It’s Blog Tour Time

Pat posted on Monday about patience, about the time between stages in the publishing process. I’m on the homestretch with my debut, PARCHED. Under two months to go until release day and, yep, it’s all about patience.

… and promotion

Right now, that means I’m working on my blog tour. While the brick and mortar tour isn’t realistic for most authors today, we can still travel the country, and even the world, virtually.

What is a blog tour, you ask?

Well, a blog tour is a series of interviews, author guest posts, photo blogs, video blogs, reviews and special features where an author hops from one book blogging website to another in the weeks around her release.

There are a few ways you can do this:

1) Let your publicist arrange the whole thing.
2) Contract one of the many children’s and YA book blogs who offer the service for a fee to arrange and host your blog tour for you.
3) Do it all yourself.

Any guesses as to which option I chose?
Yep. Number 3.

The great thing about setting it up all by myself is that I get to choose the sites I think will best suit my story. I get to meet lots of enthusiastic kidlit folks and reach a wider audience than I would otherwise.

So, since nobody really told me how to do this, or what a blog tour should look like, I made up my own rules. They look something like this:

1) Find awesome bloggers who love middle grade lit. Send them an email. If they are too busy, don’t take it personally. If they are interested, awesome.
2) Don’t worry if the dates get a little scattered. Getting that many people’s schedules to line up perfectly is crazy-making (and, seriously, who is counting?)
3) Pick an end point and stop there. Remember, all those posts you line up are like homework assignments –fun and interesting assignments—but work all the same. Don’t sign yourself up for more than you can handle.

So that’s my blog tour plan. I lined up 3 weeks (give or take) of great blogs to visit around my June 4 release day. I think it’s going to be fun. Check back in a couple of months and I’ll post the full schedule. For now though, I have to get going … I have some interview questions to answer.

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Melanie Crowder graduated in 2011 with an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is the author of the forthcoming middle grade novel, PARCHED (Harcourt Children’s Books, 2013). A West Coast girl at heart, Melanie now lives and writes in the beautiful (if dry) state of Colorado.

Visit her online at melaniecrowder.net.

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