Today I’m linking up with Coffee Addicted Writer to talk about giveaways. Here’s the question:

Are the giveaways on your blog publisher-sponsored giveaways or giveaways of your own books?

Confession: I’ve never done a giveaway neither here on my blog or on YouTube. I get why people do them, it’s a great way to get more followers, but the reality for me is that I’m a middle school teacher. If I have extra books, or if I’m going to give them away (which I’ve done), I’m going to give them to my students.

See, I teach in a small border town. The town has a used bookstore, but the selection of books appropriate for adolescents is depressingly small. The only place to buy new books is Wal-Mart, and the selection there is ridiculous as well. From my students, I’ve heard unfortunate things about how adolescents are treated by the public librarians.

Thankfully, we have an amazing school librarian. She’s awesome and gets the students just about anything they want. But I still feel like, given the population of kids I teach (struggling readers), they should have first dibs on any extra books I have.  When I (accidentally) bought more than one Quarterly box last quarter, I thought about doing a giveaway, but ended up donating the books to the library at my school instead. Most of the students in my school have never read a book annotated by an author. It’s an interesting experience for them that most would not experience otherwise.

How do you approach giveaways?