June is a 5 Monday month, meaning there's an extra #MGMonday blog to write. This Author Life blog is all about blog tours, and whether they are really worth their while for middle grade books. What is a blog tour? In the past, authors would travel around the country, promoting their book at bookshops and festivals. IT was a logistical nightmare, not to mention prohibitively expensive for many authors. Then, there's the headache of making sure you actually have an audience at these events. Cue, the blog tour. An online version! One without the need for travel, or the headache of wondering if you'll be speaking to an empty bookshop! My First Blog Tour Experience For my debut novel, Taking Wing, the blog tour was a magical thing! I didn't really know what to expect and the fact that several blogs had written reviews was fantastic! I shared each post on my social media, and got lots of comments from people I knew. My first blog tour was organised by Goddess Fish Promotions ...
For today's #HistFicThursdays blog, I am so excited to be welcoming Fiona Forsyth to the blog with a guest post about her new book Death and The Poet , as part of her Coffee Pot Book Club tour. Her fabulous guest post discusses the book's setting, moving away from the perception of Ancient Rome to its reality with just enough artistic license to keep readers deeply engaged with the story. But first, let's meet the book... Blurb 14 AD. When Dokimos the vegetable seller is found bludgeoned to death in the Black Sea town of Tomis, it’s the most exciting thing to have happened in the region for years. Now reluctantly settled into life in exile, the disgraced Roman poet Ovid helps his friend Avitius to investigate the crime, with the evidence pointing straight at a cuckolded neighbour. But Ovid is also on edge, waiting for the most momentous death of all. Augustus, the first Emperor of Rome, is nearing his end, and the future of the whole Roman wor...