triggered later.

4. LibraryThing Early Reviewers

LibraryThing is a cataloguing site for people who own a lot of books. It is smaller than Goodreads, and its Early Reviewers program is why it stays on this list.

Early Reviewers is free. Each month LibraryThing lists a batch of new and forthcoming titles, members apply, and an algorithm matches winners to books using their catalogue and reviewing history. LibraryThing says close to 100,000 members take part and the batch goes out in a newsletter to more than a million. Winners must review on LibraryThing within 90 days, and their score suffers if they do not.

The rules: the book must be published no more than six months before the batch month, or not yet. Authors may offer 5 to 30 print copies or 5 to 10 ebook or audiobook copies, in countries they choose, in up to two batches. AI-authored titles are refused. Batches run from the first business day to the 25th, with titles due three days before. You ship print within eight weeks and digital within one, and you may not contact winners for anything else, newsletters included.

In your first hour, create an account, add your book to your library so the record is correct, then list 10 ebook copies for the next batch on the giveaway entry page.

The mistake is listing before you are ready for reviews. They land on LibraryThing, not Amazon, though many members cross-post. For reviews on your Amazon page by launch day, build a launch team as well. See How to Build a Launch Team.

5. Reddit

Reddit is where self-published authors talk to each other, and where most self-promotion is removed within minutes. Moderators enforce the rules, and they differ by subreddit. As of 16 September 2026:

Subreddit	What you can post about your book
r/selfpublish	Nothing. A link, title or “any other identifier” is a violation, and intent is irrelevant. There is a dedicated self-promotion thread.
r/writing	Samples only in the monthly “Would You Read This” and “Promote Yo Self” threads. You need 5 karma earned inside r/writing to post at all.
r/books	No promotional posts, comments or flairs. AMAs are arranged through the moderators. No direct sales links anywhere.
r/wroteabook	Built for promotion. One post per book per month, books for sale only, no preorders, no AI-written books, genre flair and the pinned format required.
r/ARCReaders	For recruiting advance readers. Unpublished books only, up to three posts per book, a week apart.

The value of r/selfpublish is the archive of authors reporting what worked, with numbers, and the weekly threads where you can ask about your own case without linking to it.

In your first hour, read the rules and pinned posts of the subreddit you are about to use, then leave useful comments in five threads before posting anything. If your book is unpublished, write an r/ARCReaders post in the pinned format. If it is on sale, do the same in r/wroteabook.

The mistake is the “just published, here it is” post in r/selfpublish or r/books. It is removed, and the r/selfpublish rules say an honest question that contains a book link is still a violation. The second mistake is drafting the post with an AI tool. r/selfpublish bans for it and r/writing removes it.

Why Wattpad is out

Wattpad is not dead. Its own transparency report gives 71.2 million global monthly active recipients for January to June 2026. But it is a serial fiction platform, not a promotion site for finished books. Stories go up part by part, to a maximum of 200 parts, and the help center says you cannot upload a PDF or Word file, only plain text under 2 MB. Its creators’ blog points to the hot lists for what trends and names werewolf and teen fiction. If your ebook is in KDP Select, posting the full text on Wattpad breaks the exclusivity term, since Amazon holds the sole right to distribute the digital edition, free copies included. r/wroteabook classes Wattpad works as free content, not books for sale.

If you write serialised romance or YA fantasy and want readers before you publish, Wattpad is still the right place. That is a different job from promoting a book already on sale.

Where to start

Do Author Central and Goodreads today. Both sit on pages readers already visit, and both need the ISBN or ASIN of each edition, so have them to hand. Set up BookBub this week and add all three follow links to your back matter before the next upload. List the book on LibraryThing in the month before launch, once you are ready for reviews. Treat Reddit as somewhere you read for a month before you post.

None of this replaces the people you ask directly. Reviewers and bloggers will check your Amazon and Goodreads pages before they reply, so finish those first. The Reviewer’s Mental Checklist covers what they look at.