Week three of the Spring 2012 Magic Appreciation Tour has come to a close. Book and author registrations have slowed down for the moment, so I don’t have any new books to share with you this week. However, several of our authors got caught up on their post exchanges.
Also, please note the announcement at the end of this post. The current (Spring 2012) tour is going to end on March 31 and go back to the original one-month-per-quarter schedule.
The Post Exchange
This was a big week for interviews, and we have one new book review. Please feel welcome to visit the blogs and leave your comments. We appreciate your feedback and support!
- Interview with Fantasy Author Cat Gerlach
Vanna Smythe interviews Katharina Gerlach on her blog. Cat shares how her dream of becoming a forester turned into a dream of becoming an author. - The Magic Appreciation Tour: Guest William English
Danika Dinsmore interviews William English on her “Accidental Novelist” blog. Will talks about how he got his start writing fantasy and short stories. - Book Review: Brigitta of the White Forest
Roger Eschbacher reviews Danika Dinsmore’s MG fantasy book Brigitta of the White Forest on his blog “The Novel Project.” Roger characterizes the book as a “fun and engaging read with an interesting story.” Please check out his review to learn more! - Author Spotlight: Vanna Smythe
Katharina Gerlach interviews Vanna Smythe on the “Independent Bookworm” blog. Vanna shares some of her experiences with releasing her new book Protector and her perspective on the true value of social media. - Sue Santore INTERVIEW: Author of A Singular Gift and A Singular Chance
Harrison Davies interviews Sue Santore on his “The Aduramis Chronicles” blog. Sue shares how she has been able to turn her retirement into a new career as a writer.
Magic Appreciation Tour authors are welcome to submit more offers to the Post Exchange. It’s a great way to get more traffic to your blog and to get to know some of your fellow fantasy writers!
The Spring 2012 Tour Ends March 31
When I first came up with the idea for the Magic Appreciation Tour, it was going to run for one month per quarter. But then I realized that the book listings should be available to potential readers on an ongoing basis. I thought, “So why not have the tour be ongoing as well?”
The answer to that question is “tour fatigue.” While leaving the book listings up indefinitely is still a good idea, I think our authors would benefit from having a break between tours. Also, having that break gives me more time to work on automating some of the site features. Automation would make it easier for me to run the tours, and it would give our authors instant access to things like the Post Exchange. (No more waiting for a “You’ve been paired!” email from yours truly.)
Registration will continue to be ongoing, so magical fantasy authors can still list their books on the site and be ready to participate in the next author tour.
So, unless the Tour authors rise up in protest, I’m going to go back to my original plan of holding the author tour part of the Magic Appreciation Tour and Book Sale only one month per quarter. That means the current tour ends on March 31 (next Saturday.) The next tour (Summer 2012) will run during the month of June.
If you want to do any final-week post exchanges, please submit them now!
As always, if you have suggestions on how I can improve the Magic Appreciation Tour and Book Sale site or program, your feedback is welcome. You can leave a comment here, or if you want to keep your thoughts just between you and me, you can use the contact page on the MA Tour site.
Magic Appreciation Tour Blog 
I think that for the first event of this sort, the tour was quite successful. I am definitely going to take part in the summer tour as well. Maybe, I’ll think of things to improve until then. Considering that all things take time to take off, I am very pleased with the results. We can’t do more than trying to get the word out anyway. See you again in summer.
Thank you, Cat. You were part of the reason the tour was successful. Thank you so much for your enthusiastic participation. Over the next couple of months, I’ll focus on getting more book and author registrations so we’ll have even more participants next time around. We already have a nice number of fantasy books on the site, and having read several of them myself, I’m pleased with the selection. I believe the readers are going to discover what a great resource we have in the book listings eventually (with a little help from all of us, of course).