Blog Power

Literary agent, Nathan Bransford, asks his blog readers where they heard about the book they are currently reading. Read the comments if you want to know the power of blogging! Click here to leave your own comment.

Blog book tours vs. live book tours

Both are good. But don't plan on scheduling a blog book tour the same time you are traveling for a live tour. Complete one tour, rest up for a week or so, and then embark on your second tour.

Authors who think they can do a good job scheduling live and virtual tours at the same time, have no clue how much work is involved with a blog book tour. No clue at all. One of the tours won't get the attention it needs to succeed, probably the blog tour, and then the author will complain that the silly idea didn't work for them at all. Gee, I wonder why...

One tour at a time and give each of them 100% of your energy. Easy peasy if you pay attention and follow directions.

At the Blog Book Tours class, the next assignments for the month focus on the social marketing groups we all know... and maybe hate. These include Facebook, MySpace, Goodreads, and Twitter.

We're starting with Twitter because it's the fastest, easiest, and most powerful for marketing your other websites. It's also less of a time-suck than the more complex social forums. There are other added benefits about Twitter networking that I'll point out later.

In a nutshell, Twitter is a micro-blogging site that allows snappy posts of 140 characters. To participate, you follow other Twitter users and this allows you to see their updates.

You, in turn, are followed by others and those people can read what you have to say. Keep this scenario in mind, because it's the key to how Twitter works, or how it doesn't if you don't "get it". Believe me, many people don't, and consequently feel it's a waste of time.

Let me repeat:

You must follow people to see their updates.
Only your followers can see your updates.

It's crucial you understand this. If you are enthusiastically following thousands of people, but only a fraction are following you back, then only that small fraction sees what you write. Therefore, it's important you spend your efforts offering information that is of value to others, so they will want to follow and read you.

Now, to get started, and before the following and socializing begins, you need a few things upfront:

1. An email account that is acceptable on Twitter like yahoo or hotmail


2. A name that coordinates with your other website efforts if possible - I use blogbooktours everywhere I can
   
3. A small photo for your homepage and post icon


4. A well-written short bio


5. The website link you will send readers to for more information
   

Now you're ready to set up your Twitter account. Go to http://twitter.com/ and follow the directions, plugging in the information above.

Once you've gotten this far, you're ready to practice entering some updates. Introduce yourself in one, leave a blog link in another, tell us what you're doing today in a third. Do this several times more, perhaps throughout the day, to get Twitter into your conciousness and just to practice writing concise but meaningful messages. Be sure to bookmark your Twitter page to make it one of your regular stops several times during the day, much like checking your email.

Now you're ready to start following people and have them follow you back. We'll talk about how to do that in the next post.

And then you can follow me @twitter!

Tomorrow I'll also post helpful links picked up at Twitter to help you even more. One of my favorites is TwiTip for ongoing updates and tips.

Making room for better things

There are better things to put on your blog than a long archive list. Why show each post in the current month? Your readers can scroll through your actual posts quite easily. Collapse that thing now!

Then add the new Follow Me widget on Blogger or something similar on other blogging platforms. This is a great way to spark blog popularity. Place it quite high in your sidebar as demonstrated right here. Your widget will look something like this:

Everyone in the B.A.D. Challenge, as you visit each other, look for a way to follow and add yourself to this list. On Blogger blogs, you'll see that all the blogs you follow now appear at the bottom of your dashboards. It's a fast and handy way to see if anyone has posted something new. How many of you knew that?

And they're off

In the right column, you'll see some of our current class members - these folks are courageous enough to participate in the Blog-A-Day Challenge otherwise known as the B.A.D. Challenge. There will be days toward the end of the month when that acronym will have truth seeping from its pores.

Blogging daily is hard work, and maybe not even a good idea over the long haul. But to get a blog pumped up fast, it's a good tactic to post day after day, to have pals visiting your blog and commenting, and to politely and appropriately promote on your other social networks like Twitter and FaceBook.

Two tricks can really help an aspiring blogger succeed:

1. Plan your blogs so that one long and related post is split over several days. This maximizes your writing efforts and is appreciated by readers who want to stop by your blog for a quick look, but don't want to wade through a long treatise

2. Write the above-mentioned essay(s), and then use the prescheduling feature on your blog to post ahead for the week

To demonstrate, look at my post above, and notice how this essay could easily have been split into two blog posts. Because I write my blogs in a Word file ahead of time, it's easy for me to see these natural breaks.

Extra tip: If you're drafting in a formatted word processing program, copy and paste into the Edit Html window (in Blogger) rather than the Compose window. You'll avoid formatting issues when your blog publishes.

Do you draft your blog posts in a word processing program and then move them to your blog? What are some other reasons this might be a good idea?

Time for another class

We've been quiet here as our last blog book tours class put together their tours. We've been following them as they travel to host blogs for most of April, and we'll interview a few of them to get feedback about their experiences through the entire process.

Tomorrow starts our new class and we'll be trying out a few new tactics. This course will last only two months, and we'll be following a few authors from the last class as they launch their tours in May. We'll get to experience this whole process from beginning to end, and that gives us much to learn.

We can squeeze a few more authors in who have book releases in the next few months. Join the Blog Book Tours class today and be sure to give us your name and book title. It's starts in crazy earnestness tomorrow with a Blog-A-Day Challenge.

Yes, it's still free. Yes, we're still relentless drill sergeants. Hup-2-3-4. Where's today's blog post, corporal?

Welcome to the YA Book Blog Directory!

The YA Book Blog Directory is a reference site for YA book blogs; The Reader’s Guide To The Young Adult Blogosphere, if you will. There are numerous book blogs, all with unique styles and preferences. This site can be utilized by authors looking to publicize their books, publishers looking for reviewers, book bloggers looking to network and teenage readers or the teen at heart readers.

This site is a work in progress, and its existence would be impossible without the many fantastic book bloggers and authors. Thank you.

Want to join the blogosphere? It's simple– fill out the following form to have your blog added to the directory:

YABBD Submission Form

While the YA Book Blog directory is open to any blogger for a submission, there are a few regulations:

• must be a YA book blog (this is a young adult book directory--large majority of content HAVE to be YA)
• must be a YA book review blog (NO author blogs, NO blogs about writing a YA book, NO blogs from YA characters, etc.)
• the blog must have content (content is not 10 memes to 1 book review).
• the blog must be active.
  

Also note that it may take three to four weeks or more for your blog to be added to the directory. I have a long list of other obligations and currently YABBD is at the bottom.... sorry for the inconvenience. For Young Adult Book Blog Directory tips, check out the #YABBD hashtag on Twitter.