The Advantages of a Book Blog Tour

I'm about to embark on another Virtual Tour with my new YA book, Shadow on the Highway 

(FREE on Kindle this week only! US  UK )

This will be the third blog tour I have done with my historical fiction books, and I'm really grateful to all the bloggers who are participating, and to Amy Bruno of HVFT who organises the schedule and generally keeps me on track. My first blog tour I organised myself, but it was enormously time-consuming, and now I hire someone to do the prep, which leaves me more time to concentrate on writing guest posts and promoting the tour.

I thought I would highlight the advantages of doing a blog tour, given that there are now so many blogs that readers are often overwhelmed by the sheer number, and end up not reading any at all.

The main point I want to let authors know, is that if you are looking for the blog tour to hard-sell your books, then you will probably be disappointed. 

Blog Tours build sales slowly as they are about relationships built over time with your readers, and about what is now called in the trade your 'author platform'. (Most people I know still think of a platform as a place to catch a train!) Virtual Tours are a chance not only to put your book out there online (where every body is, these days it seems), but to listen to the feedback from readers. Book Review bloggers read to a punishing schedule, often many books every month, and as such they are expert readers. They will soon spot any flaws in your book, and when several of them all say the same thing it is a chance for you, the writer, to address the problem in your writing.

I am excited to hear whether bloggers will notice a difference between my adult and teen titles, and what they will highlight as a great part of their reading experience.

For me as an an author the main advantages of a Book Blog Tour have been:

•    To get reviews and feedback from many different people, which tells me what the people who are attracted to my genre of fiction like and expect, and often quite clearly what they don't like!
•    To gain exposure on different blogs to their loyal followers, who are all people who read and are interested in books enough to read a Book Blog
•    That often, reviewers post up their reviews on Amazon, Goodreads and other online sites, leading to a higher profile for the author and more attention to older titles
•    A chance to chat to readers through comments on my guest posts and bring more life and vibrancy to the book blog hosting me

Whilst on the book tour it is tempting to tweet every review, highlight them all on facebook, and generally drive your regular readers crazy. Of course your hosts on the tour will expect you to promote their blog whilst you guest with them, but this can be a turn-off for your regular followers. The strategy that works best for me is to highlight each blog once, and then return to promote it after the blog tour has finished, so that way you can keep in touch with bloggers after the tour has ended. I do this, even if the blogger has left me an unfavourable review - after all, they committed their time to reading your book above other choices they may have had.

A Book Blog Tour is a wonderful way to increase your networking profile on Google and in search engines, and as a platform builder it is second to none. People are still reading my posts from my first blog tour which was three years ago, and I am returning to some book bloggers for the third time, proving that they are looking forward to sharing my latest book with their readers.

You will find the schedule for my tour if you click on the banner - Please join me to chat about my new release!

The King's Carver

CONGRATULATIONS to Susan who is the winner of The Lady's Slipper picked out of the hat today!
Many thanks to everone else who stopped by my blog and made the effort to enter, wasn't it a great idea of Amy's. Hope you might have won something in the other draws.


A short post today as I'm one of the stops on the Fantastic Historical Fiction Holiday Blog Hop.

THE LADY'S SLIPPER 
Top Pick! Swift's eye for detail and language augment this atypical debut. Compelling and intriguing, this is a well-told story full of wonderful prose and surprising events. It's a vivid addition to the genre.
--RT BookReviews
To win a copy of my debut novel THE LADY'S SLIPPER please leave a comment below. 
Giveaway Open Worldwide. Don't forget to leave an email address. One extra entry if you follow this blog, and another if you tweet my post.

As for the Historical Holiday Blog Hop - Just look at the fabulous prizes you can win! Click on the banner above to follow the other blogs on this hop.Historical Holiday Blog Hop Grand Prizes - $25 Amazon or Barnes and  Noble Gift Card - Prize package(s) from SIXTY historical novels. 

GRINLING GIBBONS

Grinling Gibbons - such a wonderful name - was the "King's Carver", in the Restoration period and was famous for beautiful carved wood decoration for St Paul's Cathedral, the Palace of Windsor, and the Earl of Essex's house. Legend had it that his carving was so fine that the wooden pot of carved flowers above his house in London would tremble from the motion of passing coaches.

Walpole later wrote about Gibbons: "There is no instance of a man before Gibbons who gave wood the loose and airy lightness of flowers, and chained together the various productions of the elements with the free disorder natural to each species."

Grinling Gibbons was introduced to Christopher Wren by the diarist John Evelyn who spotted him at work and was impressed by his talent. He was able to make wood appear to flow and move and was thus one of the master carvers of the Baroque style. More information about this seventeenth century sculptor in wood can be found at wanderings in eden

 or in the book, The Work of Grinling Gibbons by Geoffrey Beard

A Man's cravat, carved in lime wood by Gibbons,
courtesy of the V&A Museum

I love comments!

Literary Sisters and the Italian Belle Epoque

How would you feel if your sister burnt your manuscript?

My post on the turbulent life of literary sisters The Brontes is over at Enchanted by Josephine, a blog that more often specializes in book reviews and posts about French Royalty and La Belle Epoque. I thought a bit of Yorkshire grit and the wild moors would make a nice contrast over there.

For those of you more used to me talking about the wilds of Westmorland I thought I'd bring a flavour of Enchanted by Josephine over here. Below is a picture from an exhibition of the Italian Belle Epoque. I love this picture of a woman sewing. More similar pictures can be seen at the Dolce Vita blog: or why not visit Enchanted by Josephine where you can click to enter a Giveaway of THE GILDED LILY.
Scroll down for snow!






And for anyone wondering why there is no snow yet on this post (The Gilded Lily is set in the snow of the winter of 1661) - here it is! A picture of Gabrielle Ray who was known as one of the most beautiful women of the Edwardian Era and often photographed. This photo came from a blog dedicated to Gabrielle Ray - click on it to take you there.

Romantic Historical Fiction - 40 book Giveaway

To celebrate its Anniversary the Goodreads Site for Romantic Historical Fiction Lovers is celebrating with a forty book giveaway. The Lady's Slipper is one of the books on offer, along with others by best-selling authors like Gabrielle Kimm, Anne O'Brien, Christy English, Sara Sheridan and of course Emery Lee (who hosts the site)

You can find the Romantic Historical Fiction Group on Goodreads and Facebook

GoodreadsRHFL@groups.facebook.com

Why not join the group and celebrate with us!

Researching Historical Fiction

My guest post about how I researched The Lady's Slipper is at Passages to the Past

There is also a giveaway running of the book.

Big Box of Books from the Big Apple, and Giveaway news

The Lady's Slipper is out today in the US and the lovely big box of books has just arrived!


You can see that my cat Tabby was fairly impressed by the whole thing and has begun to read it already.

To coincide with the launch two lovely bloggers are featuring my book:

An interview about my writing life at Tanzanite's Castle


and a competition and giveaway at Historical Fiction to win a signed limited edition hardback (open worldwide).

Thanks to Daphne and Arleigh for posting today.

"His Last Duchess" Interview and Giveaway

I've just posted an interview with Gabrielle Kimm on her new book here

Pop over if you would like a chance to win a signed copy. I've just started mine, review soon!