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How I organised an Author Blog Tour

8th August 2017 by KA Hitchins 4 Comments

Authors love being featured on other people’s blogs, whether it’s having their latest book reviewed by a book blogger, being interviewed about their writing life or contributing an article on a subject dear to their heart. The pièce de résistance must therefore be having your very own blog book tour.

 

 

A blog tour is like a traditional book tour, except all the stops are virtual. Instead of going from book shop to book shop, the author goes from blog to blog. The purpose is to expose the author to as wide an audience as possible without having all the expense and trouble of travelling around the country. You can read more about blog tours here: http://www.bookmasters.com/blog/blog-book-tour/

I’ve managed to have my books featured on several individual book review blogs, but had no idea how go about organising a blog tour for myself. Having signed a contract with a small independent publisher, there was no money to pay for a publicist to organise a tour for me and I didn’t know many bloggers personally who I could recruit.

In any case, as an unknown author I found it excruciatingly difficult to ask bloggers for their help, particularly as they knew what a blog tour involved and I didn’t. I was worried I’d look stupid and unprofessional.  Having also had my fair share of rejections through the submissions process, I wasn’t keen to expose my tender heart to more refusals.

 

 

Then I had a light bulb moment. I would ask another author if I could organise a blog tour for them, making it clear I had no experience in this area but would be willing to give it a go if they were. I knew I had to find the right kind of author – one whose work I admired, who was also a new author and who had passions and expertise outside of their book which would be interesting for bloggers to explore.

The main advantage of organising a blog tour for another author is that it’s much easier to ask for help on behalf of someone else. It’s also easier for a blogger to say, ‘no,’ to a third party, and it doesn’t hurt when they do! When they say, ‘yes’, however, you know they really want to be involved.

Having come to the end of the tour, I can wholeheartedly recommend the benefits. It was exciting to be able to enjoy someone else’s positive reviews and success for a change.  I logged onto social media every day during the tour with a sense of expectation, reading that day’s blog and enjoying seeing it Retweeted and shared into wider networks than my own.

The benefits for the author were: several great book reviews, a small increase in book sales, greater credibility as a writer and the possibility that her name and the name of her book will be more easily picked up by search engines in the future.

As well as increasing the profile of the author, I’ve also gained more Twitter and Facebook followers, and have met some wonderful people online who I might not have bumped into otherwise. I have more of a sense of the community of writers and bloggers working in my genre and I’ve seen first-hand how bloggers are able to find new angles on the same story, presenting their thoughts in the most succinct and imaginative ways. Hopefully the lessons I’ve learned will improve my own blogging.

Perhaps most importantly I’ve realised how rewarding it is to work collaboratively. The writer’s life is a lonely one. It was all too easy for me to become obsessed with my own reviews and sales figures and begin to lose perspective. There are many ways to gain a sense of personal achievement and helping to promote another author is one of them. With the internet swarming with publicists charging extraordinary sums to organise blog tours, it’s time writers took matters into their own hands.

So authors, instead of desperately searching for book review bloggers to feature your book, why not organise a blog tour for another author you know. Take a moment away from your own marketing and give yourself the opportunity to enjoy someone else’s success. There will be benefits for you both – and you never know one day someone might be willing to organise a tour for you.

And if organising a blog tour seems too much work, why not occasionally feature another author on your blog? Amazon does not allow review swaps on its site, but there’s nothing to stop you teaming up with another author to blog about each other’s books.

 

 

Here a step by step guide of how I set up the blog tour.

  1. Find an author who has several different angles to their writing, not just their book. Are they involved in a particular field or have a particular expertise? Have they an interesting life story? Can they talk about writing related issues? Some of the blogs on the tour can be book reviews, an author interview or an article produced by the author on a topic close to their heart, but the material for each blog needs to be unique in some way. Bloggers do not want to duplicate material from other blogs.
  2. Recruit a group of willing bloggers (this is the hard part!). I advertised for bloggers in relevant Facebook groups, and contacted other authors I knew who blogged. It took several weeks before I had enough blog spots to cover ten days.
  3. Set up a secret Facebook page and add in all the bloggers and the author. Encourage them to follow each other on Facebook and Twitter.
  4. Send out a review e-book to each bloggers so they can read it if they want to.
  5. Ask the bloggers what kind of a blog they want to have on their site and encourage them to coordinate direct with the author over interview questions/blog content.
  6. Agree dates for the tour with everyone and produce a schedule, ideally with a blog being published every day for a set period of time. Encourage the bloggers to advertise the schedule in advance.
  7. Select a relevant hashtag for the tour so that all Tweets can be easily found in one place and retweeted
  8. Once the tour is up and running, check that blogs are being posted each day and chase up any that are late. Share the blog posts on Twitter and Facebook, including in the secret Facebook group so the other bloggers can find them easily. Share and retweet other people’s posts and tweets.
  9. At the end of the tour, thank and congratulate everyone involved.

If you have experience of organising blog tours, I’d love to hear how you do it. I know I still have much to learn.

 

Filed Under: Uncategorised Tagged With: Author Promotion, blog, blog tour, Bloggers, Book Reviews, rejection, Writers Working Collaboratively, writing

I Dreamed a Dream

20th March 2017 by KA Hitchins 2 Comments

It’s just over a year since I set up this website. I was clear at the start that I didn’t want a blog page. I would have a news page instead. The main reason was that I enjoy writing at length and in great detail – exactly the opposite skills required for a blogger!  Also, I wasn’t sure what to blog about. But I think perhaps the thing that’s been holding me back is that it’s much easier to inhabit a character and hide behind them than to speak directly as myself. As you might have gathered, I’m an introvert.

So what’s changed? Suddenly I find I have lots of ideas to blog about. I want to review other people’s books. I want to share what I’ve learnt about publishing. And if I can overcome my fear of public speaking – as I’ve had to do since having two books published – then surely I can overcome my fear of blogging.

So I’m going to start right at the beginning. How I became an author.

I dreamed of being a writer throughout my childhood and teens.  When I realised stories were created by people and weren’t magically ‘just there’ to be plucked from the library shelves, I knew I wanted to create these worlds for myself and for other people.

 

 

I’ve always made up stories in my head. I do it unconsciously, imagining other people’s lives and setting myself in different situations and dreaming impossible dreams about the future. As I grew up and began to tell people I wanted to be a writer, there were the usual negative comments.

“It’s so hard to get published.”

“It pays so badly.”

“You have to study the great works of English Literature.”

“You must stick to the grammatical rules.”

“You must write about what you know” – not what you love or what excites you or what obsesses you.

“Why not go to secretarial college and learn to type? You’ll always be able to get a job.”

 

 

I left school at sixteen, went to secretarial college and began working  in London from the age of 17. I kept writing in the evenings and enrolled for writing classes and residential weeks.  Finally I listened to the advice I was receiving and signed myself up to do an English A’Level in evening classes, eventually managing to secure a place at Lancaster University when I was 21.

I read solidly for three years, writing essays about other people’s stories, feeling intimidated that I would never be able to write as well as them. After graduating it was easy to slip back to being a secretary in London, though I continued to write in the evenings.

But at the age of 28 I gave up. Blame a heart break which made me feel I had failed as a human being. The rejection silenced my voice. I no longer believed I had anything to say that was worth listening to. I lost faith in the magic of fiction and the happy ever after. It was time to knuckle down, put my dreams aside and concentrate on the real world, which meant having a better career and earning enough to pay the bills.

 

 

When I married my husband in my thirties, he knew I’d once dreamed of being a writer and encouraged me to take it up again. I refused to countenance the idea. I was a different person now. Older, wiser. I couldn’t bear the hurt of facing my broken dreams. Besides I was busy bringing up our two children and working part time as a Learning Support Assistant.

Then I had another heartbreak: the loss of my beloved father from cancer. With two young children, a job, a widowed mother and all the tasks in the house and garden that needed to be attended to, I didn’t have time to process the grief properly and pushed on through the pain.

As months turned to years, I became conscious of the most tremendous mental and emotional pressure. At the beginning of 2012 I started jotting down my feelings at odd moments in the day to try and put things into perspective. At first this made me more unhappy. I read back my personal rants at how miserable I was and they sounded petty and ungrateful. There were so many others in the world suffering more than I was. To them, my life must appear unimaginably comfortable and blessed.

 

In order to gain some emotional distance, I projected my grief onto a fictional character of the opposite sex. He was in a different situation from me, grieving the loss of his job in the financial crash, but experiencing similar emotions. Thus the shallow, materialistic character of Vincent Stevens was born.

I didn’t tell anyone I was writing. I didn’t know if I would be able to finish a complete novel, and didn’t want to have to answer the question, “How’s the book going?” only to have to tell people that I’d given up. If I was going to fail, I was going to keep it to myself.

I planned what I was going to write when walking the dog. I scribbled the ideas down whenever I could, particularly when sitting in the car waiting to pick up the children from school. Within two months the first draft of ‘The Girl at the End of the Road’ was finished and I plucked up the courage to tell my family. My husband, sister and a couple of friends heroically read it and made encouraging sounds.

The difficulty of writing a book is nothing compared to the difficulty of trying to get one published. I sent off my manuscript to agents and publishers and the rejections started to trickle back. I edited and revised and sent out another batch of submissions. Strangely I found that the pile of rejections toughened me up. My crippling fear of failure and rejection stemming from the broken romance in my twenties was disappearing.

I’d given up writing after my first real experience of loss. I’d taken it up again two decades later during another period of devastation. Older and wiser, I now knew that pain, failure and rejection were inevitable aspects  of life. Although they make you vulnerable, giving up on something I’d loved because I didn’t want to be a failure at it was not the answer. I learned that doing nothing is much more undermining of a person’s confidence than doing something and falling flat on one’s face. It’s better to be a failure at the thing you love than to be a success at something you hate.

 

In May 2015 I heard back from a small Independent Publisher called Instant Apostle. They liked the sample I’d sent in and wanted to see the full manuscript. I emailed it to them on a Friday morning, and by the following Monday I receives a phone call offering me a contract.

Reading and writing are transformational processes. We have to use our imaginations to understand the lives of others and to enter into their experiences. Stories offer the possibility of going inside the Other – the princess, the superhero, the detective, the murderer – to experience vicariously a little of the strange and wonderful and terrible thing it is to be human. And that’s a miracle.

I hope that if you are grappling with a sense of failure or loss and are tempted to give up on something, you’ll be encouraged to continue with that thing you love but which seems so fraught with risk.

As the saying goes, ‘If you want to walk on water, you have to get out of the boat’.

 

Filed Under: Blog, Uncategorised Tagged With: author, blog, blogging, dream, failure, heartbreak, loss, novel, publishing, rejection, story, The Girl at the End of the Road, transformation, writing

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