Today is Day 1 of the blog tour for RMO.
I’m giving away a free e-copy of the book at each stop. So if the book sounds interesting, follow along and comment to have a chance to win.
Today’s stop: http://www.tameralynnkraft.blogspot.com
Rocky Mountain Oasis just showed up today on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble too.
So you can buy it on Amazon. Or you can buy it on Barnes&Noble. If you do decide to buy the book, I’d appreciate it if you would leave me your honest review on those sites after you have read it.
In other news…
Here in WA we are trying to stay cool this week. It is supposed to be almost 100 today and since we don’t normally need air conditioning, we don’t have any. This is the first hot stretch we’ve had in quite some time. Last summer I don’t remember it getting hot at all. So… Thanking the Lord for the reminder of how good we have it her in western WA. 
I have an interview posted on Novel Journey today. If you leave a comment there you will be entered to win a free e-copy of Rocky Mountain Oasis.
So with Rocky Mountain Oasis set to debut mid-August, I’ve been busy contacting people to set up a blog tour.
This honestly has to be one of my least favorite parts of being a writer. The laying your soul at someone else’s feet and asking them for help with promotion. But… you have to do what you have to do, right? Perhaps the Lord is teaching me a lesson about pride in this?
So many of my friends have been more than generous in offering to host me on their blogs for this upcoming tour and I’m so greatful for their generous hearts!
I’ll be posting each day of the tour to let you know where you can find me that day.
And if you’d like to participate and I haven’t contacted you yet, please don’t hesitate to drop me an email.
I’d love the opportunity to be featured on your blog. And would be more than happy to return the favor sometime.
What I’ve done so far is to create a calendar and each person I’ve emailed, Ive asked them if they’d be willing to host me on a certain day and then I’ve penciled them into the calendar with a “?” by it. As they respond, I’ve put them into the calendar permanently and marked down their blog address so that I will have all that information in one handy spot when I need it for reference later on.
In my email I offered to make the tour very simple for people by indicating that I would be willing to just send them a blurb and the cover of the book if they wanted. I also indicated that I’d be willing to do an interview, or just about anything they’d like me to do.
Anyhow, so far, everyone who’s responded has said yes that they’d be willing to help me. Which is a wonderful encouragement.
I’m sure there are other things I could do for this tour. Do you have ideas for me? Let me know, I’d love some outside inspiration!
Blessings on your day!
I’ve been putting off signing up on Facebook for quite awhile because I thought, “I don’t have time for another social network!”
But last night I finally made the plunge into the Facebook realm.
The neat thing about it right at first is you fill out what highschool and college you went to and other people who have put down the same things are immediately shown to you and you can request friendship from them. I was very excited to see that many of my friends from highschool were on there and am looking forward to getting to know many of them again.
If you haven’t yet taken the facebook plunge, I highly recommend it. Try it out and let me know what you think. I’m Lynnette Bonner in the Seattle Network if you would like to add me as a friend.
I signed up at Shelfari the other day.
This is a great way to get to know people who enjoy the genre you write in.
There are groups for all kinds of different genre’s where you can get to know people, let them know what you are reading, and find out their recommendations of books they’ve enjoyed.
I would love to make your acquaintance. You can find me on Shelfari as Lynnette B. See you there!
Amazon has fairly recently started a discussion board. I was browsing there today and saw that one bold author had started a ‘Shameless Promotion’ thread. He was encouraging people in his genre to read his own book. I thought that was a pretty bold thing to do. But why not? It is one more way to get your name out there. Several people responded positively to his thread.
Amazon’s discussion threads can be found here. Pick the topic that your book fits in and start your thread. Give the title of your book, and maybe even a short synopsis. And while you are at it, do you belong to any other forums? Why not post one there too? Most people are intrigued to read something put out by an online friend.
Go ahead, be bold, I give you permission!
BookTour is self titled “Where Authors and Audiences Meet.”
You can sign up for an account there and post information about your books and any events (like booksignings) that you are going to be hosting or participating in. You can also indicate that you are available to speak at an event and people or organizations can contact you if they would like you to speak for a meeting.
A clip from their FAQs page:
Why join BookTour?
BookTour lets your fans—and potential fans—see when you’re going to be in their area. And if you’re planning a tour, you can find individuals, bookstores, libraries, and organizations in cities and towns on your route. Tour information in our database is also syndicated to our strategic partners (social networks, newspaper event calendars, and more) allowing your event data to reach hundreds of thousands of potential readers. And best of all, you only have to enter it once!
It’s free and one more way to get your name out to the public.
~ Best to you! ~
Shoutlife is a social networking site a lot like MySpace. Shoutlife, however, is geared towards Christians. Signing up there will put your work in view of many potential buyers.
To sign up simply go to www.shoutlife.com and click the ’sign up’ button. You will be walked through all the steps you need to take in order to get signed up. This process will only take about 15 minutes.
I signed up last Saturday just before a birthday party my daughter was going to. When I got home from the birthday party I already had 10 friend requests. As of today, Wednesday, I have around 80 friends.
You can edit the way your profile looks by clicking on the ‘my profile / layout’ tab at the top of any shoutlife page. You can easily change the colors of your page, add a banner at the top, or, if you are a little bit tech-savvy, you can enter your own css to create a beautiful page. I couldn’t find a site with layouts made specifically for Shoutlife, but I simply found a background I liked and uploaded it. (This feature is found in the ‘my profile / layout’ section. Then I uploaded the code from a MySpace layout I found at www.iloveyourspace.com.
Have fun! And if you would like me to add you as a friend my user name on there is Lynnette Bonner.
I joined MySpace and put up just a very basic page, so that in the future (when I’m oh so famous ;>) ) people can find me on there and read a little bit about me. Being on MySpace allows people to ’stumble upon’ me and find out about my books.
Signing up is easy - just go to www.myspace.com and click ’sign-up’. You will then be walked through the steps you need to take.
You can Google to find free backgrounds to ’spiff up’ your space. They are very easy to install. And usually the creator of the template you pick will have instructions on how to insert their code into MySpace to make it work right. Since there are a gazillion sites out there that claim to be free, but really are not, I will give you the name of the place I used that really was free. (They do ask that you leave the link to their site on the template.) I used ILoveYourSpace to find my free layout. You don’t have to give them your email address or any information.
The way to insert an ILoveYourSpace layout to MySpace is very simple.
1. Find the layout that you like.
2. Copy the code for that layout.
3. Go to ‘edit profile’ on your MySpace
4. Paste the code at the end of your About Me section.
You can see what MySpace looks like by clicking here. You can see that it is nothing fancy - but I’ve had people looking at my site and it is free advertisement. I used the MySpace blog to point people back to my webpage. I also linked from MySpace to my YouTube video to get more exposure for it.
Chances are you already have several friends that have MySpace sites - so why not sign up and try it? It only took me about an hour to set up. (And most of that was searching for a template.)
Once you get set up I would love to see your page. And I’d be happy to add you to my friends list.
