NOT YOUR USUAL SUSPECTS

A group blog featuring an international array of killer mystery, suspense, and romantic suspense writers. With premises and story lines different from your run-of-the-mill whodunits, we tend to write outside the box. We blog several times a week on all topics relating to romantic suspense and mystery, our writing, and our readers. We welcome all comments and often have guest bloggers. All our authors can be contacted separately, too, using their own social media links.

We find our genre delightfully, dangerously, and deliciously exciting - join us here, if you do too!

NOTE: the blog is currently dormant but please enjoy the posts we're keeping online.


Julie Moffet . Cathy Perkins . Jean Harrington . Daryl Anderson . Nico Rosso . Maureen A Miller . Sandy Parks . Lisa Q Mathews . Sharon Calvin . Lynne Connolly . Janis Patterson . Vanessa Keir . Tonya Kappes . Julie Rowe . Joni M Fisher . Leslie Langtry

Friday, July 11, 2014

The Blog Tour

Yesterday, I happened upon a post about blog tours by Parajunkie.com--the high and the low points. It is a great post, so I hope you take the opportunity to read Dishing Blog Tours.

During my ten years as a published author, I’ve written hundreds of guest posts and traveled throughout the blog world on tour. I’ve hosted authors at my blog and met lots of wonderful bloggers, readers and authors. This year I’ve begun to ponder the benefit of blog tours.

From a writer’s perspective blog tours are time-consuming and sometimes expensive. It takes time away from writing to schedule and write posts, answer interview questions and to prepare the promotional material required by each blogger. Once a promotional tour starts, extra time is required to comment on posts, interact with readers and to do the social media posts necessary to advertise your tour.

It seems to me that the latest trend with blog tours is to do a release day blitz or a cover reveal. This is where dozens of blogs post exactly the same material on the same day. I’m not a fan of this type of post, because if like me, readers follow many different blogs, they’re bound to come across posts that are exactly the same.

As both a reader and a blogger, I prefer material that is original, something that offers entertainment value. I want to learn about the author and how they came to write their book. I want further information about the book’s setting or special research the writer carried out while writing their book. This type of post is more likely to entice me to purchase a book.

While I’m speaking of the downside of blog tours, I might as well mention those authors who don’t bother to stop by and comment on their blog post or to interact with those who comment. Very frustrating for the host! Occasionally, there are bloggers who book a date with a blog and don’t send the relevant material in a timely fashion. On the opposite side of the coin, there are host bloggers who don’t post at the correct time.

Confession time—to my shame, I screwed up once and didn’t get my post up at the right time. I was mortified by my mishap and have made very sure I haven’t repeated this mistake. The author was very gracious and accepted my apology, but I still feel bad about this lapse on my part.

When it comes to blog tour companies, not all are made equal. It pays to ask around because some are more efficient and organized than others. If an author spends hours writing posts, they need to know readers will see their efforts. Sadly, some of the host blogs don’t receive much traffic and excellent, original posts languish and die unread.

This year authors are holding Facebook parties as an alternative or in addition to a blog tour. Facebook parties are fun and quick, and although they require preparation time, I’ve found they attract a large number of readers and generate buzz. Maybe parties of this nature are the new blog tour?

What do you think about blog tours? Have you done a blog tour before and did you find it/them beneficial? Do you intend to do more blog tours in the future?

5 comments:

Marcelle Dubé said...

Interesting post, Shelley. I've never done a blog tour, myself, but I have been a guest blogger. I'm always honoured when a blogger invites me into their blog. And you're right, it's good manners to provide the post on time, and stick around to chat with commenters.

Rita said...

Not done the blog tour thing. After reading your post I may consider it. Thanks for sharing.

Shelley Munro said...

Marcelle,

It's a different way of getting the word about your book out. In my experience the tours don't seem to work as well as they used to. It's wise to choose the blogs who host you wisely because all those posts do take a long time to prepare.

Shelley Munro said...

Rita,

If you have the time, it's definitely worth trying this avenue of promotion.

CathyP said...

My publisher scheduled a blog tour (through a tour company) for my last release. It was hugely frustrating because the selected sites didn't read my genre, their regular guests weren't especially interested in anything except the prizes. Time consuming and stressful sums it up.
That said, I've done guest posts on blogs in my genre and found them helpful for introducing a new release (CYPHER - releases next month!).

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