F.A.Q. for Bloggers

Please fill in this form. We will get in touch as soon as we’ve added you to the tour host mailing list, and added your website link to our database.

If you haven’t received a response within 7 days, please fill in the form again – it probably got lost in our mailbox.

You need to have a website focusing primarily on books and authors. This doesn’t necessarily have to be a ‘book blog’ only – we also accept author websites if they occassionally review and/or feature books or other authors. If you have a book blog, but sometimes write movie or game reviews, or other reviews, you are welcome to join as well. As long as the blogs’ primarily focus is on anything book-related, that should be fine.

We only accept blogs that have been updated regularly, at least once a week. We understand if things come up, but if a blog is unactive for over a month, we may delete it from our list. If your blog has been deleted, but you still want to participate, you’ll have to sign up again.

We don’t have any requirements when it comes to the number of followers. We welcome small and large blogs alike.

We will send you an email once we’ve added you to our mailing list and added your link in our database. From this point on, we will send out regular emails about tours we’re scheduling. The emails will include media kits, tour banners, book covers and sometimes author pictures as attachments. In the body of the mail, we will mention the dates for the book tour, the book’s genre, the blurb and a link to the promotional page on our website.

You only have to reply to emails regarding tours you’re interested in. If you reply, please specify what dates you have available for the tour, and what type of tour stop you’d like to host.

Reply to our email stating you’re interested in reviewing the book. Please include your preferred format, if multiple formats are available. We require .pdf copies of the books from all our authors, but often, .mobi and .epub copies are available as well. We will mention this in the initial mail.

We request that, along with your review, you put up the book cover, title, author, genre, synopsis and promotional links. Feel free to add an excerpt and/or author bio as well. All of these can be found in the media kit.

Reply to our email scheduling the tour and express your interest in hosting a guest post. We will set up a date for the guest post in the schedule, and let the author know how many guest posts are needed and for what blogs. Once the author sends us the guest posts, we will forward them to you. We aim to do this at least one week beforehand, but this doesn’t always work out.

We request that you add book cover, title, author, genre, blurb and promotional links at the top or bottom of the guest post. Feel free to add an excerpt and/or author bio as well. All of these can be found in the media kit.

In some cases, the author specifically asks not to have any guest posts during the tour. We will mention this in the initial email scheduling the tour, and in the promotional post on our website.

Reply to our email and mention you’d like to host an author interview, and what dates you have available. We will ask you to come up with questions. Once you’ve send us the questions, we will forward them to the author. When we’ve received the author’s replies, we will mail them back to you.

In case of a character interview, you may prefer to have the author come up with the questions themselves, especially if you haven’t read the book. In that case, please mention so in your email.

We would appreciate it if you could add the author bio and picture to the bottom of the author interview. Feel free to add information about the book (cover, title, author, genre, blurb, promotional links) as well.

Reply to our email and say you’d like to host a book excerpt, and what dates work for you. You can find a book excerpt in the media kit. Sometimes the media kit has multiple book excerpts, in which case you’re free to choose which one you prefer to feature on your blog.

We request that, along with the book excerpt, you also post the book cover, title, author, genre, blurb, promotional links and an author bio and picture.

Sometimes the author prefers not to have any giveaways during the tour. In that case, you won’t be able to sign up for a giveaway.

If the author has indicated he/she wants to host giveaways, you can sign up for a giveaway as well. We always ask to include additional entry options for the giveaway: for following the author’s blog, liking their Facebook Fan Page, following them on Twitter, tweeting about the giveaway, and sometimes other entries as well. We will mention this in the email.

You are free to host the giveaway using whatever software you want, or none if you prefer, but you need to have the additional entries. You can add more entry options as well (for example, for liking your blog, or following you on Twitter). We recommend using Rafflecopter to host giveaways because it’s easy and free, but this is definitely not a necessity.

We will specify what you can give away (usually this will be an eBook or paperback copy of the book, an Amazon Gift Card or swag) and whether the giveaway can be international, US only, US/CA only, or other.

Once the giveaway is over, please choose a giveaway winner and send us the winner’s information (name and email address). We will send this information to the author, who will get in touch with the winners. If the author prefers to let us contact the winners, we will contact them instead.

If the winners haven’t received their prize within 14 days, please send us a follow-up email.

Some authors prefer to have giveaways spread over multiple blogs. These are typically “larger” prizes, like sets of books or Amazon Gift Cards. When the author wants to have multiple blogs hosting the same giveaway, we set up the giveaway ourselves through Rafflecopter. We will send you the Rafflecopter code, which you can add to your website in order for the giveaway to show up there as well.

These type of giveaways usually happen during release day parties and/or one-week blog tours, but they can happen in other blog tours as well. We are aware of Rafflecopter not working with wordpress.com blogs at the time being. If you have a wordpress.com blog, feel free to participate in the blog tour or release day party regardless, and just link to the Rafflecopter widget on another blog to have visitors participate.

After the giveaway has ended, we will choose the winners and get in touch with them.

We want our reviewers to post honest reviews of the book. You shouldn’t feel obligated to write a positive review. A lot of bloggers do prefer to get in touch with us first before writing a bad review. If that happens, we contact the authors and ask them whether they want the review posted. We then forward the author’s response to the bloggers.

If the author doesn’t want the ‘bad’ review posted, we ask the blogger to host a book excerpt instead.

This is not a necessity, but it’s highly appreciated. We ask bloggers to post their reviews on their own websites, Goodreads, B&N and Amazon. If you can’t post on all of these, that’s all right – then just post on the ones you can.

You don’t have to, but we’d really appreciate it. If you’re hosting a tour stop, we’d love if you could spare a few minutes to tweet about the tour stop or post it on your blog’s Facebook Fan Page as well.

Of course! In fact, we highly encourage this. Also, feel free to send us the link to the tour stop once you’ve scheduled it. This saves us the trouble from sending out reminder emails, and it will keep us from bothering you with reminders as well when you already have everything set up.

Please get in touch with us, so we can let the author know. We ask that you post a book excerpt instead, with book cover, title, author, genre, blurb, promotional links, author bio and author picture included.

You can put the tour banners at the top of the tour post. Most bloggers prefer to put these in their sidebars as well, and mention their tour stop date underneath the banner, to show they’re participating and to help us promote the book tour.

Our media kits are .docx format. If you have the latest version of MS Word, you should be able to open the document. OpenOffice, free Word processing software, should be able to open this format as well.

If it still doesn’t work, please send us an email and we’ll see to change the format for you.