Blog Tours: Trick or Treat?

Some readers hate blog tours and who can blame them? If all you get is a sales pitch, you might as well nail your coffin now. I'll even throw in some old Halloween candy (circa 1989).

Here's my reader confession: I won't follow a blog tour that only brags about the book. As a reader, I want to be entertained, or at the very least informed. 

I am not big on excerpts either. Some of my hosts for this blog tour have asked for excerpts and I oblige with very short ones. Maybe I'm the exception, but very few excerpts have ever gotten me excited about a book. I count on the blurb to lure me in. If it succeeds I will hunt for the book myself and seek out my own answers. 

This is my second ever blog tour and I learned a lot this go round. A blog tour (for me anyway) is all about name recognition. Secondly, it's about the book. 

With that in mind, I strove to choose blog hosts who had a diverse readership on their blogs. I wanted to find new readers, people who didn't know me before I stepped onto that platform.

But that added a new parameter in how I wrote my posts. I had to write "universal" topics that new readers could follow without knowing my history, but familiar themes (or insider jokes) that old followers would appreciate. 

Interviews were tricky too. A regular old interview is fine for people who don't know you, but how do you spice it up for people who know you too well? 

That's why some interviews were conducted with "snitches", and some have off the wall questions (or answers). One of the big favorites so far was Jackie Burris's idea of my life through pictures. I honestly didn't think my photos would be interesting to people, but it got a load of comments.

I really struggled with interviews because they can be very boring, but the new twists on this year's interviews added a lot of warmth and whimsy. 

Perhaps my biggest problem on this blog tour was time. In the beginning, I was afraid no one would want me on their blog. (Note big puppy dog eyes.)

The offers trickled in and then all of a sudden I was bombarded. I had to started declining. I think that mortified me more than not having any offers at all because I hated to let people down. 

I could have accepted them all and wrote something. But I really wanted every post to stand up on its own and not be a slapdash through tourville. So I declined and hope those people will ask me again later on down the road.

Friday, the blog tour gets underway again and my next stop will be my one and only quiz. Be sure to check back!

In the meantime, if you missed any of my other posts, check out the Blog Tour Page to see where I've been.

Tell me, guys. What do you think of the tour so far? Don't be afraid to tell me if anything sucked. Really. Any suggestions on how to improve it would be greatly appreciated. Is there anything I could have done better? Is there anything you expected and didn't see?

I think there was one thing that failed, but I'll reveal that at the wrap up report after the tour.