Elizabeth Zelvin Cyberschmoozes With Us

We're bumping up this excellent guest post by Liz Zelvin from several years ago for the benefit of the current Blog Book Tours class which is spending the month of September finding blog hosts for their own tours:


Welcome to Liz Zelvin, author of Death Can Get You Sober. She shares with us tips on developing friendships in the cyber-world to help promote our publications.

Cumulative Cyberschmoozing: The Secret of a Successful Virtual Book Tour
By Elizabeth Zelvin
My debut mystery, Death Will Get You Sober, hit bookstores on April 15 (2008). Since I want to give my novel the best possible shot, I am working hard on a variety of promotional activities. I set up a book tour, and I will be traveling across the country signing books, talking to readers, and most important, meeting individual booksellers face to face, from late April through all of May and June. A virtual tour has a different purpose: to reach and improve my visibility with the many readers who talk about and buy books online.

Setting up the virtual tour was time consuming. But I found it relatively easy to develop a list of blogs and websites that were willing to interview me or host a guest blog, others that offered opportunities to chat, record a podcast, or appear as a featured author.

How did I know where to go and whom to ask? I’ve been networking among mystery lovers for years, on e-lists like Guppies and DorothyL and web-based social networks like CrimeSpace. What gave me the time to build up not just contacts but friendships in the mystery community was how long it took me to find a publisher: more than five years from when I started sending the manuscript out. In retrospect, not a day of that agonizing time was wasted.

All this time, I’ve been schmoozing (a Yiddish word that a friend of mine insists means “to network shamelessly”) in cyberspace and also face to face at book launches, meetings of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime, and mystery conferences and parties. It helps that I live in New York. It also helps that I make my living in cyberspace as an online therapist and therefore am very comfortable expressing myself in text. I’ve been lucky in having had the opportunity to blog with some terrific mystery writers on Poe’s Deadly Daughters. When I finally did get a publisher, it happened to be one that gives me enormous credibility with other writers.

But anyone can follow a few simple rules that, in retrospect, I think contributed to the effectiveness of my virtual tour.

1. Get out there on the Internet and make friends. Be generous. Post when you can contribute something, not just when you need something. If you like someone’s book, email that person one to one and tell them so. Post comments to the mystery blogs. Don’t just talk about yourself and your book or manuscript or blog. Be thoughtful, informative, and entertaining. These skills will come in handy when you’re ready to write your guest blogs, and they’ll convey that you’re someone it will be a pleasure to help.

2. Keep it fresh. Stockpile blog posts whenever you can. Blogging is like any other kind of writing: it often starts with a spark of creativity, and then you’ve got to do the work. Don’t just write about writing or blogging or promoting books. Write about whatever interests you. During your virtual tour, you’ll want to avoid redundancy—and since you’ll tour around the time your book is published, you won’t have time to write ten or twenty pieces at the last moment. Make sure you say something different or reveal a different aspect of yourself or your work each time. I even write my brief bios from scratch every time, so they won’t all sound the same.

3. Ask your hosts if they’ll interview you rather than host a guest blog. I found every interviewer had a distinctive style and approach. Answering questions allowed me to keep it fresh without having to come up with a different angle every time myself. A bonus: license to talk about myself until the cows came home. I admit I had a grand time doing it. And some of the questions were definitely wild and unexpected. We all had fun, and I think it came across to readers.

4. Keep careful track of the logistics of your tour. A lot of the work, besides contacting hosts and writing the material, was record keeping. I had a master file that included the date of every virtual gig, the host blog or newsletter or website name, what kind of event it was (eg guest blog, interview, profile, podcast, live chat, Q&A), the url I’d need to create a link for the schedule on my website, the contact person’s name and email address, and—most important—the status of the material. Some I wrote and sent months in advance, and the host took on the task of remembering to post it at the right time. Others asked me to send it—or remind them—at a particular time nearer to the event date. All undone tasks appeared in my master file in red, and I duplicated the “Send” and “Remind” dates as notes on two different calendars. Then I posted all the events to the Virtual Tour page on my own website, with active links to the host sites or blogs—a small enough return for their generosity in hosting me.

5. Do it in advance. Get it done. It took me all of February to get my virtual tour schedule set and write the material, with a lot of emailing back and forth to my various hosts. But now it’s done. Unlike a real-life tour, except for the occasional live chat or podcast, when you’ve done the preparation, the work is finished. One or two blog hosts asked me to check in several times on the day my guest blog ran in order to respond to reader comments. And if I hadn’t heard recently from a host I’d set up a date with months ago, I might email to reconfirm as the date approached—or check to see that my blog or interview got posted as scheduled. But basically, once finalized, the virtual tour will run itself.

Elizabeth Zelvin’s debut mystery is Death Will Get You Sober (St. Martin’s, April 2008). Library Journal calls it “a remarkable and strongly recommended first novel.” Her related short story, “Death Will Clean Your Closet,” has been nominated for an Agatha award for Best Short Story. More about Liz, including her Virtual Tour schedule, appears on her website.




And you can keep up with what Liz has to say by regularly visiting her at the Poe's Deadly Daughters blog.

The Tale of Oat Cake Crag

Have you read any of the Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter? The Tale of Oat Cake Crag is the seventh in this series. Susan Wittig Albert kicked off her week-long blog book tour yesterday at Straight From Hel (you can still sign up for the drawing until noon). Today we’ll give you an overview of the rest of the week’s visits as well as some insights about how the tour was planned.

Susan’s fans will be following this tour and signing up for a book drawing each day, and also to be eligible for the grand prize if they sign in at each blog daily.

But they are not the only followers of this blog book tour. When Susan wrote her posts for each blog, she also considered any new readers and what their interests might be. On this blog, a post about the various aspects of a blog book tour would be appropriate. That’s what you’re reading right now. Here are some clues about what to expect on upcoming blogs:

Tomorrow (Wednesday), Susan visits The Blood-Red Pencil where the editors daily discuss all the many aspects of writing. So the post was crafted to explain the unusual Victorian narrative voice that the author employs in these Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter. It’s quite an intriguing concept, especially to the many writers who are fans of this blog.

Thursday, Lorna Barrett hosts the tour stop with her regular feature, Pet Peeves Thurday and you can bet Beatrix and her friends have a pet peeve in this seventh book in the series. Find out about it here and be sure to tell us your pet peeve.

On Friday, the Cozy Chicks host the final tour stop and you’ll learn that cozy mysteries (and their protagonists) might be a lot stronger than their cozy reputations lead us to believe. Beatrix Potter enchanted children with her delightful writing and illustrations, but she made history in another way, too. You can find out how by visiting the Cozy Chicks blog.

Do you have questions for Susan about writing a mystery series with a real-life heroine in the starring role? Please leave them here and she’ll be sure to answer them sometime today.

And don’t forget to sign up for the drawing to win an autographed copy of Oat Cake Crag by visiting the drawing page at http://cottagetales.com/blogtour/drawing_0914.php.


Check out the grand prize if you sign up for all five stops.

To buy a copy of the book, click here.

You can visit Susan at her Lifescapes blog for ongoing news about her books and life in the Texas Hill Country. Be sure to visit her often.

Congratulations to Betty S of Seabrook TX, who won Tuesday's BBT blog drawing! And if you haven't entered yet, today's drawing http://bloodredpencil.blogspot.com  will be open through Thursday noon.

How?

How to do I create a blog book tour? I get asked that question a lot.

First go to The Quickest Blog Book Tour Guide Ever and read it. That's a basic overview. Tackle each step listed, one by one, regularly, systematically, and long before your book release.

Then, start improving your blog through regular and well-written posts, a sitemeter, a bookmarking widget, and a blogroll that includes all the blogs you wish would host a book tour for you.

Now go follow some successful blog book tours. There are a few listed in the right-hand column here. As you get ideas, make a list of them and start thinking how you might apply them to your own book tour.

Join a group like Blog Book Tours at Yahoo! Groups and read through past messages. Look at the links at the group and learn from them. Now that you have some foundation about the whole concept, ask questions. Have people critique your blog for further improvements. Ask them for advice. What is it about the concept that confuses you most?

This is the only way to get comfortable with the idea, and believe me, the more you immerse yourself in the idea, the more comfortable it will seem too you.

When do you start this process? The year before your book release. At least three months and that's cutting it short. It's a lot more work than you think it is. Many hours are spent finding the right tour hosts and then planning each tour stop with a well-crafted interview, review, or other bit of entertainment that will engage your fans, and make them want to buy your book. Don't leave this to chance. Don't leave it until the last minute. You get one opportunity to make an impression. Make it a good one.

How many authors out there have had a blog book tour? Would you do it again?

August Blogging Challenge

We're issuing a challenge to all you blogging authors to help get your blogs in good shape for a blog book tour. August is The One-Post-Per-Day Blog Challenge. Post each day, every day.

Anyone who participates can leave a comment and link here so we go over to leave messages on your blogs. The idea is to get your blog active and noticed by the search engines before your tour. So start thinking about how you're going to beef things up on your blog; you don't want to bore us to tears with useless drivel.

If you don't know what a blog book tour is, go read The Quickest Blog Book Tour Guide Ever. You'll find more useful tips to get your blog in topnotch shape for a dynamite blog tour. It all starts with your blog - that's the launching pad for the best tours.

If you want to participate with a group, this challenge is homebased at the Blog Book Tours Yahoo!Group. You must give your full name and book title to join the group.

Nightshade wrap-up

Last November, Susan Wittig Albert graciously shared with us information and tips for a successful blog book tour after completing her very first. You can read about it here. In this conversation, she'll share with us her latest experience and insight after finishing a second tour, this one for Nightshade, the most recent release in her long-running and popular China Bayles herbal mystery series.

Welcome back, Susan.

In the most recent tour, you had a new approach to get blog hosts. Tell us how that worked (with the online questionaire). How many bloggers filled out the form and how did you choose the finalists?

For the past 7 or 8 years, I've been building an active email list. Currently, mailings go out to about 10,000 people. On my email list, I invited bloggers to visit an online information page: an outline of what I wanted to achieve with the blog tour, how hosts could participate, and what we both might gain. I also posted the URL on various lists. The page is here. 400+ bloggers visited the page; 24 applied. I visited the blogs, looking for those that seemed compatible with the spirit of the books. I was interested in traffic (of course), but also in introducing the books to a variety of audiences. I chose blogs that targeted gardeners, naturalists, mystery readers/writers, and (in one case) library patrons. I invited two bloggers (who had not responded to the questionnaire) because they are friends and have a different audience.

You decided to promote the entire series, and not just the new book, in this three-week tour. How do you think that worked? Could you tell if you got sales boosts on all the titles in the series? Would you do this again? Do you feel it diverted attention from Nightshade or did it help?

I promoted all the books because new readers to the series don't want to start with the new hardcover. I'd like to acquaint readers with the series, not with just one book. Does that help Nightshade sales? Eventually, sure. One of my jobs as a writer is to write a book--any book--that makes the reader want to read more. A reader who starts with Book 5, might go back to Book 1 and read the whole series, eventually reaching Nightshade (probably about the time it comes out in paperback).



Sales? No, I can't tell a thing. The only way you can ever tie sales to a specific marketing strategy is to direct buyers to one sales point and I don't do that. The books are sold in chain bookstores and big box stores, independent bookstores, online, and on my website. There's no way to judge the effect of my blog tour, as I designed it, on the book sales. I do this on faith, and because I enjoy it. And yes, I will once again promote the whole series, if I do this again. (That said, it was gratifying to see Spanish Dagger hit the New York Times extended bestseller list, the Booksense list, and two Barnes & Noble bestseller lists.)

How did you prep your blog hosts this time? Did you have any new tricks developed since the first tour? Cheat sheets? Reminder schedule? Kick in the pants? Threats from Guido??

I sent everyone a welcome email, a how-to email, an email about promoting the visit, another how-to email along with my guest post, and a post asking for traffic counts. The posts all went up on time. One blogger had trouble posting photos. Another just didn't get it (poor choice on my part—this was one of the invited bloggers) and two bloggers had no traffic stats.

How did you promote the tour? What forums, communities, listservs? How did you use your own blog to promote tour stops? Any new insights since the first tour?

I promoted the tour in my eletters, my blog, on my website, on related listservs, on MySpace, on GoodReads. I did more coaxing/directing from my own blog than I did on my previous tour (with The Tale of Hawthorn House, in the Cottage Tales series), and I posted a "preview" of each host blog. Readers commented that they enjoyed the previews--I'll do that again.

How are you gauging results of the tour? What numbers are important to you? Hits on the book drawing page, your own blog traffic, reports from other bloggers, titlez.com, what else?

All the above. The blog hosts collected the unique visits for the three days of my visit (the three days readers could enter the drawing for that blog) and reported the numbers to me. I have no way of verifying their accuracy, but they all seem more or less in line. In addition, I have the number of entries in the 15 book drawings, which stayed high throughout the blog tour. Traffic to my blog is up by about 20%, to the website, about 15%.

You had an overlapping live tour with the blog tour? How did that work? Would you do that again?

Most of the people I meet on the live tour aren't Internet-oriented. They belong to garden clubs, library Friends groups, and so on. It's not the same market, so there's not really an overlap. The time element is an issue, yes. I usually plan to devote April to book promotion, though (the books are published in April), so in that sense, it doesn't matter whether I'm blogging or live-touring.

Time commitment from me. This was a biggie. Estimated times, probably conservative:

Obtaining a pool of potential blog hosts and choosing the hosts, 8 hours.
Calendaring and confirming with blog hosts, 4 hours.
Mailing ARCs, 2 hours.
Writing blog posts, 20 hours.
"Previewing" host blogs on my blog, 4 hours.
Communicating with blog hosts, 4 hours.
Promoting tour, 4 hours.
Checking guests posts and commenting 15 hours.
Sending thank-you books to host, 2 hours

Total: 63 hours, a bit more than 4 hours per blog

Maybe I overdid it? Should I have cut back to 10 blogs and saved 20 hours? Should I have cut back on the complexity of the blog posts, or the previewing, or comments on the blogs? Maybe. I was stretched for time, certainly.

Length of tour. When the posts were written and I saw what I'd done, I thought it was too long. But some people didn't find out about it until halfway through, and were glad it was still going on. Also, now I have all that material, and am thinking about ways I can recycle it.

Thanks, Susan. I already have a few more questions, but will wait until you're back from your live tour! Anybody else? Leave a comment for Susan or me if you have anything you'd like to add or ask.

Kitty Knits

I love cats. I knit with passion. I like Donna Druchunas. It doesn't take a stretch of imagination to figure out why I'm hosting a tour stop here for her new book, Kitty Knits. I received it in the mail yesterday, a few weeks before my hosting date, so that'll give me plenty of time to knit a few dozen of those cool felted mice, a doorknob dangle toy, and maybe a felted bed. Although the bed may have to wait until I make the lace shawl for myself. So many great projects! Read more at the Queen of Socks blog by clicking here.

That's Donna with DeeDee. Aren't they cute?

The Van Gogh Blues by Eric Maisel

Early last year, I was honored to host Eric Maisel during his blog book tour for Ten Zen Seconds. I received the added benefit of surviving a dreadful cataract surgery thanks to the tips and inspiration in the book! Today, our tour spotlights the softcover reprint of Eric's highly popular book, The Van Gogh Blues. And again, I find myself with a tool to navigate changes in my life, this time dealing with the stresses of switching careers and life meaning from painter and gallery owner to writer, a shift that has proven much more challenging and distressing than anything I might have imagined. Read on for some comments from the author:

HBP: Eric, can you tell us what The Van Gogh Blues is about?

E: For more than 25 years I’ve been looking at the realities of the creative life and the make-up of the creative person in books like Fearless Creating, Creativity for Life, Coaching the Artist Within, and lots of others. A certain theme or idea began to emerge: that creative people are people who stand in relation to life in a certain way—they see themselves as active meaning-makers rather than as passive folks with no stake in the world and no inner potential to realize. This orientation makes meaning a certain kind of problem for them—if, in their own estimation, they aren’t making sufficient meaning, they get down. I began to see that this “simple” dynamic helped explain why so many creative people—I would say all of us at one time or another time—get the blues.

To say this more crisply, it seemed to me that the depression that we see in creative people was best conceptualized as existential depression, rather than as biological, psychological, or social depression. This meant that the treatment had to be existential in nature. You could medicate a depressed artist but you probably weren’t really getting at what was bothering him, namely that the meaning had leaked out of his life and that, as a result, he was just going through the motions, paralyzed by his meaning crisis.

HPB: Are you saying that whenever a creative person is depressed, we are looking at existential depression? Or might that person be depressed in “some other way”?

E: When you’re depressed, especially if you are severely depressed, if the depression won’t go away, or if it comes back regularly, you owe it to yourself to get a medical work-up, because the cause might be biological and antidepressants might prove valuable. You also owe it to yourself to do some psychological work (hopefully with a sensible, talented, and effective therapist), as there may be psychological issues at play. But you ALSO owe it to yourself to explore whether the depression might be existential in nature and to see if your “treatment plan” should revolve around some key existential actions like reaffirming that your efforts matter and reinvesting meaning in your art and your life.

HBP: So you’re saying that a person who decides, for whatever reason, that she is going to be a “meaning maker,” is more likely to get depressed by virtue of that very decision. In addition to telling herself that she matters and that her creative work matters, what else should she do to “keep meaning afloat” in her life? What else helps?

E: I think it is a great help just to have a “vocabulary of meaning” and to have language to use so that you know what is going on in your life. If you can’t accurately name a thing, it is very hard to think about that thing. That’s why I present a whole vocabulary of meaning in The Van Gogh Blues and introduce ideas and phrases like “meaning effort,” “meaning drain,” “meaning container,” and many others. When we get a rejection letter, we want to be able to say, “Oh, this is a meaning threat to my life as a novelist” and instantly reinvest meaning in our decision to write novels, because if we don’t think that way and speak that way, it is terribly easy to let that rejection letter precipitate a meaning crisis and get us seriously blue. By reminding ourselves that is our job not only to make meaning but also to maintain meaning when it is threatened, we get in the habit of remembering that we and we alone are in charge of keeping meaning afloat—no one else will do that for us. Having a vocabulary of meaning available to talk about these matters is a crucial part of the process.

HBP: This is the paperback version of The Van Gogh Blues, How was the hardback version received?

E: Very well! The reviewer for the Midwest Book Review called The Van Gogh Blues “a mind-blowingly wonderful book.” The reviewer for Library Journal wrote, "Maisel persuasively argues that creative individuals measure their happiness and success by how much meaning they create in their work.” I’ve received countless emails from artists all over the world thanking me for identifying their “brand” of depression and for providing them with a clear and complete program for dealing with that depression. I hope that the paperback version will reach even more creative folks—and the people who care about them.

HBP: How does The Van Gogh Blues tie in with other books that you’ve written?

E: I’m interested in everything that makes a creative person creative and I’m also interested in every challenge that we creative people face. I believe that we have special anxiety issues and I spelled those out in Fearless Creating. I believe that we have a special relationship to addiction (and addictive tendencies) and with Dr. Susan Raeburn, an addiction professional, I’ve just finished a book called Creative Recovery, which spells out the first complete recovery program for creative people. That’ll appear from Shambhala late in 2008. I’m fascinated by our special relationship to obsessions and compulsions and am currently working on a book about that. Everything that we are and do interests me—that’s my “meaning agenda”!

HBP: What might a person interested in these issues do to keep abreast of your work?

E: They might subscribe to my two podcast shows, The Joy of Living Creatively and Your Purpose-Centered Life, both on the Personal Life Media Network. You can find a show list for The Joy of Living Creatively here and one for Your Purpose-Centered Life here. They might also follow this tour, since each host on the tour will be asking his or her own special questions. Here is the complete tour schedule. If they are writers, they might be interested in my new book, A Writer’s Space, which appears this spring and in which I look at many existential issues in the lives of writers. They might also want to subscribe to my free newsletter, in which I preview a lot of the material that ends up in my books (and also keep folks abreast of my workshops and trainings). But of the course the most important thing is that they get their hands on The Van Gogh Blues!—since it is really likely to help them.

A visit with Dana Fredsti

Hotbuttonpress: Meet Dana Fredsti, author of The Peruvian Pigeon, the first almost-cozy mystery in her Murder For Hire series. Set in modern-day California, the book parodies 1940’s pulp detective fiction through the theatrics of a local acting troupe. They hire out their talents as fundraising entertainment for business and area high society, and along the way find a few dead bodies to complicate the plot. It’s clear the author knows her stuff when it comes to the acting world. Dana, how far back does your acting interest go? Elementary school? High school?

Dana: I would have to say my acting interests go back as far as elementary school, at least to the best of my recollection. My fifth and six grade teachers were very ambitious and put on Antigone and Hamlet, respectively, as the class plays. Oh yeah, and Julius Caesar. I played Antigone, Queen Gertrude and an extra in the crowd for Marc Anthony. The “we come to bury Caesar, not to praise him” speech. My cousin Sandy made my costumes and I loved my blue flowery pseudo-Grecian Antigone costume. I had really long hair back in those days and remember using my pony tail quite dramatically, flipping my hair this way and that as I gave my speech, before being dragged away to be entombed alive.

I also have very fond memories of the scene in Hamlet when Hamlet confronts his mother in her dressing room as Polonius hides behind a curtain to spy and is subsequently killed by the twitchy Prince of the Danes. When Polonius uttered his dying words, “Oh, I am slain!”, they came out as wooden as only an elementary student with no acting ability could deliver them. “Hamlet” and I looked at each other and got the giggles, which quickly spread to the audience and eliminated any possible drama in the rest of the scene.

I pretty much decided I liked acting from that point on. It was definitely my main interest in high school and the only class I didn’t want to ditch. Yes, I ditched classes occasionally to go get donuts at Winchell’s down on Clairemont Drive or to see dollar matinees at the Clairemont Theater with my friend, Maureen. The same Maureen who later became my partner in crime with Murder For Hire, by the way. At any rate, I was in every play except one during my three years of high school (our drama teacher, Mrs. Curran, believed every actor should work tech on at least one play), did community theater, and later went on to act in some really bad movies when I moved to Los Angeles.

Hotbutton Press: So acting was really a career path for you?

Dana: Back when I was younger and more naive, I thought acting was going to be my career. I rapidly discovered I did not have the drive to put up with the bullsnit you have to go through even to start to make it. I have always been easily distracted. I’d go through phases of sending out headshots and resumes, went through a couple of agents without any real results, watched as the required dress size for an actress shrunk while her boobs grew disproportionately, and found I got more satisfaction from writing and eating what I wanted. I did come very close to getting a boob job, but didn’t follow through on it. It’s funny ‘cause when I first moved to Los Angeles, my size was considered normal for an actress. In a world where Brittany Spears was termed “obese” by some fans when she made her ill-advised wardrobe choice for the 2007 MTV Awards, I’d be Jabba the Hut. Okay, not that bad, but I was never a size 2 or 4. Except possibly when I was a toddler.

Hotbutton Press: What do you do now for a living? I mean besides write novels.

Dana: I’m currently working at a Venture Capital company (sustainable, green, health and wellness type investments) as their office goddess (i.e. manager). My co-worker recently told me writing was my real job and my day-job was my steady side-gig. Heh. I like the way she thinks. I actually really like the company, my co-workers and our office. All in all, it’s a great job and I’m very happy there. It’s like the anti-VC firm, with a really eclectic and creative group of people and they’ve all been extremely supportive of my writing. That, I’ve found through past experience, is a rarity in the workplace. Plus we have a really cool Nespresso maker and I make killer Belgian chocolate mochas every morning.

Hotbutton Press: Speaking of chocolate, your characters are seriously into it! Where can we find a recipe to tide us over until the next book?

Dana: This is an easy one! For the best hot chocolate ever, take two squares of Belgian chocolate and click here.

Hotbutton Press: I can see this mystery series adapted for TV. Would you ever consider that?

Dana: Oh, yeah! As long as it didn’t affect my writing more books in the series or any funky legal mess with the rights.

Hotbutton Press: What next?

Dana: Let’s see. I have both my sequel to MFH (working title Murder for Hire: The Big Snooze) and a supernatural thriller/romance/mystery started. That is to say, I’ve done basic plot and character notes, the barest skeleton of outlines, and some research for the latter. Also, another edit of a screenplay and I’ve made a solemn vow to post on my blog at least twice a week, preferably three! None of this is counting bookstore signings and other promotional appearances for MFH. 2008 will be a very busy year!

Hotbutton Press: Getting that sequel written for your impatient fans is the most important job. We’re dying to know what happens next, especially with the dangling romances you wickedly set up. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and have to say I didn’t suspect who the villain was right up until the conclusion. It was a definite cliffhanger for me.

Don't miss out! There will be a drawing at the end of the tour for three free copies of The Peruvian Pigeon… but only if you leave a comment here or at the other blog book tour stops listed below:

Sunday, January 20th Elysabeth’s Emerald City

Monday, January 21st Blogbooktours

Tuesday, January 22nd Kat's Random Thoughts

Wednesday, January 23rd Chrysalis Stage

Thursday, January 24th Kitty Litter: A Mystery Writer's Rants & Raves

Friday, January 25th Pointless Drivel

Saturday, January 26th Redzilla Attacks!

And the winners are:

Zoggirl

Shelli

Diesel

Steven Prosapio

Email our author at zhadi at aol dot com to make arrangements for your winning copy of The Peruvian Pigeon. Congratulations all!

And you can buy the book by clicking here. Enjoy the rest of the tour.

The Peruvian Pigeon

Coming soon we'll interview Dana Fredsti about her premier book in the Murder For Hire cozy mystery series. Here's a bit of the synopsis:

Connie Garrett has a lot on her plate. Her mystery-oriented theatrical troupe, Murder for Hire, has been hired as entertainment for Emerald Cove’s first annual Fall Festival, a series of events held to honor local authors and raise money for the newly opened Emerald Cove Library.

This year’s Festival post mortem honoree is Shay Randell, creator of the famous hard-boiled detective Mick O’Mallet. The publicity generated for the Festival is better than previous years because a new television series featuring O’Mallet is now in the works. The publicity from the Festival could be invaluable to Murder for Hire. One of the actors, Connie’s boyfriend Grant, is even being considered for the role of O’Mallet in the new series.

You can read more here.

Even more fun, listen to the author read the prologue by clicking here.

A blog book tour in retrospect

Last week we hosted Susan Wittig Albert on her first-ever virtual book tour. Susan is a long-time web aficionada who for many years has utilized various internet tools like e-letters, websites, and a marvelous Lifescapes blog of her days in the Texas Hill Country. We were curious to know her reactions to the blog book tour experience and here are her responses:

How did this experience compare to your live tours?

Much less physical effort! I could stay at home and work, instead of driving for hours, giving a couple of talks a day, sleeping in a different bed every night, eating other people’s food (not my own cooking).

Did you feel you connected to your readers?

Actually, yes, although I didn’t expect that. I received a great many email comments and notes, as well as the comments on the blogs. And since I was seeing the names/email addresses of the people who dropped in on the drawings, I got a sense of the “attendance”—that part of it, anyway. Turns out that fewer than half of the people who read the blog entries participated in the drawings.

How much work/time involved compared to a live tour?

The up-front time was actually fairly comparable. I manage my own live tours, so I choose the venues (much as I chose the bloggers, by soliciting invitations), book my own motels, do my own maps. On a live tour, I have a couple of talks and repeat them (to the point where I’m pretty sick of them when it’s over)—the prep time is minimal. On the blog tour, each stop was a different prep, most of which required maybe 2-3 hours of writing, revising, doing photos, setting up links, and so on. Also, Peggy (my wizard of a webmistress, She-Without-Whom-Nothing-Happens) clocked quite a few hours in developing the program for the drawings, setting up the tour schedule webpage, etc. The big thing that was missing: the driving! On a live tour, I usually try to book two events a day, which usually means 4-5 drive-time hours, sometimes more.

How do the tour costs ($$) compare?

Hey, how do you spell M-O-T-E-L? $100 a night? Also, gas ain’t cheap nowadays. A 10,000-mile-tour (like the one I drove, yes, me myself and I, in 2005) would probably cost around $1200 in today’s gas, plus the daily tab on the rental car (or the wear/tear on a personal car), and a couple of plane fares, getting me where I couldn’t drive. I’m a cheap date where food is concerned, though. I’m perfectly happy with McD’s salads. Sometimes publishers pick up the costs, but an author who is paying her own way is chalking up a big tab.

What do you see as the greatest advantage of the virtual tour over a live tour?

Less time on the road, more time in my own bed (with my own DH), and lower cost. The carbon footprint is distinctly smaller, which counts for plenty, seems to me.

I got to spend some quality time with nine great blog hosts (thanks, guys!). We worked out problems together, figured out what sort of post to create, and communicated—more or less successfully. My live tours are longer and more hectic, and I never feel as if I really get to know the tour hosts.

Also: I got to “meet” some blog readers who would never in the world have made the effort to attend one of my live events—people who are regular readers of the host blog, who had never heard of my/my books before. If they read the post and remembered it, they might be inclined to remember that, the next time they run across my name/book title. Or they might go to the library to pick up the book. Or even look for it on a bookstore shelf. You never know. So I think the chances of picking up a new reader may actually be higher in a blog tour than a live tour. (I have no statistics on this, so don’t hold me to it.)

Plus: When you do a live tour, it’s in-one-ear-out-the-other. People remember the event, but not what I say. Also, the audience is fixed: it’s the folks who came that night, and that’s it. On the web, the tour posts hang around for a long time. People stumble over them much later. The audience is larger than the audience that showed up at the original time of the post. That’s a big plus, seems to me.

Disadvantages?

I’ll try to be systematic about this. Forgive me.

1) Impact on the attendees. Seems to me that a reader who makes the effort to come out to a bookstore or a library or wherever to hear me is going to remember the occasion longer than someone who comes to one of the blog stops. I’m guessing here, but I think that’s probably the case.

2) Non-blogging readers. I have a great many older readers who don’t do computers and stick their fingers in their ears when they hear the word BLOG. (They think it’s an obscenity.) On live tours, I reach them through libraries, garden groups, reading groups, herb societies, and Red Hatters. I can’t reach them through a blog tour.

3) Media impact. When I do a live tour, I put some up-front effort into encouraging the tour hosts to get strong local media for the event. Usually, I have pretty good luck: newspaper coverage, some local radio (by phone), some local TV. Also, the event is promoted in the host’s newsletters and website. Even though I may see only 40-50 people at an event, it’s likely that 400-500 have seen a notice of it, read something about it, or heard about it from a friend. On last year’s tour, I did a benefit for a university alumni event. There were a couple of hundred people at the event, but 5,000+ people all over the U.S. got a mailing from the university, with the book cover/my photo/all that good stuff. You don’t get anything like that with a blog tour.

4) Book sales. Let us not forget the point of this exercise, which is to sell books. Live tours sell books—not just the books I sign/sell at the events, but the books that I sign at various local bookstores, where I’ll do drop-ins whenever I can fit them in. Signed books sell, so when I leave a stack in a bookstore, I can figure they’ll be sold eventually. Blog tours, on the other hand, are more like advertising. You’re just putting the word out there, raising awareness, getting people’s attention. You can’t measure whatever sales you might achieve.

What did you love about the Blog Book Tour?

Getting all over the web! I have a Google Alert on my name (how’s that for chutzpah?) and I was delighted to see it flashing across the sky. That’s why I did this. I think it worked.

What did you loathe about it?

Nothing, really. Oh, yes: I got really impatient when the posts weren’t up by 8 a.m. Eastern Time, as I asked. That’s because I knew that readers would be there before the posts appeared, which feels really counter-productive to me. But then, I’m a former English teacher. I’ve been known to lock the door of my classroom at two minutes after the hour. (Not quite, but almost.)

How did you track your statistics throughout the tour?

That’s hard. I had to depend on self-report (not always accurate, and a couple of bloggers forgot to tell me that they didn’t have a statistics package). But on this tour, I had two other statistics of my own: the number of people who came to the tour schedule page, and the number of people who entered the drawing for each blog event. Those are my “hard” numbers. I’ll be curious to see if my next blog tour brings in more traffic—or less.

Thanks, Susan, for giving so generously of your time and insights once again.