My Brain Was Asleep And Other Excuses

Writers have to market and marketing isn’t easy in the digital age when your books are among eight million available for sale at any one time. Sometimes you do impetuous things that seem like a good idea at the time, and afterward you wonder where your brain was.

I am guilty of this.

For Scandal’s Bride, my new release, I signed up for a virtual blog tour. For those who don’t know, people who blog regularly often feature writers as guests. They may show the cover of a new release, the blurb, and sometimes an excerpt from the book. I added “review option” in case they wanted to review the book.

I hired a reputable company who prepared a press kit with everything a blogger might need. They listed tour dates on their website and bloggers signed up. Wow, how easy is that? Then the emails arrived.

Most bloggers sent a set of interview questions. Five sent requests for blog posts. Only one said I could write about whatever I wanted. After a panic attack (all this had to be done a week prior to the tour), I began.

Ninety-seven interview questions later, my brain died. What else could I possibly say? There were a few similar questions, but the tour organizers suggested I write each one from scratch. The blog posts I needed to submit had topics from which to choose. Each had to be around 500 words.

Aside from questions about the book, writing process, and my other books, there were lots of personal questions. As a former city manager (who learned early that I lived in a fishbowl), these didn’t bother me. Some of the questions were quite interesting. Had to think pretty hard.

For example: If you’re stranded on a desert island, what three things are in your backpack? Write a 100-word scene using the words hammer, traffic light, and saucer. Were you a shy kid or a tomboy? If you had a super power what would it be? Do you kill your little darlings and where do you put the remains (they’re asking about words, not people)?

My six blogs were on how theme transcends genre, how I overcome imposter syndrome , an interesting story behind the book (there was one), what or who inspires me, what my writing process entails, and my favorite…why people should read romance novels.

I’d love to post all of the blog stops here, but I won’t. I’ll post each day’s stop on my author page. If there was something you wanted to know about me (and I cannot imagine what that might be), you’ll find it during the tour.

My brain might have died, but preparing for the tour was fun. Goddess Fish Promotions is the name of company, should you ever need to exercise your brain.