For Love of the Book

photo (1)There is something about books.  Old books, new books, second hand books, borrowed books.  It really doesn’t bother me much, as long as I have them.  It’s not a small addiction, but at least I can absolutely credit my parents for giving it to me.  I firmly believe that their shared love of reading, of learning and their passion for books was handed down to us kids in the very air we breathed.  Our home was filled with books.  We were read to as infants, had books of our own as toddlers and small children and as we grew, our passion was indulged at every turn.  All in all, not a bad way to be raised.  To this day, I find it difficult to understand homes that have no (or very few) books in them.  It is as if I have a natural distrust of that emptiness.

Don’t get me wrong, I have some amazing friends who have uttered those dreadful words “oh, I don’t read much”.  It’s shocking, I know.  Subtle gifts of some of my favourite books have failed to entice them and I am resigned to the fact that they have fallen prey to the dark side. Ok, I jest.  Not quite on the dark side. However, I am comforted by the fact that we have other things in common and that I have built a large circle of like-minded book lovers with whom I can share my nuttiness.  A passion that has now lead to me following my heart into helping authors with their promotions.

In the same way that many of my childhood favourites will always be voiced by my Mother or my Father, no matter how many times I read them, being a part of the journey with an author weaves that book into the fabric of my life.  Adds them to my mental library as it were.

Let me tell you, it’s a journey that never gets old.

Best,

BM xx

Well, hello there!!

rose-764267_1920When you start a new venture – or in my case, formalise a venture – you find yourself having to do all the admin of setting yourself up.  Gone are the days when it was a simple case of setting up a website or simply printing some business cards.  These days, the bare minimum is Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and a blog.  If your industry involves publishing, you also need Goodreads and let me tell you… setting it all up isn’t a quick exercise 🙂

There are a number of services that we will be offering, including blog tours, video promo clips, audio reviews and guest bloggers to fill space on your blog.  This blog will also allow us to talk to you about tips and tricks in writing and marketing and provide a platform where we can promote not only our own tours, but also new writers, books that we’ve loved and more.

Our reading tastes are wide and so we’ll be sharing all of that with you.  In the meantime, we’ve set up our YouTube channel, Goodreads profile (which still needs to be populated properly), a Twitter account (and we’ve started to follow all our favourites), a Facebook page to make communicating as simple as possible and now we’re breaking in this blog 🙂  It’s been a busy day!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX9gOSrmF_A6HKdl5Oke1Zg

https://www.pinterest.com/TheBookMistress/

https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/43478052-book-mistress

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Book-Mistress/543201862487119?ref=bookmarks

https://twitter.com/_BookMistress

We’ve been organising blog tours for the past few years and recently branched out into providing short promotion videos for authors to use and we will also be doing YouTube reviews that can be shared on author blogs and websites.  It’s an exciting time and with all the changes, the time had come to formalise our freelance activities and so… The Book Mistress was born.  It’s a lovely play on words as I’m a mistress to my book obsession and I’m also the mistress of the books…

The great news is that we have managed to get the delightful Domino and Dominic Lane to join our blogging team and I look forward to having them share their great advice and experiences with you all.

Until then… have a spectacular day!

Best,

BM x