SFR Brigade Midsummer Blog Hop - April Update

Just a quick update on the forthcoming hop before my book tour starts, so you don't think it's been forgotten. Firstly, thank you to everyone who has signed up so far, and for all the offers of help, particularly on the promotion side. And thanks to those who have put the Blog Hop button on their blogs. Secondly, Heather Massey at The Galaxy Express has kindly offered to post about the hop and put a list of participants on her site. However, she does need the list before the end of May so can I encourage those of you who are interested but have yet to sign up to do so as quickly as possible? I know a few people are a bit hesitant because of technical details - if you're concerned about scheduling a post or adding the inlinkz tool please feel free to contact me. Most issues (if it's Blogger) I can help with, although I struggle a little with Wordpress.

I've been tweeting about the sign up at regular intervals and will be back to promote the hop as soon as my tour's over. I will be emailing everyone on the list so far with further details at that time. Meanwhile, give me a shout if you need anything regarding the hop. :)

Amazon Tag Party - 04/26/2012

Welcome to the all-new SFR Brigade's Amazon Tag Party. Please find the list of this week's participating titles below. All you need to do is click on the title and it will take you to the relevant Amazon page. Happy Tagging!

A brief step by step guide:

1.Go to the Amazon buy page (links provided below)

2.Scroll down to the 'Tags Customers Associate with this Product' header. Please be aware that not all the tags show up on the books - you will need to click 'show all (number of) tags' to see the full list. There's also a limit to how many tags you can agree with - 15 - so choose wisely my young apprentice!

3.Look for these tags: SFR, Scifi Romance, SF Romance, Science Fiction Romance and Paranormal Romance - please feel free to add any extra tags you feel are appropriate to the work (i.e. Space Opera, Military SF, etc.)

4.If the tags are already there, just click on them to add your 'vote'

5.You can also type into the 'your tags' box to add your own (no need to save the page, just type and add)



For those wishing to submit their titles for tagging, a sign-up list will be open from Monday to Wednesday of each week for you to enter your own title for tagging (look for the tab in the SFR Brigade pages above). The criteria for signing up are:

1. It must be on Amazon

2. It must be SFR (includes Steampunk, Apocalyptic, Futuristic, Space Opera, Near Future, YA SFR and all the other subgenres that fall under that SFR umbrella.)

3. Must be written by a Brigader

4.Must have tags already added for taggers to agree with.

5.Priority will be given to new titles and/or those not tagged in recent weeks. Please try to give everyone a chance to have their title highlighted. List numbers will be restricted, otherwise it commits other members to spending a considerable amount of time tagging.

Amazon Tagging Party - Trial Run

After some discussion, we're trialling a new system for the tagging parties. In the SFR Brigade blogsite pages, you'll now see an Amazon tagging sign up. This is a linky tool which will be open from Monday to Wednesday, with the completed list being published on a Thursday for Brigaders to go tag titles. Please follow the instructions on the page - and let us know if there are any issues with it, or if you feel the system doesn't work for you etc. Any suggestions are always appreciated. :)

Please note - there is apparently a limit to how many tags someone can agree with, so choose your tags with care. :)

Battle Stations!

Brigade!

Do you know how long it's been since our last tag party? A long, long time.

The Brigade had a tradition of hosting a Tag Party on Thursdays. Tags are those little words and phrases that help Amazon's search engine sort through all the titles.

Any idea how many titles Amazon has? It's in the millions for print books and now over 800K for Kindle. Wow. Tagging gets us noticed on the search engine - makes it easier for the reader to find us amongst the teeming masses. (And, yes, I'm quoting a tag party there.)

Tagged books also give us a good idea of what's out there to read, and gives us an open comments forum for fun (spoiler free!) talk about the books. You're not required to buy or review the books, but you'll probably find yourself adding books to your TBR pile.

From the Twitter chatter, there's a lot of interest in getting this going again. All we need is some victims, and some volunteers willing to click a few buttons. A party host who is willing to organize everything and write the actual Tag Party post would be wonderful to.

Thursdays are in the middle of the week, everyone has a busy life, so let's put this to a vote.

YAY or NAY?

If YAY, would you be interested in hosting?