Several weeks before the release date, I used SignUpGenius to create a form where people could sign up to host my new book on their blog on certain dates. I love that site – it makes everything so convenient, and keeps track of all the information in a nice organized format! If you haven’t used it, I highly recommend checking it out. (Best of all, it’s free!)

I used Rafflecopter to set up my giveaway. In case you’re not familiar with how that works, it’s another great free site! It creates a form that can be embedded in or linked to from a blog or website, and the same form can be placed on multiple sites. People can enter the drawing for the giveaway – in this case, to win an Amazon gift card and a digital copy of my first book in the series, The Collar and the Cavvarach – through a number of means. I set it up so that those included retweeting a tweet about the giveaway, following me on Twitter, liking my author Facebook page, etc.

I set up the blog tour to last about six and a half weeks, which in retrospect was too long. At least, it was too long for me, what with my day job and other things going on in life. I just didn’t have the energy to keep up with everybody’s blog posts toward the end! For each day, I gave bloggers several options for different types of posts: author interview, excerpt, review, basic premade post, or “other” (with a place for them to fill in their suggestions). That meant that most days, four or five different people were featuring my book on their blog at once. Which was great for exposure, but it got to be a lot for me to keep up with in terms of sharing the links on my social media and visiting each one. And I think my Facebook friends got tired of me crowing over all the places The Gladiator and the Guard was being talked about every day!

How did I get bloggers to sign up? Well, I posted in four or five different author groups that I’m part of on Facebook, asking people to click on the link to sign up to host my book. Then I went through my records in my author email account and also on this blog, and made a list of every author who I had ever hosted or whose books I had helped to promote in any way. I typed up a form email describing my new book, explaining about the blog tour, and asking if they’d be willing to help. But I sent it out to one person at a time, personalizing each email by addressing them by name and sometimes making additional comments based on how well I know them or what interactions we’d had in the past. And for each participant, I offered to include one of their social media links in the Rafflecopter (so that following them on Twitter, for example, was one way for people to enter the drawing).

Although I included the link to the SignUpGenius form in my email and asked people to put their info there, it was amazing how many people did not click on it but instead just emailed me back to say that yes, they could help. With some, it took a few emails back and forth before they understood that SignUpGenius was the place to let me know what kind of post they wanted to do on what day. A few never did fill it out, so I just filled it out for them. (Besides keeping all the information in one place, the advantage to having it on SignUpGenius is that the system will automatically email participants a reminder about what they signed up for a couple of days beforehand.)

Responses came in thick and fast, several per day for the next couple of weeks before eventually fading off to a trickle. I didn’t want to lose track of who I had already communicated with about what, so I created an Excel spreadsheet with columns for the blogger’s name, their response (if they were willing to help or not), what I did in reply (e.g. sent them a review copy of the book if they requested it), what I still needed to do (e.g. send them the links for where to post their reviews, once the book was live). Unfortunately, SignUpGenius does not allow people to leave links anywhere on their form, so authors had to email me separately to tell me their Twitter handle or Facebook page to include in the Rafflecopter. So, I made another column in my spreadsheet to keep track of that information and whether or not I had added their link yet. Then I made a final column to fill in later, to indicate when I had sent all materials they had requested for their blog.

Many busy bloggers requested the premade post. I posted it on my own blog too; you can see it here. It included basic info about the first book in the series, plus the covers of both books. I also included The Gladiator and the Guard‘s back cover blurb, buy links, my own social media links, and a brief author bio and author pic (though I didn’t include those last two on my own blog, since my readers already know me and that info is available elsewhere on my blog). Of course the Rafflecopter giveaway was on there as well. I offered to send all this to bloggers in html, so that they wouldn’t have to format everything and put in all the pictures separately. Almost everyone enthusiastically took me up on the html offer, with only two or three people asking for the text and pictures separately so they could set it up themselves. I always prefer html when I’m hosting someone else’s post on my blog. It’s so much quicker and easier!

I know from my own experience in hosting others’ blog tours that I don’t always remember exactly what I’ve signed up to do, especially when I sign up far ahead of time. It helps when the author emails everyone a list of who is doing what kinds of posts on what dates, or when she sends me a specific email with the exact info I need. When she sends one email with fifteen attachments to everyone who signed up, saying, “Download and use the ones that apply to you,” it’s a lot more confusing. (But SignUpGenius makes it easier for everyone to check exactly what they signed up for.) Anyway, I sent out separate emails to people, giving them exactly (and only) the materials they had requested, which I think helped to avoid confusion and frustration. It did take me a little longer that way, but I’m glad I did.

As a blogger myself, I know that many bloggers host lots of authors’ books and help with various blog tours. When I emailed people about the event, I made sure to mention the name of my book each time. After all, I often get confused when someone sends me an email that just says something like, “Please add a note to the bottom of your post to tell readers my book will be free at the time,” with no mention of what their book is or when it’s scheduled to appear on my blog.

I asked every blogger involved if they would please tell me the permalink to their post once they got it set up. Only a small handful did (maybe 10%?) though a few others emailed me the day their post went live to let me know. In most cases, I had to simply search online to find that person’s blog in order to share the link on my social media. If you’re featuring someone, I suggest you let them know exactly where and when! You want them to help drive more traffic to your site, right? And it’s easy to set up a post ahead of time, at least on Blogger. (I can’t speak for WordPress, but I know people who do it there too, so I don’t think it can be too hard.) Just use the “schedule” button at the right to choose a date, and click on “permalink” to see the exact link to that exact post. (I’m editing this to add: someone who blogs on WordPress just told me it’s easy there too. You can do it through the calendar icon to the right of the “publish” button.)

When the book was live, I emailed everyone who had agreed to review it and gave them the links to several places to leave reviews: Amazon, Goodreads, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, Kobo. By the next day, there were 10 reviews up on Amazon, but only a few in any of the other places (though someone did point out that you can’t leave a review on Smashwords if you haven’t actually obtained the book from there). More reviews trickled in over the next few days and weeks from people who couldn’t quite make the deadline. I found I didn’t mind too much about the delay. I’m grateful for reviews any time I receive them! But I do wish more people had left reviews in more of the places I’d asked them to.

I have no way of knowing how many people visited each blog when my books were featured there. However, I definitely noticed that I had more entries in the giveaway when the title of the person’s blog post mentioned the giveaway. It makes sense. Not everyone cares to read every blog post, even by a blogger they like. But if they know beforehand that they could win something – well, who doesn’t like free stuff?

Each day, I made sure to visit each of the blogs that was hosting The Gladiator and the Guard that day and leave a comment thanking the blogger. I’ve always been told that’s good etiquette, and people seemed to appreciate it. I admit that I did get a little behind, especially toward the end of the blog tour when things got busier in my non-writing life, but I caught up on all of them eventually. I also made sure to share the links on my social media every day (though I didn’t do that for the ones who just posted the premade post, since I figure none of my friends wants to read the same description day after day). Each time, I tried to say something unique and interesting about it, such as a hint of what the excerpt was about, or a question or two from the interview, to get people curious and make them want to click on the link. I always tried to tag the blogger when I did so, so that their friends would see it too. I was surprised at how many of the bloggers did not say anything on their social media when the posts went live on their blogs. I’ve found that doing so is the best way to drive traffic to my blog. (Well, that and having other people share the links too.)

Anyway, here are a few of the main points that I took away from the whole blog tour experience. I intend to make sure I apply both the suggestions for authors and the ones for bloggers from now on!

Suggestions for Authors:
If you have a premade post for people to share on their blogs, get it formatted on your own blog first, and then give them the option of receiving it in html format. It saves bloggers time!
Only send each blogger what she really needs. Including lots of attachments that don’t apply to everyone just makes it confusing and makes more work for people who are doing you a favor.
Mention the name of the book being featured each time you communicate with a blogger.
When emailing bloggers individually, mention the date on which they will be featuring your book (at least if they have not sent you the permalink to the post. If they have, they’ve obviously got it scheduled and don’t need a reminder).
Visit each blog that is hosting you when the post is live, and leave a comment to thank the blogger.
When you do, check the box that says you’d like to receive email notifications when anyone else comments (so you’ll know if other people are talking about your book or the post).
Share about each blog stop on your social media to help direct more traffic there.
When you do, tag the bloggers involved.


Suggestions for Bloggers:
Even if an author sends you a pre-formated post in HTML, look through it after you paste it into your blog. It might still need minor adjustments to look right. (Yes, I speak from unfortunate experience.)
If you’re hosting a giveaway, mention it in the title of the post. (e.g. “The Gladiator and the Guard: an Exciting new Adventure Story with a Giveaway!”)
If you’re hosting a giveaway, say so when you share about your blog on social media.
If you share on social media about an author you’re featuring, tag her so she can easily share your post, retweet your tweet, etc. Plus, then her friends and followers will see it too.
Set up the post as soon as you have the necessary materials and schedule it for the day you agreed to post it, so you can’t forget closer to the time. 🙂 (I had several bloggers who forgot!) 
Then send the author the permalink right away. Why wait till the day it goes live?
If you agreed to review the book, post your review in all the places the author asked you to. If for some reason you can’t, or if you can’t do it by the agreed-upon date, email her and let her know so she doesn’t think you just can’t be bothered.

Authors and bloggers, do you have any suggestions of your own to add to these? I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

Strong, compelling writing comes down to the right words, in the right order. Sounds easy, but as all writers know, it is anything BUT. So how do we create this storytelling magic? How can we weave description in such a way that the fictional landscape becomes authentic and real—a mirror of the reader’s world in all the ways that count most?

 Well, there’s some good news on that front. Two new books have released this week that may change the description game for writers. The Urban Setting Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to City Spaces and The Rural Setting Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Personal and Natural Spaces look at the sights, smells, tastes, textures, and sounds a character might experience within 225 different contemporary settings. And this is only the start of what these books offer writers.

 In fact, swing by and check out this hidden entry from the Urban Setting Thesaurus: Police Car.
 
And there’s one more thing you might want to know more about….

Becca and Angela, authors of The Emotion Thesaurus, are celebrating their double release with a fun event going on from June 13-20th called ROCK THE VAULT.

At the heart of Writers Helping Writers is a tremendous vault, and these two ladies have been hoarding prizes of epic writerly proportions.

Ready to do your part? Stop by Writers Helping Writers to find out more!  

Click here to see a list of sites where you can promote free books at no cost. 
Click here to see a list of sites where you can promote free books for a fee.
Click here to see a list of sites where you can promote discounted books at no cost.

In some cases, as you can see, I’ve made notes about certain useful-to-know details, such as the fact that some sites don’t actually require the books to be exactly 99 cents. If you have additional information about any of these sites, feel free to share it in the comments. It would also be great to hear if you have tried any of them, and how they have worked for you.

Please let me know if you find any broken links or outdated info, or if you know of any paid promo sites for free books that I have not listed. I will try to maintain this list and keep it as thorough and accurate as possible!

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*Want to save some time? Let me submit your 99 cent book to ALL of the highlighted sites for you. This service will only cost you about as much as a cup of coffee! Click here to sign up or find out how it works.

In some cases, as you can see, I’ve made notes about certain useful-to-know details. If you have additional information about any of these sites, feel free to share it in the comments. It would also be great to hear if you have tried any of them, and how they have worked for you.

Please let me know if you find any broken links or outdated info, or if you know of any paid promo sites for free books that I have not listed. I will try to maintain this list and keep it as thorough and accurate as possible!

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*Want to save some time? Let me submit your free book to ALL of the highlighted sites for you. This service will only cost you about as much as a cup of coffee! Click here to sign up or find out how it works.

Every once in a while, something comes along that changes things for the better.

And in the world of writers, this is especially welcoming, because we all know just how much sweat, courage and persistence it takes to write a book and then release it into the world. Today I’m pointing you toward a new website which I hope will help writers brainstorm stronger characters, craft deeper, more compelling plots, and teach us how to be more effective with our description so we draw readers in. One Stop For Writers is a collaboration between Becca Puglisi and Angela Ackerman, authors of The Emotion Thesaurus, and Lee Powell, creator of Scrivener for Windows. This powerhouse online library is filled with one-of-a-kind descriptive thesaurus collections, tools, tutorials and much more, all geared to provide the resources you need to strengthen your prose and write more efficiently.

Want to check One Stop For Writers out?

Hop on over to Writers Helping Writers for their Launch Week festivities (October 7-14th)! If you know Angela, Lee and Becca already, you probably can guess there will be some great prizes, and probably a bit of paying-it-forward too.

I first heard about Books Butterfly a couple months ago on Readers in the Know (an excellent site for authors; it has a handy chart showing dozens of different book promotion sites and what they offer).  I was looking for new places to promote my books, and I hadn’t heard of Books Butterfly before.  I searched online and found very little about it apart from their own website and one conversation on Kboards.  But the little I heard was good, so I decided to give it a try.

Books Butterfly offers several different packages for authors.  They are unique in that they guarantee a certain number of downloads, depending on which package you buy.  I decided to try the “pure gold” package, shown at right.  It cost $50, and naturally I was worried that it wouldn’t end up being worth it.  After all, that’s a lot of money to pay just to get a thousand people to download a free copy of my book!  Books Butterfly promises that if you don’t end up getting that many downloads, they will refund a percentage of your money based on the percentage of the promised downloads you didn’t get.  So from that perspective, I was confident I would get what I was paying for.  But what I was really wondering was whether all those free downloads and the increased exposure would lead to enough actual sales to make it worth the expense.

Anyway, I decided to go for it.  I filled out the form on their site and received an email response less than an hour later.  I’ve been quite pleased with Books Butterfly’s customer service and correspondence, so I’m going to include some of the text from our emails back and forth for you to see.  The guy who I corresponded with was Abhishek Singh.

Hi Annie

thanks for writing in.

A) Your book meets our acceptance criteria. We’ll be glad to run it. It looks lovely and the reviews are among the strongest I’ve seen in Fantasy.

B) We’ve sent you an invoice. It’s Pure Gold Slot. $50 for 1000+ Free Book Downloads. Downloads will be on Date of Promotion and Next Day.

We estimate free book downloads range to be: 800 to 1,500.

C) Please see terms below.

D) Slot will not be run until invoice is paid. 

E) For Free Books, please let us know if the book is permanent free or was permanent free in the past.

F) There is a prorated refund. Refund is required in less than 5% of free book promotion slots. Please see terms below. 

G) Refund does not apply if you are running promotions with other sites. We can only guarantee our own performance – we cannot and do not guarantee results for you if you are running with multiple sites.

We still guarantee 1000+ downloads. However, we cannot and do not guarantee performance of other sites.

******* Terms & Clarifications

Please read the following to get a clear understanding of what happens when we run your book.

*Terms & Details

1) We’ll run your book 2 days in a row.

Dates would be: May 22nd, 23rd.
You’ll get additional sales on 3 days.

Dates of Promotion: 22nd, 23rd.
Date after Promotion: 24th.

IN this case Sales will be 40-50% on Day 1, 40-50% on Day 2, 10% on Day 3.

3) There is a prorated refund for all fixed price slots.

Example: If you buy a Platinum 100 Slot ($100 for 100+ Sales) and get only 75 sales, we’ll refund $25.

Example: If you buy a Pure Platinum Slot ($100 for 2,000+ Downloads) and get only 1,500 free book downloads, we’ll refund $25.

4) Refund does not apply if you misrepresent your book’s sales history. In addition, there is no refund if you don’t disclose a free book is a permanent free book before slot is run. In addition, there is no refund if you don’t disclose that a paid book has been free, or at a cheaper price, in the last 12 months before date of promotion.

5) Refund does not apply if you are running with multiple promotion sites. We can only guarantee our own performance, not that of other sites.

6) We do not track sales or downloads. Free book downloads can’t be tracked. For sales we don’t use Amazon Associate tag so there is no way to track sales. You’ll have to check your KDP Stats. You can also ask us for expected range of downloads and purchase a book promotion slot based on that.

7) Please also read the Terms of Service included in the Invoice and on the Website. Using our service for book promotions constitutes acceptance of terms.

8) For purposes of the Prorated Refund, average sales during the last stretch when you were running no promotions is counted as the baseline. You can choose a 7 day stretch or a month stretch. However, it cannot be a stretch during which you ran a big promotion like Bookbub or ENT. It must be a normal stretch with no promotions. It is your responsibility to let us know if your book gets big sales spikes of 50-100 sales periodically because your mother’s cousin tweeted it or your dog instagramm’ed it.

9) Thanks for getting so far. 98% of authors are great. Unfortunately, there are a small 2% who try to game the system, and try to get refunds illegally. Hence the terms listed above. If you’re in the good 98% of authors, we’ll do whatever it takes to make you have a great promotion with results backed up with a prorated refund.

As you can see, some of what they said was redundant (that was the case on their website as well), but it all made sense.  I received the invoice separately and paid it, then replied and said that I understood and agreed to their terms.  After a couple more emails back and forth clarifying some of the details, I thought of something else and sent Abhishek this note:

I thought of two more details that might be useful to know for this promotion.  My book, Prince of Malorn, is listed as Book III in the series, but the books can be read in any order, and each one can stand on its own.  If there’s a way you can mention that in the promotion, it might encourage more people to buy it.  Also, another book in the series (Annals of Alasia: The Collected Interviews) is permafree.  It has been for a few months now, so I know it’s not eligible for one of your regular promotions.  But another author mentioned on Kboards that you once listed their permafree novel along with a different one in the same series that they had paid to promote, and it led to increased sales of the other one.  I’m not sure if you would want to consider doing something like that in this case, and I understand if not, but I thought I’d mention it just in case.  The link to the permafree one (for Amazon’s stores in any country) is  http://smarturl.it/AlasiaInterviews.

I was quite pleased when Abhishek wrote back and said:

1) It’s still eligible for our regular promotions. Peramfrees are fine. There’s no time restriction. However, let me just run it for you for free. It’s a novella so it might get just 200-500 downloads.

Wow, they would run it for free along with the other one!  If that isn’t great service, what is?!

Well, I had my promotion this past weekend.  Prince of Malorn was free from Friday to Sunday, with The Collected Interviews of course being permafree.  Here are my results, including the number of downloads I got on other books.  (All are in the same series except The Collar and the Cavvarach.)

Sadly, my usual numbers (when I’m not doing any kind of special promotion) are usually just one or two sales or borrows a day from all my books put together.  🙁  So this shows you there was definitely a difference!  

I was surprised and puzzled about a couple of things.  The first was that I actually got some paid sales on my permafree book!  How did that work?  But I realized that it’s actually only free in Amazon’s US, Canada, and Netherlands stores (and possibly the UK – I couldn’t get pricing info there to show up for me).  So, people must have bought it from other countries, which had never happened before with that book.  The second surprising thing was that somehow there were some free downloads of Prince of Malorn even after the 24th, and I know I set it to go back up to the normal price ($3.99) on the 25th.  Probably it had something to do with the fact that I live in Taiwan, and I’m not sure what timezone my KDP report uses, or whether it depends on the timezone customers are in.

Anyway, as you can see, I did not get a thousand downloads of PofM, but I did get over a thousand on the two free books put together.  Since the Books Butterfly folks were running TCI for me for free, it would have seemed ungrateful not to include that in the total number and instead ask for some of my money back.

Deciding not to claim any money back, I emailed Abhishek to share my results and thank him.  Here’s his reply:

Annie, really glad we could get you those downloads.

I was a bit aggressive with your book because the reviews were brilliant. Normally I would only have done Pure Silver ($25 for 500+ downloads). So really glad to see total downloads were 1,142. Thank you for being gracious and including the downloads of the free novella.

And also happy to hear you got sales of the other books in the series and some borrows.

My only regret is that I did not make much profit from this, but I did get lots of downloads, and hopefully they will eventually result in reviews and more paid sales of my other books, especially the ones in that series.  So far I have been seeing residual effects in terms of slightly-higher-than-usual sales and borrows numbers, so that’s been nice.  And I did make about $30 on the three days of the promotion, with about another $20 since then, so I’m coming out even.

Will I use Books Butterfly again?  Honestly, I don’t think so.  It was a pretty good experience, but by comparison, the last time I promoted a free book (In the Enemy’s Service) with Ereader News Today, it only cost me $20 and I got 1,849 free downloads and 18 paid ones in the first two days of my promotion.  But I’m not sorry I tried Books Butterfly this time.  It was worth finding out how it would go, and honestly, fantasy never sells as well as certain other genres.  If you’ve written a romance or a mystery, it may do far better with them than my books did.

Have you tried Books Butterfly?  Feel free to tell us about it in the comments.  I would love to hear how your experience compares!