It is time, once again, to honor book bloggers.

It's April, and that means my fellow indie author Terri Giuliano Long is sponsoring a little celebration of book bloggers.  The celebration only lasts through today, which is why this week's post is a day earlier than usual.

Long-time readers of this blog may recall my post on this subject sometime last year.  That is, you may recall it, and I certainly seem to recall writing it, but now I can't find it.  Maybe I posted it at the Indie Exchange.  Hmm.

Anyway, no harm, no foul.  Let's talk about book bloggers, and why they are crucial to the indie author ecosystem.

Traditional publishing wisdom asserts that one of the benefits authors get from signing with a publisher is help with promotion and marketing.  (It's not true, by the way, or it's not true of every trad-pubbed author; these days, only the mega-star authors get a marketing budget, and the rest have to bump along, doing their own promotional efforts, just like we indies do. Tell me again about the benefits of being trad-pubbed....  Sorry.  Off-topic.  Refocusing.)

Indie authors, however, don't even get that much (minimal) help.  No, we are stuck with making our own noise.  And besides personal appearances and chatting up all and sundry on social media, one of the best ways for us to get noticed is to be featured on someone's blog.  The blogger's audience becomes our captive audience, and if we can manage to be charming or entertaining or both, we might sell some books.  Those new readers, if we're very lucky, will become fans, and recommend our books to their friends, who may also become fans, and so on.  Indie authors are on a slow but steady career trajectory, and a lot of our growth wouldn't happen if it weren't for bloggers featuring us or our books.  My thanks must go here to the Cabin Goddess, who twice this year has let me visit with my characters in the Pipe Woman Chronicles in her Fourth-Wall Friday feature; and to Allison Bruning, whose virtual cruise stopped at both Naomi's condo and Swan Island last fall.

Many bloggers also review books, and their reviews can boost an author's visibility.  I am particularly grateful this year to my friends at Big Al's Books and Pals, Leanne Herrera, and Love of the Goddess for giving the Pipe Woman Chronicles such glowing reviews.

I'm sure I'm leaving some folks out, and for that, I apologize.  Dear blogger buddies, even if I didn't mention you by name, know that I am grateful for your help and support this year.  Thanks to all of you -- you rock!

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This week's news is mostly Camp NaNoWriMo-related.  The first draft of Annealed is proceeding apace; as of this writing, I am at 20,170 words of my 40,000-word camp goal, and 30,251 words for the whole book.  The first drafts for each preceding Pipe Woman Chronicles book have clocked in at somewhere around 52,000 words, so I'm comfortably past the halfway point.

No, I'm not going to tell you what's happening in the book right now.  Nice try, though.

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This moment of bloggy gratitude is brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

An Ode to Book Bloggers.

I'm posting a day late this week because I'm taking part in the "Celebrating Bloggers" blog hop, sponsored by Terri Giuliano Long, the author of In Leah's Wake.  Terri's got the details on her blog here, but basically, the idea is to share some love for book bloggers.  (Hint: click on the link -- there's a giveaway.)

Y'all might not realize it, but there aren't a whole lot of marketing opportunities for indie authors (or at least, not a whole lot of ethical opportunities, which I'll talk more about in next week's post).  On Amazon, I'm one author in a vast sea of others.  You can gain exposure by making your book free, and you can certainly move a lot of books that way (free is everyone's favorite price, after all), but if readers are snapping up 30 or 40 free books at a time, the chances that they'll ever find yours on their Kindle or Nook or Kobo again -- let alone to getting around to reading it -- are kind of small.  And then you have to hope that they like your book well enough to go back to the place where they bought the book and leave a review, or -- best of all -- that they remember your name and spend money for your next book.

Granted, you can take out an ad somewhere like Facebook.  But how many people will see it, let alone click through to buy your book?  If you're like me, you've got something like Adblock Plus installed on your computer, so you don't see any ads.

But book blogs?  Ah, book blogs are marvelous.

Book bloggers themselves are marvelous.  For starters, they're readers.  Nobody in his or her right mind would start a book blog if he or she didn't like to read in the first place.  I know some bloggers who just wanted a place to keep a list of all the books they've read, and the blog grew from there.  So you know that they're looking for books to read and review.  And they're upfront about the types of books they like to read, so if you do a little homework, you will know immediately whether they might like your book.

Book bloggers, as a tribe, have the patience of Job.  They often put up with pushy authors who want to know why they haven't yet seen a review of their darling.  Sometimes, authors turn unprofessional, even abusive.  It takes a thick skin and a sense of the absurd, I think, to survive as a book blogger for long.

But bloggers don't just do reviews.  They also provide a platform for indie authors to gain visibility.  Over the past year, I've done numerous guest posts, a couple of Q&As, at least one character interview, and a post that broke the fourth wall and let me talk directly to Joseph and Naomi.  This not only gives bloggers content for their blogs, but it lets us authors showcase our creativity in different ways than just writing fiction allows us to do.

So hats off to you, my book blogger buddies, and may your tribe ever increase.
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I'm Lynne Cantwell, and I approve this blog post.