Click here to find my book review.
Here is an excerpt from the interview & a synopsis of the book:
The Author’s Guide to Working with Book Bloggers
Do you feel out of your comfort zone when dealing with book bloggers? They are the New Gatekeepers to book publishing success – but how can you tap into that source of free promotions by putting your best foot forward?
The Author’s Guide to Working with Book Bloggers combines the advice of 215 blogging professionals collected in a survey covering all aspects of communication between authors and Review Blogs. Whether you are a new author, or have many titles under your belt, let us demystify the promotion of your book on a book blog.
You’ll learn about whom and where book bloggers are, and the following:
The Query,
The Review,
The Giveaway,
The Author Interview,
The Guest Post,
The Book Blurb Excerpt and Cover Reveals and more!
Andrea: Please share details about The Blogger List, such as the number of members, average of monthly visitors, when it was started, etc.
Barb: The Book Blogger List was started in late January of this year. Word got about quickly, and continues to spread. Book bloggers continue to sign up to the site on a daily basis. I now have well over 600 Book Bloggers listed. I wanted a site that sorts or arranges bloggers by genre. (When authors are looking for someone to promote their book, they look for bloggers who like to read what they write.) That’s what the Book Blogger List does. The site can be searched for a specific blogger, but all the listings are laid out categorized by genre.
Today it has 647 listings, but I also know that I have 9 queries in my inbox that need to be posted. The number will continue to increase!
The site has averaged between 8000 and 9000 hits per month since it’s inception with the number of daily hits varying widely. The lowest number of hits each day is usually about 150 with the highest daily figure being well over 1000. The average time spent on the site is 5:30, which shows that people are looking around while they are there. Our traffic comes from everywhere with US, UK and Canada sending us the majority of the traffic. Almost every country represented to some extent. Almost half of the traffic comes from search traffic, with the major search criteria being the word “blog” or “review” + a genre.
Andrea: Wow! What inspired you to found The Blogger List and also write your book?
Barb: I work with authors on a daily basis. I tutor Wordpress and I help them put together their Author Platform. I’m the behind the scenes person. I don’t consider myself a writer, but a voracious reader. I find it really rewarding to help an author understand how all the various parts and pieces go together to form a functioning Author Platform.
When trying to teach authors how to use book bloggers as a source of promotion, I was frustrated with the existing databases of book bloggers. Finally, after many months of threatening, I started my own. I really didn’t expect to list more than 50 or so bloggers.
The number of book bloggers that have signed up and the number of hits are amazing to me! I am humbled by the attention my little site is getting.
The ideas for the book began before the site. I got into a discussion one day with a bunch of book bloggers on Twitter about the fact that authors needed some guidance to work with book bloggers. I was curious as to whether just experienced book bloggers were seeing what we were seeing, or if it was more widespread than that. I created a survey, posted it on my blog, and advertised it on Facebook and Twitter. I had 215 responses! Amazing! Again, I was thinking I would be lucky to hear from 50 bloggers. The information that I gathered from that survey as well a follow-up survey were pearls of wisdom. I realized that what I assumed would be an academic survey of book bloggers simply had to be turned into a book so that I could include everyone’s information.
I had a wonderful editor help me organize the information into chapters, and then a lot of help along the way. I had the participants of the survey serve as proofreaders and beta readers.
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