Thursday Thirteen - 226 - 13 Things I've Been Doing to Set Up My First-Ever Blog Tour

1 -  After my summer trip to New York to attend my first writers' conference, and after successfully pitching to an agent and an editor from the traditional print publishing world, I made the liberating decision to self-publish my book on Amazon Kindle.

2 - What that means is a flurry of activity - already well under way - which includes prepping for a social media blitz of my own making. 

3 - First order of business: seek out fellow bloggers who are avid readers, and who write book reviews.

4 - Type things like +indie+vampire+book+blog+reviewer


 +indie+horror+book+blog+reviewer and 


+indie+paranormal+book+blog+reviewer into my search engine.

5 - Click on the blogs to check them out. This is the internet version of pounding the pavement. I have more time than money, so it's well worth the investment. 

6 - Go to the all-important Review Policy tab or Disclosure Policy and find out what the reviewer's reading tastes are like. For me, I'm looking for someone interested in paranormal, vampire or horror. I'm also taking note of fantasy reviewers for my Scorpius story, once it's ready to go. 

7 - Discover that many of these bloggers have reached a TBR pile saturation point and are no longer accepting books for review - but that they enjoy hosting guest authors for blog tours. Yay, me! 

8 - Find their Twitter link and click over into the Twitterverse. Follow them. 

9 - Place them on my Twitter list for Reviewers, which you can view from my Twitter account.

10 - Once within Twitter, I look at who shows up in the right-hand sidebar under the heading Similar to

11 - I click away, going deeper and deeper into the Twitterverse, checking out Twitterers who declare themselves as book bloggers, clicking on the links to their blogs.

12 - Pay attention to the tone and previous subject matter of these new blogs, so I can tailor my guest posts to their blog readership.

13 - Remember to ask for a few days' vacation from my day job in order to launch my author blog tour in early November. Hope you'll be along for some of the stops!