If you request a review from a busy book blogger, you are likely to be put in a months-long que. Popular bloggers can’t keep up with the requests they get, and some of the biggest bloggers get paid by large publishers to review books. What chance does your review have to make it on their site? Honestly, not a good one.

Garnering free reviews is no easy feat and paying for them doesn’t always guarantee that you’ll see any bang for your buck.

Is it worth making the financial investment to court bloggers? Yes! Just not book bloggers.

My book, Girls’ Weekend, tells the tale of three busy, overloaded moms who leave for a weekend away and decide they can’t return to lives that don’t seem to fit anymore. What happened to the life they thought they’d have? The woman they used to be? Motherhood is what happened. This is a common dilemma for plenty of women.

So, who better to blog about my book than moms? I discovered that the Mom Blog world is vast. In the year leading up to my book release I combed twitter in search of blogs. Making lists of the busiest ones, the ones that made me laugh, the ones that made me cry, the ones that taught me something. I commented on the posts, reached out to the bloggers and made connections.

A few months before my book launch, I pitched these bloggers formally through their websites, telling them first what I liked about their site and then why I thought their readers might like my book. I offered a paper or ecopy for free with no obligation to review it.

More than half of these women took me up on it and more than half of those posted about my book. The results? Sales. Girls’ Weekend was my bestselling book to date.

Look for bloggers and websites that are frequented by the kind of person who would like your book and then ask. All they can say is no. Like so much else I’ve discovered about marketing my book – you’ll never know unless you ask, and you have nothing to lose.