When It’s Over – Thoughts on My First Blog Tour
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When It’s Over – Thoughts on My First Blog Tour

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Enrai debuted the beginning of this month and I’ve had time for the dust to settle and look at everything that’s happened with fresh eyes.

Enrai’s my second book and so far it’s performance in one month has outstripped its older sibling’s in the year it was out. It didn’t help that it started out on the now defunct Pronoun, and all the issues with moving things around. I tried finding a suitable replacement, but no one (including Draft 2 Digital, and others) worked out correctly. Some distributors rejected my books, at one point, the book never went through, and the publishing platform had no answers for me. I was looking exposure. That was a stressful place to begin with, but when it finally moved to Amazon, people weren’t biting. I didn’t realize how deep the blogsphere went until I went digging. I found several blogs, and had to query them each individually with a (mostly) personalized message. Most got back to me, but some never responded or decided they would pass, no explanation given. I’m already a pretty anxious person by nature, and as someone who was trying to figure out how to turn this into a viable career, that only made things worse for me.

So about halfway through Enrai, I decided I didn’t want any of those problems. I consolidated everything to Amazon, and most of all, I didn’t want to send individual queries. Waiting for responses was always stressful, waiting for the timing to line up, and to I knew I was missing a good portion of bloggers. I’d seen a number of promo sites, but I was skeptical at first.

An online service that’s completely digital, not accredited or anything. What would happen if they took my money and disappeared? (Like one other promo company has seemed to do as I pen this) But the service I was looking for wasn’t too expensive. If I was screwed, I could take it up with Paypal. So after some conversations with some other writers about their promo experiences,  I conjured up a little faith, something difficult for a down to the bones pessimist and reached out.

And it was better than I ever dreamed.

Many reviews, and even if blogs didn’t review, they featured my work so that people could see it. I was blown the fuck away. I think I’m a lifer now. Anything I put up for sale will have to go through a promo site. I’ll admit I was prideful before. I thought I had to do it all on my own. That paying for any service would somehow delegitimize what I was doing which looks even stupider typed out than it sounded in my head. I can’t imagine going back to my old ways now.

I’m very grateful to everyone who reviewed, hosted, retweeted, liked, or reposted. And I’d recommend this to pretty much anyone. I’m still learning, I feel like each time I release a book I get better at the whole process and this was definitely a step in the right direction.

With all that said, here’s the list of blogs that featured my books this month!

Thanks for stopping by!

-J

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