Ten Great Reasons To Book a Blog Tour #blogtour #VBT #PUYB #bookpromo @abbybardi

It is with great privilege to have as our guest today Abby Bardi, author of the mystery, Double Take. Abby has been on tour with us in the past and she’s here to give you ten great reasons to book a blog tour. Enjoy!

ten great reasons to book a blog tour

Ten Great Reasons to Book a Blog Tour

By Abby Bardi

Let’s face it, my most recent novel Double Take has not done as well as my two previous novels (The Book of Fred and The Secret Letters). Like any parent, I love it just as much as the other two, but the truth is maybe it’s a little bit, um, dark. And people tell me the main character is kind of unlikeable, though hey, let’s be honest, she’s a lot like me only cooler. I started feeling like if people only got to know Double Take, they’d come to appreciate its gloomy but ultimately life-affirming view of a young woman’s coming of age in the Chicago of the 1970s, where even the birds were depressed.

If Double Take had been a physical book, I could have gone down the street to my local library with a stack of copies and done some fun promotional things, but it’s an e-book, and while those are convenient and don’t take up miles of shelf space in your house, they’re hard to autograph.

That’s where the blog tour comes in. I had already done two blog tours with the wonderful Dorothy Thompson’s Pump Up Your Book, so it was easy to email her and say hey, let’s do another one! Almost immediately, she had organized a month-long tour of a bunch of blogs and we were virtually on the road.

Here are my ten best reasons to give blog tours a try:

  • Everyone knows that guest blogging is a great way to promote your book and meet new readers. But how do you find out where all the great blogs live? Booking a blog tour gives you easy access to blogs you might not find otherwise.
  • When you guest blog, you can virtually meet a lot more people at once than you could ever cram into your local library.
  • Writing guest blogs prods you to think about your book in different ways. When you have to come up with five to ten blog topics at once, you have to dig deep and ask yourself exactly what is interesting about your book and why people should read it, which is not something you necessarily have to do face to face.
  • A blog tour is a virtual book-signing event: you’re in effect putting your “signature” on your work.
  • Blog tours allow you to connect with readers you might not have targeted otherwise. For example, I did a guest post on a blog that has a lot of fantasy authors, but my novels are definitely not fantasy. I had to think about what Double Take has in common with fantasy: when my protagonist Rachel Cochrane has to confront the death of one of her oldest friends, you could think of this as a hero quest; and when this journey takes her into the lair of the most dangerous person she’d ever known, you could think of this as a confrontation with a monster. See what I mean about #3?
  • A few months ago, I went to a crime fiction event at my local library because a friend of mine was participating in it. As I listened to the authors discussing their work, I thought OH DUH, Double Take is actually a murder mystery. I don’t know why it took me so long to realize this, but my next thought was that I should try to promote it as a mystery. But how? OH DUH, a blog tour.
  • Like most authors, I have Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook accounts, but I don’t actually post much in them. Doing a blog tour gives you interesting new things to post in your social media accounts.
  • Guest blog posts are fun to write! If you’re addicted to writing, it’s interesting to have new prompts for more writing. Like this one! This is fun.
  • A blog tour forces you to think about your big picture as a writer. What are you trying to do? What kind of books are you writing? Why do you write? WHO ARE YOU?
  • Finally, and probably most important: a blog tour gives you an excuse to post pictures of your dog.

dog

Meet the Author

Abby Bardi

Abby Bardi is the author of the novels The Book of Fred, The Secret Letters, and Double Take. Her short fiction has appeared in Quarterly West, Rosebud, Monkeybicycle, and in the anthologies High Infidelity, Grace and Gravity, and Reader, I Murdered Him, and her short story “Abu the Water Carrier” was the winner of The Bellingham Review’s 2016 Tobias Wolff award for fiction. She has an MFA in Creative Writing and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Maryland and teaches writing and literature in the Washington, DC, area. She lives in Ellicott City, Maryland, the oldest railroad depot in America.

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Double Take

Inside the Book

Title: Double Take
Author: Abby Bardi
Publisher: Harper Collins Impulse
Pages: 186
Genre: Mystery/Women’s Fiction

Set in Chicago, 1975, Double Take is the story of artsy Rachel Cochrane, who returns from college with no job and confronts the recent death of Bando, one of her best friends. When she runs into Joey, a mutual friend, their conversations take them back into their shared past and to the revelation that Bando may have been murdered. To find out who murdered him, Rachel is forced to revisit her stormy 1960s adolescence, a journey that brings her into contact with her old friends, her old self, and danger.

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