Mixing Genres

Promotional Overload

Ever done a blog book tour? I know a lot of you are familiar with Dani and BlogBookTours, including her wonderful Yahoo listserv group on which she is now running classes every three months. Or is it four months? If I wasn't so tired from my latest jaunt into the cyberworld of promotion (or the promotional world of cyberland?), I'd do some fact-checking. But whatever the specifics are, Dani is the queen...no, the empress...NO, Dani is the goddess of blog book tours and I worship at her shrine!

ANYway, I have done two cyber tours for my murder mystery MURDER FOR HIRE, one solo and the other with Jess Lourey, author of the very funny MURDER BY THE MONTH series. Both were hard work; lots of posts to write and interview questions to answer, but definitely manageable. And the one with Jess was a lot easier because we shared the work.

Why I thought this would mean organizing and running a tour for eleven romance authors (myself included) for Ravenous Romance would be easy is beyond my comprehension. I guess I figured if there were eleven of us, it would mean that much LESS work for me. Except I was the organizer. And none of these other authors had ever done a blog book tour before and had no real concept of what it was.

Without boring you with the myriad of frustrations I experienced during the last two months, I'll just give you a brief idea of what I had to accomplish with this tour. There needed to be 13 stops: an intro, eleven stops that showcased one author per day, yet also involved all 11 authors, and a final stop to wrap things up. I had to find and contact all the host blogs, explain what we were doing, and figure out dates for each post while matching authors with the appropriate blogs. I came up with a format that included a question of the day that would be answered at length by the showcased author, with short Reader's Digest answers from everyone else. I had to send out questionnaires to the authors, nag them to get the questionnaires back in time for me to cut and paste all the answers into 11 separate posts, add the last paragraph telling people where the next day's stop would be and talk about the giveaways for each post. These had to go BACK to the showcased authors for their intros and anything else they wanted to add, including their book excerpts. Lists of urls and hyperlinks were sent to all the hosts, along with the schedules. Reminders were sent out, more nagging to authors to get the final posts back so I could proof them and send them on to the various hosts.

I was the first blog host and spent hours putting in everyone's book cover jpegs and as many hyperlinks as would help promote the authors, Ravenous Romance and all of the hosts. I checked links obsessively to make sure everything would be perfect for our first day. And it was - over 95 comments for our first stop. After that... well, let's just say no matter how carefully you plan something like this, there will still be things to go wrong and all you can do is damage control as best you can.

One host, a very reliable friend of mine, had the time wrong so the post wasn't up in the morning and I couldn't get a hold of her. I hastily put the post up at my blog, contacted another person on her blog, and he got the post up and running at the planned site. Another host was gone a large portion of the day and had the comment moderation on, so none of the comments showed up for a few hours. Yet another had the wrong link for the showcased author's website and was also gone for a large part of the day. Y'know...glitches.

I, of course, took them all as personal failures and emitted stressons all over the place. My long suffering boyfriend was on hand to dispense soothing words, backrubs and wine. All in all, I spent two months putting this tour together and then baby-sitting all the stops, even while on a mini-vacation. I have not gotten anything substantial in the way of writing done during this time.

Was it worth it? Yes. The authors have seen a rise in their sales, we had an average of 60 comments per stop (over 160 at one stop), and it's been a blast. Doing a tour for my next mystery novel will be a snap in comparison.

Would I do another multiple author tour again? Ask me in a few months when I've recovered from this one!

It's a Mystery...

...that my head is still attached to the rest of me.

Apologies for late posting - I'd posted last week and failed to notice that today was the first Sunday of the month. I suspect I missed a board meeting about guest posts, since I just realized all the posts last week WERE guest posters. Which means...oh, heck, it means I'm overworked, confused and need to take more gingko biloba herbs for my poor smoking brain pan...

Being a writer is a tricky thing (or 'tricksy', if you're Gollum) in that there are so many things attached to the job other than writing. This isn't even taking into consideration day jobs, which so many writers, published or not, have to maintain to do things like pay their rent. If you've been a regular visitor to this blog or any other blog on writing, you've no doubt read about the trials and tribulations of publicity and marketing, which has become more and more of a 'do it yourself' thing over the years. Nowadays, unless you're Stephen King, Dan Brown or any of the other airport bookstore rack authors, you will have to put massive amounts of time into pushing your own work, even with a larger publisher. It's just the way things are.

Some writers thrive on the marketing side of things - I personally love speaking engagements and library panels. I don't mind the online social networking - sites like Facebook and Twitter, not to mention the blogosphere, make the job a lot easier if you can resist the maelstrom-like time suck that can happen. One 25 Random Things About Me tag or meme is an hour or two of my day that I choose to spend writing, thank you. In theory I'm all over things like that because it's fun to learn things about my friends and fellow authors. In reality, I don't have time.

The last month I've been setting up a blog book tour for 11 authors from Ravenous Romance (I'm one of the authors) to help publicize Ravenous, a relatively new e-publisher, and my fellow authors who've bravely joined me on this whirlwind visit through cyberspace. I thought it would be relatively simple, having done two of my own blog tours for Murder for Hire.

Hah. Hah hah. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!! Yes, this is the sort of laughter that rises into a maniacal scream.

Time suck anyone?

Without boring you with the tedious details, I have put in a good 20 hours of my free time setting up this tour and if I ever make noises about doing something like this again, please feel free to whack me upside the head. I think overall the work will be worth it and I don't think anyone's done a blog book tour with so many authors at one time. Maybe something for the Guinness Book of World Records. If I have any hair left after tearing so much of it out trying to coordinate this, I'll look at it as a good thing. If not, let me me an object lesson to any of you planning your own tours. Ultimately, it's a good example of the time marketing and publicity can take if you're trying to do it right.

Okay, and if you're mildly insane.