The blog tour has been long and hard.
Almost 4 weeks in total. The first week I had to go down to Ahoskie
North Carolina to take care of my mother. It was tricky checking into
the blogs in the mornings and keeping up with those who commented while I was down there, but I got it done.
Once I got back to New York it was business as usual. I got
back into my daily routine and made managing my blog tour one of
them.
I didn't understand the value of a blog
book tour until the end, until now. Before the tour started I Googled
the title of the book and my name and what I got was maybe a handful
of returns on my search. Six if I was lucky. My blog didn't even
register. That was before the tour. Now I did the same search and I
have web pages filled with returns. I'm on virtual book shelves,
blogs the works. And every blog has a different slant or feel or
approach. I'm uniquely echoed all around the Internet.
Then I learned about the Law of Three.
If your book is mentioned in more than three places on the Internet,
people are more apt to purchase it. If the Law of Three applies,
Cover of Darkness is well on its way. I am happy about this tour. It
has benefits that I never even thought of. Yeah, okay, the
blogosphere is noisy with chatter from my book, but then my Facebook pages and
Twitter accounts began to blow up also. I'm having likes and followers
every day. The name of my book is reaching the masses.
Then I come to my blog, merely by
accident, and noticed that even here, the numbers of my members has
risen drastically, with the pageviews busting through the roof. And
it dawned on me that I didn't blog in months. I was so busy with the
publication of my book and the blog tour and marketing the book that
I stop communicating with everyone. I've gone dark.
I need to keep up more. I need to speak
out and do more. I've done a great deal, that's for certain, but I
need to do more. Right now, I'm engaged in what I really love.
Writing. I've almost finished with the 7th book in the
Darkness series. I have book two to the editor and we're going over
it with a fine toothed comb. We're doing the best work we've ever
done for the second book. I'm also very excited to be working on book two and
I'm happy to say the team, the proofreader, the cover designer, the formatter and others should have it all wrapped up by the end of
the year. That would be great.
I also want to give Cover of Darkness
some lead time. I want to market it to the best of my ability and
marketing is probably the left leg if writing is the right. It is
true that writing is what I love and if it was a perfect world,
writing would be all that I would do, but it's not, and marketing is
a must if you want your book to be noticed, and read. That's my
burden, or job now, and that's to publicize the book.
Another thing is to stay in touch,
which is what I've been failing at miserably. I've been so into doing
the marketing thing and the Facebook thing and the Twitter thing that
I've lost sight of the blog thing. So here I am, trying to catch everyone up
with what I've been doing this past month, which has largely been the
blog tour and several other matters to get the word out on the book.
One thing that I did, which was my plan
just before the completion of the blog tour, was to put out another
press release for the book. I chose to use a different agency this
time, a cheaper one, whose ad stated, why pay hundreds of dollars
when you can pay just about $200.00. So, maybe against my better
judgment, I chose Lightning Release to do the job. It's been days
since I paid them, and I have yet to see anything that they have
done. I'm going to stay patient though. I know that there are a lot
of rip-off artists in the self-publishing world today. Myriads, and
myriad more are popping up daily. I've been extremely lucky so far.
This might be my first mistake.
I've been making other moves too, but
I'm not going to bore you with them all in this one post. I'll be
more in touch as the days wear on. Right now, I'm going to take a
break, wind down, and coast a few days. Then complete the 7th
novel and go back a re-edit the 3rd.
By Friday, the blog tour will be over
and I'll have far more time to do other stuff. And I hope to keep in
touch through my blog.
Thanks for reading.
Gregory
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