​THE BOOK BLOG FAERIE CAME!

   
 
A lot of writer and SP blogs have been crowing about a “book blog tour.” I am familiar with “satellite media tours” which are the ways that anyone can get their message out to the big TV & Radio stations on a station-by-station basis.  This herculean effort spreads the news as far and as wide as that morning’s news director in every station, in every one of the 225 (or so) television/media markets in the U.S., thinks is worthy of their station’s efforts. But it also meant that any car crash, political gaff or "baby falls down the well" story could suddenly preempt this effort and hundreds of thousands of dollars and the sweat of no less than 100 people gets discarded without so much as a “hey sorry ‘bout that,” shrug.
 
In other words, “traditional” PR.
 
But this is 2015, and the internet is a giant high school hallway with all its cliques and anti-cliques talking about what matters most to each one. So how do we as writers even get noticed by the captain of the football team or the D&D geeks… in this virtual “campus quad?” (Which is what it was called ay my alma mater Rim of the World HS.) Never mind that not only is itdifficult to compete to get your book judged by it’s cover, forget that your baby has a great personality, you might still get noticed faster than.. okay I’m jumping from the metaphor train, too cumbersome…
 
BUT – all that’s to say, I’m with the blogs (at least I just joined the team on a trial basis) and signed up with Kenya Cooper-Moore at The Book Nymph PR. For both the aforementioned book blog tour and a Facebook Launch Party.
 
And so far so good. Kenya is very responsive to a newbie like me (despite having a three month old Jensen competing with me for mommy’s attention. She’s the perfect match for my 800 pound (okay, 300 - but I’ve been exercising everyday and no carbs) pound Guerilla ways… I am used to promotion where giant satellite trucks and people in suits talk to other people in suits about things that were made by people in flipflops for people eating Cheetos. (I had done the first 5 Xbox launches when all they were launching was an idea that a thing called an Xbox was going to one day challenge the PlayStation.) So, I’m used to screaming and yelling, a hurricane of emails about logistics and cancelled logistics, and last-minute changes to logistics that were cancelled – where a total of (and You can add it up) over 50 -100 million dollars in man hours, equipment and resources is devoted to the launching of something.
 
But I’m not used to being an army of one. Kenya is what my friends in the military call a force multiplier – and her team will lead me into the murky waters of the cyber-sea…
 
So far, she’s been lining up 20 (that’s the package I bought) bloggers who will either review my book, interview me as author (about the process of writing) and/or spread the word in an intelligent and engaging way to their audiences. She’s also started to promote the FaceBook launch party and inviting guests – we’ve discussed prizes for incentive contests during the party and she coached me how to invite my “peeps” to the party. All of this has one goal – drive everyone to buy my book (or at least tell someone about it).
 
She’s been forwarding to me the interview questions from the various blogs interested in talking to little ol’ me. And we even have a YouTube interview! All of these details will be made available on the homepage of this site when locked down.
 
So… will it work, you ask. (You knew sooner or later, I’d get back to you, yes?) Time will tell.
 
What interests me are these points:

1. The internet lives forever, so each of these items will “force multiply” and     reprinted forever (oops, that also means… Huh! I have to… articulate, yikes!).
2. I can do a lot of these in my own time (which is divided into running to another promotional task and running to the next promotional task). So I have already used the wee hours when people who can say yes to my wild idea aren’t up yet to answer the interview questions… and the answers are a little more honest than they might be, if I had time to be guarded…)
3. Someone else who is better than I at this is doing what they do best. I know how to write, and I know how to critique PR… but that’s it at this point.

 
This last point is probably the most attractive of them all for girls like us – we can stick our book under our pillow when we go to sleep at night, and, while we’re sleeping, the book faerie will come. When we wake the next morning and stick our hand under our pillow, we’ll find that we’ve got… sales! (Thanks for your faith, you knew I’d stick the landing, yes?)
 
Please revisit this after we go through it, and I promise to analyze the experience. But for now… shootI I have to make that phone call! 
 
Until next time!