Today I do something I've never done before. I launch a ten-stop blog tour for my new middle-grade novel, Zero Tolerance. For the first time in my career, I decided to work with a publicist to promote one of my books and hired the truly fabulous Blue Slip Media. Barbara
Fisch and Sarah Shealy have been absolutely terrific to work with. They
are enormously knowledgeable about the the world of children's books and
enormously supportive of authors.
For starters, they made me a wonderful discussion guide put together by an experienced curriculum specialist to go with the book.
Then they
set up the ten-stop blog tour for me, where every day for ten days
I'll be hosted by a different blog. Some are posting a review of the book,
some sent me interview questions, some asked me to submit guest posts. The tour launches today on the site Read Now, Sleep Later. I
visited the site this morning and was thrilled to find that Alethea, the
host blogger, made up apple nacho recipes paired with each character in
the book: the Sweet Sierra, the Principal Besser, the Gerald Shepard,
Esquire - brilliant! There is also a giveaway of the book today on the School Library Journal website as a "teen giveaway."
Will any of this end up making a difference to sales? It's hard to know. Even if this book sells better than my others, it will be hard to say that the reason is because of my extra promotional efforts or because the book is simply a more alluring read given its more controversial and timely subject matter.
But for now, I have to say that the blog tour is tons of fun, and a lot more fun than what I've heard real life book tours are like, where you fly from city to city, staying lonely in a hotel, going to bookstore appearances where nobody comes. Here I just spent an enjoyable weekend at home in my nightgown writing blog posts ( I adore writing blog posts) and getting to explore the lovely sites that are hosting me. I'm building relationships with these bloggers, children's book lovers all. And I get to have exceedingly wonderful APPLE RECIPES for my book!
What's not to like about this, I ask?
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> going to bookstore appearances where
ReplyDelete> nobody comes
That won't happen in Boulder! Ben and I finished "Zero Tolerance" just today, and we are excited about your appearance at the Boulder Book Store at 6:30 PM on Thursday, September 19. Our dog chewed the cover off of our copy, so we hope to get a new, autographed, copy.
Bookstore appearances are 100 percent different when you have dear wonderful friends who can come than in a faraway city full of strangers. I'm grateful to your dog for boosting my sales!
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