Author Groups, Blog Tours, and Twitter

Author Groups

So I am definitely more of a lone wolf when it comes to writing. I like to do things my own way, I like to edit my own work, and, for the most part, I like to use only my own ideas. I’ve tried to work with people before, and it’s never quite panned out the way that I wanted it to. However, I think getting a second set of eyes to read through what I’ve written is probably a good idea. So I’m thinking about starting to look for writing groups to join, and/or beta readers.

I was recently approached by Boulder County Indie Authors, which is a newish small indie author group mostly focused on sales. They do some local events in Boulder, and I’m honestly pretty excited to be a part of it. Hopefully this will help me reach more readers and sell more books.

Blog Tours

I recently found out about this thing called “book blog tours”. So there are a whole ton of book review blogs out there, and blog tours are basically virtual tours that “stop” at a list of those blogs. At each stop, the blogger posts something about your book (usually a review or an interview or a blurb).

I’m looking into two places right now: Silver Dagger Book Tours because I can decide how much I pay them based on the sucess of the tour, and YA Bound Book Tours because they seem a bit more reputable and appear to stop at blogs more centered around reveiws.

Twitter

I hate twitter.

But not for any other reason than that it’s a social media website. I actually think it’s a pretty good tool for marketing, exposure, and networking if you’re an author. I would happily lurk away if I hadn’t joined it specifically to post things to try to draw attention to myself (and by extension my book). It just stresses me out. Because it’s a social media website. Which is why I’ve been avoiding it for an age and a half (I know my blog posts get tweeted, but that’s cheating, because I can just do that through WordPress and I don’t actually have to log in to my account).

So from this day forward I’m going to try to force myself to be more active on Twitter. For starters, I’m going to make it my goal to tweet or retweet at least ONE thing a day.