Marketing Part IV—The Blog Tour

As promised, I am officially kicking off the Find Your Magic, Farworld Blog tour. Since I haven’t done this before, I am going to kind of make it up as I go. It’s pretty simple, so that shouldn’t be too hard. But if any of you more experienced bloggers think of a better way to do it, or catch something I missed, let me know. Here’s the deal:

My publisher, Shadow Mountain, is providing me with 400 advanced reader copies of the first book in the Farworld series, Farworld—Water. The books will be used for a blog tour running from July 1 to August 31. (The book should hit the shelves the first week of September. It appears the official release date is September 5th.) I will send the first 200 bloggers who sign up to take part in the tour an ARC, and will also drop ship a second copy for them as part of any type of contest they would like to run.

What: Farworld Blog Tour
When: The tour will run through the months of July and August. Signup will begin Friday, April 11th. (But you can get in early. See below.)

Here’s what you do:

1) Send an e-mail to me at scott at jscottsavage dot com any time after 7:00 am MST Friday, April 11th telling me the name and URL of your blog, the mailing address where you’d like the book sent, and any preference you have as to when you want to post your review. I’d kind of like to spread out the reviews over the two months prior to the release, but I don’t want to tie anyone to a specific date. Let’s just make it easy and say first half of July, second half of July, first half of August, or second half of August.

2) Agree to run a review of the book and do a Q&A with me on your blog during the tour. You don’t need to send me your questions now, since you may come up with different questions once you’ve read the book. (I’d imagine something like, “If you can get this trash published, doesn’t that give hope for everyone?”) Okay, I hope that’s not really the first question that comes to mind, but it would be great if sites asked questions that are most tailored to their audience so they aren’t all the same.

3) When the time comes to do the review and the Q&A, run any type of contest you’d like. When you have a winner, send me their address and I’ll send them their book. On both the book I send you and the one I send the winners, let me know if you’d like them signed and personalized in any way.

Here’s what I do:

1) I will provide Shadow Mountain with the list of blogger addresses. As soon as the ARCs come out they will be mailed to you.

2) I will post here on the site when the tour is full, and when the ARCs are sent out. If you don’t get your book within a week or so of the mailing, let me know and I’ll check on your copy.

3) As soon as I get your questions, I’ll send back my answers.

4) If we get too many people signing up for one part of the tour, I’ll ask for volunteers to change to another part of the tour.

Random Notes:

G sharp, E flat, D.

Sorry.

The only real rules I can think of are that you must be using a blog that is fairly active. No fair using sites that haven’t been updated since 1999, cool as that year was. If you have two blogs that have different audiences, I think I’d be okay with you posting and running contests on both of them, but I’d only send you one review copy. Also, if you are part of a blog that you share with other people, it will be first come first serve. Only one review and contest copy per blog.

Oh, this might be kind of a pain, but since the initial release will only be in the US, I’m going to limit the tour to US and Canadian addresses only. I promise to do another tour in other countries when foreign rights are sold.

If you don't have a blog, not to worry. I'll link to all the blogs on the tour, so you'll have 200 chancea to win one. And I might be able to snag a couple of extra copies to give away here too.

Finally, thanks everyone. I really appreciate all of you who have given me such great feedback and support. It’s great to have good people helping you, and I hope I can return the favor. But in all seriousness, review the book honestly. I’d much rather have someone say they didn’t like this or that so I can try to improve with the next book in the series. But, hey, if you really do think I’m the next JK Rowling, say what you have to.