Book bloggers have become an essential part of publishing.
If you are an indie author you are not going to sell many books without them. Far more importantly than that, you will never find a more engaged, passionate group of book lovers – and, asides from ourselves, these are the people we write for, right?
In this article I’m going to talk about why book bloggers are so important and what they do, about book blog tours and the one taking place for my novel Vile, about how to find the Book Blogger for you, and some does and don’ts when dealing with these very important people in the world of publishing. I’ll also be reviewing all of the blogs that are reviewing my book on the blog tour. Vengeance! (Just kidding. Probably).
Reviews are fine – but useful reviews are essential.
As soon as my book was ready to go and the Kickstarter set up, I started contacting book bloggers looking for reviews. Reviews are important for a book. This should go without saying, but there’s an important addendum: useful reviews are essential for a book. A useful review is one that lets a potential reader know if this is the sort of book they are going to like. It’s lovely getting a review that says “5* best book ever”, but that is not a useful review, it’s a temporary ego boost.
Three times I tried to read A Brief History of Seven Killers, before I loaned it to someone safe in the knowledge that I would never see it again (such is the nature of lending someone a book.) I really couldn’t stand it. It also won the Booker prize. Knowing that other people loved a book is nice, but what you really need to know is if you will like the book.
Whether a review is useful is usually based on two factors.
First, in the review, do they describe the things they like and don’t like, what other books it reminds them off, and are those things in accord with your own tastes?
Second, does the reviewer generally like the sort of books you like? This can be immensely powerful. Most of us avid readers have friends who if they say, “read this, you’ll like it,” then you read it without any further recommendation. Or if they talk about a book they love, you pick up a copy, because you know that if they like it you will too.
Book bloggers can fill that exact niche. Find bloggers who like the sort of thing you like and talk about things in a way that interests you. There are more books out there than you can possibly read in a dozen lifetimes. Finding the right bloggers to follow can help you read books you would never find on your own and open your mind to books you might never otherwise have picked up.
Throw in the fact that nobody pays attention to book adverts unless they’re for an author they already know, and it should by now be clear that book bloggers are essential.
Book Bloggers and Kelly Lacey’s Love Books Group
During my quest to find people who might enjoy my book, and be prepared to review it if sent a copy (ps. that’s an open offer, if you’re a book blogger and you’re interested in my book tweet me at @keithcrawford77), I had the extraordinary good fortune to come across Kelly Lacey.
Kelly Lacey runs Love Books Group. I’m going to talk more about Love Books Group and Kelly’s blog in a moment, but first let’s talk about book bloggers.
Writers need to understand that book bloggers aren’t quite the same creature as we are. Even at our best we’re not the most social of creatures and getting a typical writer to keep up an active social media presence is like getting a cat to obey instructions. Most of us have to constantly fight the feeling that any conversation about somebody else’s writing is inherently proving that not only can we not write, but we never had any right to think we could in the first place. Yep, writers are often bonkers and asocial. I have about 300 followers on twitter and 2000 subscribers to my website, and I feel pretty proud about that.
Kelly Lacey has a reach of millions. Yes, you read that correctly. Book bloggers essentially like to read and talk about what they’ve read. They are much, much better at networking with other bloggers, because that’s what they like to do – talk about books. What’s more, while me blogging about how to write is of interest to some people (I hope), there is a much, much larger group of people looking for advice on what book to read next.
Basically, we should be giving these guys all our love. Because they’re really passionate about doing a job that we’re really crap at.
There are, by the by, a fair number of authors who are book bloggers as well. I can only imagine that they must be much more psychologically sound than the rest of us.
Kelly Lacey has been running her site https://lovebooksgroup.com/ since 2017 with the help of her cats – so you see she perfectly understands the psychology of writers. What’s exceptional about her site is not only the concise, readable reviews that she writes, but that she is deeply engaged in co-ordinating with other book bloggers. So, this isn’t just a good site to come and find good book reviews – it’s a place to come and find good book reviewers.
Hers is the first book blog you should check out. I could say more but I’m not going to, because you should be checking out her book blog.
Back? Ok, let’s continue.
Alongside her incredibly enthusiastic and well organised co-ordination of book-bloggers, Kelly provides a paid service to promote authors via books tour. This is part of how I came into contact with her: after her highly professional and prompt response to my request for review, I felt that she was someone I could work with.
The Vile Book Blog Tour
First of all, we talked about the book, and a little about me. Kelly has rules, my absolute favourite of which is that she operates a 100% drama free zone. As someone who runs super-massive writing competitions from time to time, I’ve received a lifetimes worth of random emails calling me an evil bastard for not recognising someone’s genius. I definitely appreciated a zero-drama rule.
A Book Blog Tour is basically a set period of time, say a week, during which a select group of reviewers will post about your book. Here’s the list for Vile:
As Kelly knows everyone who’s anybody in book blogging, she checked her extensive files and found a list of bloggers who are interested in my sort of work and would be prepared to review the book. I then sent them all a paperback copy.
This is important. Sending free copies to reviewers is the single best advertising investment you can make. Suck it up and buy them a book. I’ll talk more about advertising your book in another blog post, but the bottom line is that if you can have only one expense, make that expense buying the book for reviewers.
So, a book blog tour is basically a run of reviews aimed to grab the maximum amount of attention as possible over a week.
Social Media is weird. It’s basically like standing in a room full of people shouting and trying to find someone who is saying something you care about. Or just shouting by yourself for the pleasure of shouting. Thus, shouting something once is almost certainly a waste of time. People need stuff to appear several times in several different ways before they’re likely to notice.
Hence running a series of reviews in a row. The blogger helps their readers know if they will like your book. The visibility of your book (and your biggest problem is just having people notice your book exists) is magnified immensely. And, with a bit of luck, some people might be tempted to buy.
The Bloggers Reviewing my Book
Portobello Book Blog
https://portobellobookblog.com/
Like Love Books Group, Portobello Book Blog is another seriously well organised blog that not only includes the author’s reviews, but interviews, links to other bloggers and the innovative #tenthings where they publish ten interesting things about the author of whatever book has caught their interest.
The reviews are thoughtful and somewhat longer than the average, going into more depth about how and why the book made the reviewer feel the way they did. This means they are not only good reviews for the reader, but they provide excellent insight into why the novel works (or doesn’t). It’s a great example of how to reflectively read, an essential skill for any writer and a pleasant pastime for any reader.
I really like the #tenthings. It reminded me that crazy is the default background for authors!
RamblingMads
https://www.bloglovin.com/blogs/ramblingmads-13796709
I now have a deep, enduring and permanent love for this blog because they used the phrase “bracketing meta narrative” when talking about my book and I got to jump up and down a bit and say “somebody got what I was trying to do! Yay!” I mean, I’m very happy for people to come for the swordfights and explosions, but it’s always lovely when somebody spots the mysteries (and understands them).
This is the review here.
RamblingMads reviews are concise but rich – the reviewer has clearly read and engaged with the books they review and knows exactly what they want to say. This makes for an interesting contrast with something more explorative, like Portobello Book Blog. Portobello is lovely because you feel like the reviewer is figuring out their feelings as they write. Ramblingmads is brilliant because, erm, it isn’t rambling at all – the reviews are like the well delivered final statement of a particularly good barrister.
Emma’s Chapter
https://emmaschapter.wordpress.com/
Emma is currently a student of Journalism and Creative Writing at Falmouth University, which makes it especially brave of her to run a book blog at the same time. She defines herself as a daydreamer, and I think that can be seen in the way this blog is a bit more bloggy than the others – she hosts things like first line Friday’s for book lovers, she writes about film and travel; basically, this is a very rich blog that strays a long way from reviews from time to time but always goes somewhere interesting.
If the blog feels that it lacks cohesion you should embrace that as a strength. Whereas some blogs on this list are very systematic in their presentation of book tours and cover reveals, Emma’s Chapter invites you to explore whatever it is she happens to be thinking at the moment. A scary reality of publishing a book is that it will be read and owned – by which I mean taken ownership of, that the book becomes their book as well as yours – by real people with rich internal lives. The holistic quality of Emma’s Chapter empowers the reviews and makes them well worth your time.
Bookread2day
https://bookread2day.wordpress.com/
What I love about Bookread2day reviews is that they get straight to what this reader likes about the book. I can’t find a lot on the site about the reviewer themselves, but their passion is clear, and the review illustrates the hooks that caught them – giving the reader a clear idea whether this is a book that will catch them too.
The reviewer isn’t a writer (or English isn’t their first language), which sounds very snobbish of me, but I actually want to make a point. We aren’t just writing for writers. In fact, writers are hardly our audience at all. This reviewer expresses themselves very well, and that they are not professional copy-editors (me neither, frankly, no matter my qualifications – my [French] wife is always giving me grief for the poor English in my, erm, writing blog) – sorry, that the reviewer is not a professional quality writer actually brings us much closer to somebody who is speaking from a place of passion about reading: someone who is sharing their pleasure/displeasure, not just thinking about whether they could have written it better.
So, don’t be a snob about book reviewers who aren’t writers themselves. Bookread2day has deeply useful things to say about the books they read. If you only listen to those whose prose is like Proust’s, then you’ll never understand why your books don’t sell. Brookread2day gave me a really useful and deeply appreciated review.
*Okay, an after note. This reviewer may well not be a professional quality writer now, but they could have the potential, they may be working to be a writer, and they may well one day succeed. I’m dyslexic (as may occasionally be obvious), and my journey to writing sentences that people could read and understand was a long and hard one. Writing better sentences is something a good writer works on every day, and never stops striving towards. So, I sincerely hope that, if they dream of writing, if they are writing, the reviewer of Bookread2day is not put off by my comments. We are all in the process of becoming.
The Faerie Review
http://www.thefaeriereview.com/
So, I can’t claim to have done a scientific study, but it seems that many book bloggers have a thing about a) Fairies and b) Cats. I love cats but am mildly terrified of Fairies (or Faeries or Fae) because I read all the rights sorts of literature as a kid. I mean, what do they want with all those teeth anyway?
Right, the blog. The Faerie Review is actually made up of a small group of reviewers, which seems exceptionally pragmatic. Read the profiles and you’ll see pretty quickly this is an amazing group of people, who have overcome everything from strokes to dyslexia, while getting into all sorts of cool stuff like Legends of Zelda memorabilia. Basically, this is a very safe space to get your geek on.
They do author interviews as well as reviews and have some sort of book challenge – although I found the site a little difficult to navigate (possibly because I’m in the middle of destroying yet another computer). However, once I dug in a little bit, I found a huge amount of content on the site. This is a really good book blog to check out if you want to find a book you would never in a million years have found on your own, read by people with a breadth of life experience that nobody would ever believe if you wrote them as a character. It’s always worth following the exploits of interesting people.
The P Turners Book Blog
https://thepturnersbookblog.wordpress.com/
This is a very shiny looking stylishly black and white blog that had this very English Englishman (ok, yeah, I know, I’m also French) blushing because there was a fair old chunk of romance content on the first pages – plenty of skin on display, if you know what I mean. But P Turner is actually K, S, L and M Turner, four different reviewers with some overlapping tastes but a wide range of interests. Thus, it is worth taking some time to know which reviewer is which, to find who fits your tastes. It isn’t all romance and vampires (not that there’s anything wrong with romance and vampires), I think I just turned up on a particularly romantic vampire sort of day. Or night, I guess.
They do a lot of cover reveals and book tour announcements, so digging into the archives is the best way to find the reviews themselves. These are excellent. They combine precis with commentary, emphasising the central conflict while making pertinent comparisons with other work (including film and tv, which I always find helpful.) Because there are four of them, they can cover a lot of ground and the reviews are precise enough to help you find your next new read.
The Midnight Review
http://themidnightreview.co.uk/wp/
This blog has a lovely banner that invites you to come and get lost in an unknown world with the reviewer, which hits very close to my life-long fantasy of The Doctor turning up in the Tardis and inviting me to go on an adventure, so I was immediately engaged. The website is really well set out and makes it very easy to get from review to book announcement – frankly this website works a darn site better than mine!
The reviews start with an overview then do a really good job of highlighting what the reviewer enjoyed and the sort of reader who might appreciate the book. They also review children’s books, something I particularly enjoyed, and The Midnight Review makes it very easy to find and learn about books you might want to read.
The reviewer is also the mother of a child with Asperger’s. For reasons I shan’t bore you with, I’ve had the opportunity to know many parents with children on the autistic scale (if that’s still an expression anymore, this was some time ago). Because of the particularities of these children, their parents often learn superb communication and comprehension skills – the ability to understand and express a very great deal with very little. It could be this reviewer simply naturally has this gift, but I very much enjoyed her clarity of thought and word.
The Magic of Wor(l)ds
https://themagicofworlds.wordpress.com/
You’ve got to love a good pun! The Magic of Wor(l)ds does a lot of book tours and cover reveals, so scrolling down the main page of the blog you won’t find many reviews to start off with – or sometimes you only spot them mixed in with the reveal. That’s ok, because it means you get an excellent resource that works as a jumping off point to all sorts of different writing.
There’s also a section where the reviewer shares some of their own writing, although most of her writing is in Dutch. She is a corporate translator who administrates Bokenfans!, a large book group on Facebook, and does some developmental editing work with Dutch authors. I think that makes her reviews particularly worth watching out for, as she brings a profound knowledge of the structure and form of good story.
Rosie Writes…
https://rosemariecawkwell.wordpress.com/
So shiny, it burns my eyes! Rosie has put some serious work into making a blog that works particularly well on a tablet, so step away from your desktop and take a look at this beauty in the way it’s meant to be read.
Rosie describes herself as a “Writer of fiction, Book blogger, autistic, probably a Dragon, owned by Hell Hounds”, so she’s clearly awesome. As with a lot of these sites, there’s a heady mix of promotion, book tours and cover reveals. If you want to find the reviews, click on the menu, scroll down through the list until you get to book reviews. The tag is hidden away a little but take the time to find it.
It’s worth the scrolling. Rosie reviews hardcore. I believe her when she says she might be a dragon (I love dragons, they’re like cats if cats could breath fire.) She goes into a great deal of detail, reflects on everything from the effectiveness of the book to the effectiveness of the language, and in one of the examples I read emailed the author to challenge them about whether the writing parsed or not. That’s pretty damned cool (and I’m sure helped the author enormously.)
Anyway, I don’t know what the Hell Hounds paid but they got a good deal. Rosie thinks in great detail about the books she reviews and whilst that doesn’t give you the key hooks kind of approach that is so useful in RamblingMads or The Midnight Review it does make for a really interesting read.
A Final Thought on this List
At some point I’m going to take some time to write about some other book bloggers (if you’re a book blogger and want me to talk about your blog, tap me up, it’s interesting). While cats, fairies and mythical monsters are a continuous theme, there are clearly a wide range of styles and approaches – all of which bring value to the potential readers and the authors.
What I’m saying is, you shouldn’t just get to know a Book Blogger. You should get to know a whole bunch. These are the people you are selling to. These are the people you want to enjoy your book. Get out there and listen to what they are saying.
How to Find Bloggers
Basically, until you’ve started following and got to know a few blogs, Reedsy has your back here.
https://blog.reedsy.com/book-review-blogs/
Reedsy collate a database of book bloggers, including their interests, whether they accept indie books (yep, there are still a lot of people out there stuck in the 20th century), and how large a readership they have. I wouldn’t worry about that last one so much. You never know who is on their way up, or who is on there way down. Be excellent to everyone.
So, starting out, stick in your category and then look through the sites.
Now, you’re going to experience a wicked temptation here to go direct to the contact page, rattle off an email with a PDF of your book, then move on. Because doing this job properly takes ages, is boring, scary, and is stopping you from getting on with writing your next book. Resist this temptation, because it’s as transparent as that raincoat in Blade Runner (you know which one I mean).
You do this, and you’re just sending spam. And spam goes straight into the spam bin.
What you need to do is take some time and look around the site. Find out if they like books similar to yours. Find out if they’re currently accepting submissions! Scrupulously check their submission conditions, and then follow them. In your covering letter, explain why you were attracted to their blog and how your book is a good fit. Treat it a bit like a job interview, because it is one.
Some things you should never do with book bloggers.
First, don’t be a bitch. Book Bloggers almost all have a huge pile of books they’re reading. They may not have the time to read your book. They may not have the inclination. I don’t have the inclination to recover my copy of A Brief History of Seven Killers, but that doesn’t give Marlon James the right to tweet that I’m a dickhead for not appreciating his book.
Don’t respond to reviews. The sole exception is to thank people (not in the commentary, over social media), whether the review is good or bad. Under no circumstances should you explain all the reasons why they are wrong or even worse start calling them names or such similar. This should be obvious, but writers do this ALL THE TIME, so it seems necessary to point it out. Saying nasty things about people on the internet is never a good idea.
What happens, after you’ve explained why the reviewer is stupid? Well, now it’s feeding time. Your book blogger has more followers than you, and even if they don’t, the internet is going to come after you for being a dickhead. You’ve seen what happens to films when they do something the fanbase doesn’t like (I’m thinking the Last Jedi here, a film that I love)? Well, by being a dickhead you’re both inviting a surge of one-star reviews and encouraging no book blogger to ever look at your work again.
So, you know, be excellent to each other.
So, what should you do with book bloggers?
Find the ones you like and engage with them. Be polite, and don’t hassle them. They are more powerful than you! Plus, they’re awesome. They love books. If they aren’t interested, remember that doesn’t mean you should cut your wrists because your book is terrible, it just means they’re not interested.
Follow them, retweet and comment if they talk about your work (of course), and also if they say something you find interesting. Everyone is trying to build their audience so pay it forward. In the process you’re going to find and meet other book bloggers who might like your stuff. All is well.
Finally, remember that you’re a reader too. When you find book bloggers that like the same stuff as you, use it as an opportunity to find work you enjoy. Particularly in the indie market, it can be hard to find quality books amongst the vast quantity being published. These amazing people are out there doing the work for us!
Book bloggers. Your new best friends.
