Star of Hope, the third novel in my Sun Song Trilogy was published in February. As usual there was the flurry of promotion: events, review copies sent out, radio interviews.
This time around my publisher organised a Love Books Group blog tour for the new publication but because this was the third in a series it was agreed that a Book Blitz for each of the other two books would work best.
Most writers know what a Book Blog Tour is but a Blog Blitz is different. There are the same number of bloggers as a normal tour but rather than a week of blogging it happnes over only three days.
What I didn’t realise at the time of agreeing was that I was required to provide nearly all the content.
Before the tours I had to prepare ten blog posts (min 300 words), two interviews and ten excerpts.
The excerpts were easy, I picked pieces I use for readings.
The Q & As were OK to do too becasue the bloggers asked different questions and I enjoyed the diversity.
The hardest thing was to write ten blog posts about three different books from the same trilogy. I was very concious of repeating myself and becoming a bit stale. I worked hard to keep them fresh.
The subjects suggested for all three books were, location, inspiration, favourite character to write or something different. The inspiration and location for all three books are very different but the main characters carry the story the whole way, so I had to be inventive to mix and match it.
Once the content was delivered I has a couple of weeks wait before the Twitter storm.
I am a reguler user of Twitter but, unlike some writers, I don’t have a huge following. Imagine my suprise when I woke up on Monday morning to find 50 plus notifications waiting. The first blitz blog had gone out, and throughout the day more were posted. Each time a blog went live I retweeted the posts, liked the retweets and thanked everyone for their comments and shares. Day two and three of the first week for Ways of the Doomed was a great success.
On the Monday of week two I expected the same but business wasn’t so brisk, even so I was still kept very busy.
The third week was the full blown Book Blog Tour for Star of Hope, but I was going on holiday and found it difficult to tweet and retweet. I have discovered that when these tours are running you need to be on retweet duty all day (I am not clever enough to set up scheduled tweets).
Was it worth all the work?
The tour organiser thought so. The traffic on the tour was a weekly Twitter reach of 2.6 million and I boosted some of the blogs on my Facebook author page and that produced lots of engagement.
Over the course of the next few weeks I will repost all my Book Blog Tour posts on this site and with pictures.
www.moiramcpartlin.com 