Guest Post: Leah Petersen on Hiring a Blog Tour Manager

Don’t Be Scared, They’re Here To Help You, Just Hold Still
by Leah Petersen

To celebrate the release of my debut novel, FIGHTING GRAVITY (Amazon | B&N | Powell’s | Dragon Moon Press), for which she was the editor, Gabrielle invited me to guest post on her blog, so here I am! And she’s going to let me talk today about an aspect of marketing that just about drove me crazy with anxiety: the blog tour.

You gotta do it, everyone does, and it’s essentially free if you organize it yourself. Well, that’s where I was freaking out, ’cause I am NOT an organizer. So what’s a girl to do?

Hire someone else to do it.

I’d looked around at different marketing services, and mostly they were out of my price range, or I just didn’t trust that they were going to be worth my money. This is where all that author-networking came in handy.

I’d been following Roni Loren for a while, and had a few pleasant chit-chats and exchanges with her. She’s a great writer and has done a fabulous job building a following and marketing herself. So when I tweeted about how stressed out I was over the idea of organizing a blog tour, and she tweeted back that she’d hired a company to do it, I jumped right on that.

They were very affordable and, more important than that, she’d been very happy with the whole experience. That was what I needed to know.

And she was right. I hired Goddess Fish Promotions to organize my blog tour and I’ve been very pleased.

They’ve made it easy for me. They designed marketing banners for the tour, booked up every stop of the tour, they actually got me a couple of extra spots because they were a good fit, or to make sure there was no hole in the schedule where one blog was having technical difficulties.

As for these stops on the tour, the organized and efficient manner they’ve set it up and communicated with me has been excellent. They always have the exact details of what I need to provide for that day, either an interview or a guest post, along with a link to the blog so I can check it out before I write to that audience. They organized ahead of time my media kit, containing all the items each blogger would need in the way of a bio, photo, links, excerpt, etc. so that I don’t have to try to remember who got what, or who wanted more or less than what the last guy did.

I’ll admit, there’s still a TON of content I have to provide. Almost every blogger has opted for me to provide all the content for the stop, rather than to review the book themselves. As a blogger, I understand that completely and I’m not complaining. It just makes it that much more of a load off of my mind that, buried under all this content I need to provide, I’m not being asked to manage all the rest of it too.

It’s been a great experience and more than worth the very reasonable price.

So I’ve been there, frustrated and uncertain and in desperate need of help but not sure who to trust. Well, trust your fellow authors. Ask around, get recommendations. Ask the marketing company for references and talk to them.

There are people who can help you, who can make your marketing easier and more effective. Just ask your friendly fellow authors who’ve already been there. They won’t steer you wrong.

Goddess Fish: goddessfishpromotions.blogspot.com

Roni Loren: www.roniloren.com

—
Leah Petersen lives in North Carolina. She does the day-job, wife, and mother thing, much like everyone else. She prides herself on being able to hold a book with her feet so she can knit while reading. She’s still working on knitting while writing. Her first novel, Fighting Gravity, is available now from Dragon Moon Press.