We were in the thick of author Cage Match, the hugely successful tour of Blog Tour de Force. The next Bestseller For a Day was only two weeks away. Known for her brilliant ideas, Carolyn McCray warned the Indie Book Collective volunteer staff to buckle in.
She had another gem.
Blog Tour de Troops! Memorial Day weekend, four days of a blog hop style tour where every single commenter got a free ebook from every participating author.
Yes. Every single commenter.
AND, for every commenter, one for a troop, too!
Plus a Kindle given away to a commenter and (hopefully) multiple Kindles to the troops.
Whoa. Wow! Everyone on the call got chills.
We only had a few weeks to put word out, coordinate the authors, create a theme, collect a $15 buy-in from each author to go toward the Kindles and cross all fingers.
In essentially two weeks time, we rallied 33 authors, focused on gratitude and rode a wild wave of support for four amazing days.
Just under 5000 comments came in. That means just under 5000 free ebooks went out plus one for a troop.
Comments ranging from high-five’s for the cause to heartfelt, heart wrenching stories about our troops filled each author’s blog. Words can’t encompass the gratitude felt by the authors over the reader response. But one author hoped we could all show it with a number.
10,000.
Augusto Pinaud suggested we collectively contribute enough of our ebooks to the troops, about a 3:1 troops to comment ratio, until we could give 10,000 ebooks of the 40 or so titles to our troops!
I still get chills typing that number.
Not only that, but thanks to outside donations along with the author buy-ins, we got 7 Kindles to the troops!
And we are doing it again.
Bigger and better, on November 11th weekend for Veteran’s Day! Our new goal is to gather 100 authors and to double that 10,000 number. Maybe more. And we're getting veteran's in on the giveaways, too. Because the men and women who safeguard our freedom deserve our thanks.
To get involved, feel free to contact Elena Gray, the BlogTour de Troops Coordinator at elena@elenagray.com
10 comments:
All I can say is FABULOUS! Thanks for thinking of something like this and, even better, following through.
Amber,
What an outstanding project! and for such a worthy cause. Thank you for sharing about Memorial Day's success and alerting us to Veterans' Day.
Im published with Liquid Silver Books and would love to donate a download...how does it work?
Having had a son in the Middle East during the beginning of the war and him asking me to send fiction books to take his mind off things, you can add me to your list of authors! What a great cause.
I'm not a pubbed author so I can't help that way, but I did tweet this and plan to Facebook it and do what I can to get the word out to my author friends.
I'm not currently pubbed either, but some of my fellow writers are. I will be sure to post this out on our chapter's bulletin board.
I would love to donate my contemporary romance To Love A Soldier to this cause.
Marie ROy
aka Collette Thomas
Thank you all so much for your comments!
We are in works of building a database for any troop to come 'buy' from, all freebies, of course.
We're still in construction stages but Blogtourdetroops.com can get you up to date details.
Also, stay tuned for our next tour, Nov. 11th. Even non-published authors can participate by co-blogging as I did this tour with author Kelli McCracken. Once her book releases, she'll be sending it all of our commenters from that weekend, too.
Thank you for sharing information about the Blog Tour de Troops! What a great way to support our young men and women overwseas, and our veterans.
There's nothing I can say that hasn't been said before, other than repeating the WOW! Awesome! Thank you so much for doing so much for the Veterans.
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