Using book blogs to promote your novel

It's interesting self-publishing and realising that you are responsible for all the publicity your book will ever get. The truth is that this was pretty well true when my books went out through publishers (though Endeavour put some real effort into 'The White Rajah' before succumbing to the sort of internal ruptures that seem to bedevil all small presses these days). Now, though, I'm having to look at every aspect of marketing and decide if I want to spend time/effort/money on it or not. So, for example, I decided I would spend time/effort/money on cover design but I economised by proofing 'Dark Magic' myself.

Today I am looking at blogging sites. I don't have to worry about the cost of these, because I'm only looking at free ones. However, I'm honestly not sure about the time and effort involved in submitting to them. That may seem quite silly. After all, in the time I’m spending writing this I could probably submit to several. But not, as it happens, that many. Everybody says – and my own experience bears this out – that you can't just send out blanket submissions to blogging sites. You need to read the site and decide if it's suitable for your book, then check the submission requirements and then send a personalised request for consideration. This is not the work of a moment and there are so very many blogging sites.

The first thing to do is to find sites that might be interested in your book. There's a really useful guide at https://bookbloggerlist.com/. I looked to see how many of the book blogs listed here cover historical fiction. The helpful search function produced 37 pages each with 14 blogs, so 518 blogs. That’s a lot of submissions.

Not all blogs are equal. I do very strongly recommend Rosie Amber (https://rosieamber.wordpress.com/). This is not only popular and well-regarded, but Rosie runs a team of reviewers and they will feature you on their individual blogs as well as posting through Rosie herself. You may find that you reach blogs by more than one reviewer too. Rosie’s reviewers are also generally happy to review Kindle copies, which is a huge plus as well.

Beyond Rosie, where to turn? My own research suggests that most of the hundreds of blogs simply consist of book review after book review. They are often uncategorised and the quality of the reviews themselves is, to put it politely, mixed. Does anybody really read through them looking for their next book? Do you?

Some reviewers feature their reviews on #TuesdayBookBlog. It’s well worth following that and maybe picking out a few of the best reviewers there to approach.

If you know somebody who runs a book blog, it makes obvious sense to ask them if they would be interested in reviewing their book. Interestingly, I review about 25 books a year, often with quite detailed discussions of the books running to 500 words or more but, although I often see people claiming they can’t find reviewers, I am not often approached by authors. (Publishers are another story, suggesting that at least some of them are making an effort that their writers aren’t.)

Does it make sense to send multiple requests for reviews to bloggers you don’t know? My feeling is that it doesn’t, despite the widespread view that book bloggers are important. I suspect most of them shift very few books for the authors they review. But I’d be interested in your views and, in particular, if you have any book bloggers you think are worth reaching out to (or if you blog reviews yourself), I’d love to hear from you. Comment here or email me at tom@tomwilliamsauthor.co.uk.