The Tale of Oat Cake Crag

Have you read any of the Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter? The Tale of Oat Cake Crag is the seventh in this series. Susan Wittig Albert kicked off her week-long blog book tour yesterday at Straight From Hel (you can still sign up for the drawing until noon). Today we’ll give you an overview of the rest of the week’s visits as well as some insights about how the tour was planned.

Susan’s fans will be following this tour and signing up for a book drawing each day, and also to be eligible for the grand prize if they sign in at each blog daily.

But they are not the only followers of this blog book tour. When Susan wrote her posts for each blog, she also considered any new readers and what their interests might be. On this blog, a post about the various aspects of a blog book tour would be appropriate. That’s what you’re reading right now. Here are some clues about what to expect on upcoming blogs:

Tomorrow (Wednesday), Susan visits The Blood-Red Pencil where the editors daily discuss all the many aspects of writing. So the post was crafted to explain the unusual Victorian narrative voice that the author employs in these Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter. It’s quite an intriguing concept, especially to the many writers who are fans of this blog.

Thursday, Lorna Barrett hosts the tour stop with her regular feature, Pet Peeves Thurday and you can bet Beatrix and her friends have a pet peeve in this seventh book in the series. Find out about it here and be sure to tell us your pet peeve.

On Friday, the Cozy Chicks host the final tour stop and you’ll learn that cozy mysteries (and their protagonists) might be a lot stronger than their cozy reputations lead us to believe. Beatrix Potter enchanted children with her delightful writing and illustrations, but she made history in another way, too. You can find out how by visiting the Cozy Chicks blog.

Do you have questions for Susan about writing a mystery series with a real-life heroine in the starring role? Please leave them here and she’ll be sure to answer them sometime today.

And don’t forget to sign up for the drawing to win an autographed copy of Oat Cake Crag by visiting the drawing page at http://cottagetales.com/blogtour/drawing_0914.php.


Check out the grand prize if you sign up for all five stops.

To buy a copy of the book, click here.

You can visit Susan at her Lifescapes blog for ongoing news about her books and life in the Texas Hill Country. Be sure to visit her often.

Congratulations to Betty S of Seabrook TX, who won Tuesday's BBT blog drawing! And if you haven't entered yet, today's drawing http://bloodredpencil.blogspot.com  will be open through Thursday noon.

Asking For Book Tour Advice

Today we welcome Roberta Isleib and Susan Wittig Albert to Blog Book Tours.

Dani: Hi Roberta and Susan. Roberta, you just completed your second blog book tour for Asking For Murder, third in the Advice Column mystery series. How did it go this time, now that you’re a seasoned pro?

Roberta: Hi Dani! Thanks for hosting me here and for all the tips and support you’ve offered! The tour was exhilarating, but exhausting. Just below you’ll read Susan Albert’s admonition that an author shouldn’t launch a blog book tour because he or she thinks it’s an easy way to promote.

Ditto!!

Dani: You hired a professional service your first tour and organized this one yourself. How did your workload differ in each scenario?

Roberta: There are three kinds of work involved, not counting spiffing up your own website/blog before this all begins. First would be locating hosts and signing them on to the tour. Second would be writing the posts for each tour stop. And third would be attending each day’s stop and chatting with your visitors. For a hired tour, many of the stops are standard to a number of touring authors, and therefore, less specific to you and your books. So it was definitely more work organizing my own tour. On the other hand, the stops were better tailored to my specific marketing needs.

As far as writing posts, I probably put an equal amount of work into both tours. There’s simply no point in turning in a shoddy essay if your goal is to have visitors become intrigued enough with your writing to buy books! And the same with visiting sites on the days they host you: You must plan to stop in several times daily and respond to comments. You want to be a cheerful, interesting presence—Iike you would at a dinner party, only in this case you can wear pajamas!

Dani: How did you connect with the host blogs on each tour, and did that determine what kinds of posts appeared?

Roberta: My book, ASKING FOR MURDER, is the third in a mystery series featuring Dr. Rebecca Butterman, advice columnist, clinical psychologist, gourmet cook, and amateur sleuth. So I tried to find a variety of websites that would be seen by mystery buffs, writers, as well as folks interested in cooking, advice columns, sandplay therapy, and psychology. (And here, I must plug Dani who pushed me to explore niche markets! Listen to your blogtour mom—she’s almost always right.) I contacted most of the hosts directly; a few invited me to make a stop on their blog. Some of the hosts had a specific idea of what they wanted. For example, Helen Ginger on Straight From Hel wanted a post on writing openings. Several others wanted to do book reviews or author interviews. But the majority expressed no preference. So my subjects ranged from disastrous dinner parties, to how to avoid giving bad advice, to a discussion about how the media makes psychologists look like buffoons, to a marketing chat between my husband and me. The challenge was to keep the connection between the host blog, my guest post, and my new book firmly in mind as I wrote each one.

Dani: Just for fun, what were your favorite stops on each book tour?

Roberta: My husband was a star on both tours. He’s funny and good-natured and I think it gave people a break from my voice to have him do an interview. The post on White On Rice Couple is hysterical, because they took the idea I sent (disastrous dinner parties) and ran with it. You must go look at the pictures of the gigantic lopsided cupcake. Although this might sound a little far from selling mysteries, the topic allowed me to post an excerpt about my character’s dinner party from hell in Asking for Murder …and hear a lot of funny stories about other people’s disasters.

Dani: And one of their readers commented that they bought your book! Those are the best comments. Now, what do you think you’d do differently on your next blog tour?

Roberta: I was not good with statistics. (Advice—don’t go on vacation right before your tour starts—things slip through the cracks!) If I’d had more time, I should have checked in with the hosts to be sure the comments feature was working. We had a couple of snafus with that. And some hosts were better at promoting the appearance than others—I’d offer suggestions to all the blogsters at the beginning.

Well-known authors will have a different experience with a blog tour than those just starting out. Susan’s books are very popular and her herbal/gardening niche is very well defined. This allows her to be quite selective when choosing hosts—something we all aspire to! Next time I would start even earlier choosing possible hosts, so I could take advantage of the best traffic. One more thing—there were people I approached who didn’t wish to be part of the tour, but they will post a review or an interview in their own time. Just saying, sometimes it helps to shoot high.

Susan: I’m a big believer in a tour that has a strong thematic continuity, so that people keep coming back for the next post. I also try to choose my hosts carefully--which means finding hosts with the right thematic fit, fairly strong traffic (the stronger the better!), and a habit of promoting their blogs. Peggy, my webmistress, puts up an invitation/application page that spells out all the details. I list the topics I want to post on (thinking “theme” with every topic), and invite hosts to pick a couple.

Then I put out the word on the Internet that I’m looking for hosts, and hope that the invitation will land in the right laps. If not, I go out and invite bloggers to “apply,” (I keep a list of people who mention my work on their blogs, and of course, a roll of blogs that are important in my areas of interest.) I schedule the tour. Peggy posts a calendar page (this is important, because it gives people an idea of the thematic “threads” that are involved).

I send out the blog posts to the hosts a couple of weeks ahead of time, asking them to pre-post, if possible. Peggy checks the posts to make sure they work right. Sometimes they don’t, which requires “adjustments.”
I promote the tour by directing readers to the calendar page, which is the “gateway” to the tour. Also, I offer a book prize at each blog stop. Peggy sets up the drawing pages--one page for each tour stop. She random-generates the winners and emails them to get name/address for mailing the prize book.

Now that the invitation/application page, the calendar page, and the drawing pages are done, they can be reused for the next tour, which will cut down my work substantially. Still, this project takes a lot of time and effort. Authors shouldn’t undertake a blog tour if they think it is “easy.”

Dani: One of the things I try to impress on authors planning tours is the importance of blog statistics, your own as well as tour hosts. Susan, I know you have clear opinions about this aspect of a tour. Roberta, how do your stats compare between the pro tour and your own?

Susan: Since I can’t see the blog stats (the host blogger reports her/his stats to me), I track the entries to the prize drawings, which serves as my own statistic. It should be smaller than the blog hit number (some people don’t bother to enter), but at least, it’s consistent. Also, I track the daily hits to the calendar page, since I use it as the “gateway” to the tour.

Roberta: I don’t really have numbers to answer your questions. But many more comments were made on the sites this time around—I imagine this has some correlation to traffic. (Again, listen to your blog mom and ask your hosts to give you numbers before and after!)

Dani: We know the most important statistics are book sales, because that’s what the publishers are most concerned about. Can you both comment on the effectiveness of the blog tours on your sales? Roberta, which of your tours do you think was most effective in that aspect?

Roberta: The only way I have to track sales right now is to haunt Amazon. And of course we’ve all been told that Amazon ranks account for only a small number of sales. That said, the numbers seem better this time. I did send an email out to my mailing list at the beginning of the tour, which coincided with the book’s release date. The biggest surge came then. I sent another email out when I’d had a TV appearance and could offer a peek at the clip. Surge in blog visits. So you see it’s very hard to separate cause and effect when you’re doing many things to promote a book.

Susan: I’ve said this before, but it bears saying again. Unless you are directing purchasers to one single web page for book purchases, it is very hard to separate out the effects of the blog tour on sales from all the other things you are (or should be!) doing to promote your book. Of course, you can check Amazon or Barnes/Noble ranking, but that’s not going to give you much hard data. Also: since I leave my calendar page online and occasionally direct people to a particular post or a group of posts, people continue to read the posts. So book sales from those posts may continue over a long time. It’s very hard to track results from that kind of “delayed” advertising.

Dani: Would you do it again? Any idea of changes you might make to make it easier?

Susan: Yes, I’ll do it again, in March-April 2009. I’ll look for different hosts, improve communications with them, and expand my promotion efforts. I’ll also come up with different post topics. My theory: every little bit helps.

Roberta: What she said (grin). Except I have to write another book first—I’m looking forward to having the time and energy to do that! A million thanks to you Dani for your enthusiasm and support!

Dani: I think the October theme at the Blog Book Tours Yahoo!Group better be working with statistics – at least the ones that are available! Susan is right when she says you can't track exact sales, although this works best with non-fiction and purchase links at each stop that lead directly to a publisher site. I know of one author who had to go into reprint halfway through his blog tour. But other statistics can give strong clues if we use them, like the reports from each of the hit counters. More authors are starting to add widgets like sitemeter and statcounter, but the reports often aren't read and understood. Guess we'll tackle that subject next.

Thanks to both of you for sharing your experiences with the rest of the writing world. Hope lots of good sales and more books are in your futures!

You may purchase Asking for Murder by clicking here.

If you have a question for Roberta, be sure to leave it in the comments.

Nightshade wrap-up

Last November, Susan Wittig Albert graciously shared with us information and tips for a successful blog book tour after completing her very first. You can read about it here. In this conversation, she'll share with us her latest experience and insight after finishing a second tour, this one for Nightshade, the most recent release in her long-running and popular China Bayles herbal mystery series.

Welcome back, Susan.

In the most recent tour, you had a new approach to get blog hosts. Tell us how that worked (with the online questionaire). How many bloggers filled out the form and how did you choose the finalists?

For the past 7 or 8 years, I've been building an active email list. Currently, mailings go out to about 10,000 people. On my email list, I invited bloggers to visit an online information page: an outline of what I wanted to achieve with the blog tour, how hosts could participate, and what we both might gain. I also posted the URL on various lists. The page is here. 400+ bloggers visited the page; 24 applied. I visited the blogs, looking for those that seemed compatible with the spirit of the books. I was interested in traffic (of course), but also in introducing the books to a variety of audiences. I chose blogs that targeted gardeners, naturalists, mystery readers/writers, and (in one case) library patrons. I invited two bloggers (who had not responded to the questionnaire) because they are friends and have a different audience.

You decided to promote the entire series, and not just the new book, in this three-week tour. How do you think that worked? Could you tell if you got sales boosts on all the titles in the series? Would you do this again? Do you feel it diverted attention from Nightshade or did it help?

I promoted all the books because new readers to the series don't want to start with the new hardcover. I'd like to acquaint readers with the series, not with just one book. Does that help Nightshade sales? Eventually, sure. One of my jobs as a writer is to write a book--any book--that makes the reader want to read more. A reader who starts with Book 5, might go back to Book 1 and read the whole series, eventually reaching Nightshade (probably about the time it comes out in paperback).



Sales? No, I can't tell a thing. The only way you can ever tie sales to a specific marketing strategy is to direct buyers to one sales point and I don't do that. The books are sold in chain bookstores and big box stores, independent bookstores, online, and on my website. There's no way to judge the effect of my blog tour, as I designed it, on the book sales. I do this on faith, and because I enjoy it. And yes, I will once again promote the whole series, if I do this again. (That said, it was gratifying to see Spanish Dagger hit the New York Times extended bestseller list, the Booksense list, and two Barnes & Noble bestseller lists.)

How did you prep your blog hosts this time? Did you have any new tricks developed since the first tour? Cheat sheets? Reminder schedule? Kick in the pants? Threats from Guido??

I sent everyone a welcome email, a how-to email, an email about promoting the visit, another how-to email along with my guest post, and a post asking for traffic counts. The posts all went up on time. One blogger had trouble posting photos. Another just didn't get it (poor choice on my part—this was one of the invited bloggers) and two bloggers had no traffic stats.

How did you promote the tour? What forums, communities, listservs? How did you use your own blog to promote tour stops? Any new insights since the first tour?

I promoted the tour in my eletters, my blog, on my website, on related listservs, on MySpace, on GoodReads. I did more coaxing/directing from my own blog than I did on my previous tour (with The Tale of Hawthorn House, in the Cottage Tales series), and I posted a "preview" of each host blog. Readers commented that they enjoyed the previews--I'll do that again.

How are you gauging results of the tour? What numbers are important to you? Hits on the book drawing page, your own blog traffic, reports from other bloggers, titlez.com, what else?

All the above. The blog hosts collected the unique visits for the three days of my visit (the three days readers could enter the drawing for that blog) and reported the numbers to me. I have no way of verifying their accuracy, but they all seem more or less in line. In addition, I have the number of entries in the 15 book drawings, which stayed high throughout the blog tour. Traffic to my blog is up by about 20%, to the website, about 15%.

You had an overlapping live tour with the blog tour? How did that work? Would you do that again?

Most of the people I meet on the live tour aren't Internet-oriented. They belong to garden clubs, library Friends groups, and so on. It's not the same market, so there's not really an overlap. The time element is an issue, yes. I usually plan to devote April to book promotion, though (the books are published in April), so in that sense, it doesn't matter whether I'm blogging or live-touring.

Time commitment from me. This was a biggie. Estimated times, probably conservative:

Obtaining a pool of potential blog hosts and choosing the hosts, 8 hours.
Calendaring and confirming with blog hosts, 4 hours.
Mailing ARCs, 2 hours.
Writing blog posts, 20 hours.
"Previewing" host blogs on my blog, 4 hours.
Communicating with blog hosts, 4 hours.
Promoting tour, 4 hours.
Checking guests posts and commenting 15 hours.
Sending thank-you books to host, 2 hours

Total: 63 hours, a bit more than 4 hours per blog

Maybe I overdid it? Should I have cut back to 10 blogs and saved 20 hours? Should I have cut back on the complexity of the blog posts, or the previewing, or comments on the blogs? Maybe. I was stretched for time, certainly.

Length of tour. When the posts were written and I saw what I'd done, I thought it was too long. But some people didn't find out about it until halfway through, and were glad it was still going on. Also, now I have all that material, and am thinking about ways I can recycle it.

Thanks, Susan. I already have a few more questions, but will wait until you're back from your live tour! Anybody else? Leave a comment for Susan or me if you have anything you'd like to add or ask.

A blog book tour in retrospect

Last week we hosted Susan Wittig Albert on her first-ever virtual book tour. Susan is a long-time web aficionada who for many years has utilized various internet tools like e-letters, websites, and a marvelous Lifescapes blog of her days in the Texas Hill Country. We were curious to know her reactions to the blog book tour experience and here are her responses:

How did this experience compare to your live tours?

Much less physical effort! I could stay at home and work, instead of driving for hours, giving a couple of talks a day, sleeping in a different bed every night, eating other people’s food (not my own cooking).

Did you feel you connected to your readers?

Actually, yes, although I didn’t expect that. I received a great many email comments and notes, as well as the comments on the blogs. And since I was seeing the names/email addresses of the people who dropped in on the drawings, I got a sense of the “attendance”—that part of it, anyway. Turns out that fewer than half of the people who read the blog entries participated in the drawings.

How much work/time involved compared to a live tour?

The up-front time was actually fairly comparable. I manage my own live tours, so I choose the venues (much as I chose the bloggers, by soliciting invitations), book my own motels, do my own maps. On a live tour, I have a couple of talks and repeat them (to the point where I’m pretty sick of them when it’s over)—the prep time is minimal. On the blog tour, each stop was a different prep, most of which required maybe 2-3 hours of writing, revising, doing photos, setting up links, and so on. Also, Peggy (my wizard of a webmistress, She-Without-Whom-Nothing-Happens) clocked quite a few hours in developing the program for the drawings, setting up the tour schedule webpage, etc. The big thing that was missing: the driving! On a live tour, I usually try to book two events a day, which usually means 4-5 drive-time hours, sometimes more.

How do the tour costs ($$) compare?

Hey, how do you spell M-O-T-E-L? $100 a night? Also, gas ain’t cheap nowadays. A 10,000-mile-tour (like the one I drove, yes, me myself and I, in 2005) would probably cost around $1200 in today’s gas, plus the daily tab on the rental car (or the wear/tear on a personal car), and a couple of plane fares, getting me where I couldn’t drive. I’m a cheap date where food is concerned, though. I’m perfectly happy with McD’s salads. Sometimes publishers pick up the costs, but an author who is paying her own way is chalking up a big tab.

What do you see as the greatest advantage of the virtual tour over a live tour?

Less time on the road, more time in my own bed (with my own DH), and lower cost. The carbon footprint is distinctly smaller, which counts for plenty, seems to me.

I got to spend some quality time with nine great blog hosts (thanks, guys!). We worked out problems together, figured out what sort of post to create, and communicated—more or less successfully. My live tours are longer and more hectic, and I never feel as if I really get to know the tour hosts.

Also: I got to “meet” some blog readers who would never in the world have made the effort to attend one of my live events—people who are regular readers of the host blog, who had never heard of my/my books before. If they read the post and remembered it, they might be inclined to remember that, the next time they run across my name/book title. Or they might go to the library to pick up the book. Or even look for it on a bookstore shelf. You never know. So I think the chances of picking up a new reader may actually be higher in a blog tour than a live tour. (I have no statistics on this, so don’t hold me to it.)

Plus: When you do a live tour, it’s in-one-ear-out-the-other. People remember the event, but not what I say. Also, the audience is fixed: it’s the folks who came that night, and that’s it. On the web, the tour posts hang around for a long time. People stumble over them much later. The audience is larger than the audience that showed up at the original time of the post. That’s a big plus, seems to me.

Disadvantages?

I’ll try to be systematic about this. Forgive me.

1) Impact on the attendees. Seems to me that a reader who makes the effort to come out to a bookstore or a library or wherever to hear me is going to remember the occasion longer than someone who comes to one of the blog stops. I’m guessing here, but I think that’s probably the case.

2) Non-blogging readers. I have a great many older readers who don’t do computers and stick their fingers in their ears when they hear the word BLOG. (They think it’s an obscenity.) On live tours, I reach them through libraries, garden groups, reading groups, herb societies, and Red Hatters. I can’t reach them through a blog tour.

3) Media impact. When I do a live tour, I put some up-front effort into encouraging the tour hosts to get strong local media for the event. Usually, I have pretty good luck: newspaper coverage, some local radio (by phone), some local TV. Also, the event is promoted in the host’s newsletters and website. Even though I may see only 40-50 people at an event, it’s likely that 400-500 have seen a notice of it, read something about it, or heard about it from a friend. On last year’s tour, I did a benefit for a university alumni event. There were a couple of hundred people at the event, but 5,000+ people all over the U.S. got a mailing from the university, with the book cover/my photo/all that good stuff. You don’t get anything like that with a blog tour.

4) Book sales. Let us not forget the point of this exercise, which is to sell books. Live tours sell books—not just the books I sign/sell at the events, but the books that I sign at various local bookstores, where I’ll do drop-ins whenever I can fit them in. Signed books sell, so when I leave a stack in a bookstore, I can figure they’ll be sold eventually. Blog tours, on the other hand, are more like advertising. You’re just putting the word out there, raising awareness, getting people’s attention. You can’t measure whatever sales you might achieve.

What did you love about the Blog Book Tour?

Getting all over the web! I have a Google Alert on my name (how’s that for chutzpah?) and I was delighted to see it flashing across the sky. That’s why I did this. I think it worked.

What did you loathe about it?

Nothing, really. Oh, yes: I got really impatient when the posts weren’t up by 8 a.m. Eastern Time, as I asked. That’s because I knew that readers would be there before the posts appeared, which feels really counter-productive to me. But then, I’m a former English teacher. I’ve been known to lock the door of my classroom at two minutes after the hour. (Not quite, but almost.)

How did you track your statistics throughout the tour?

That’s hard. I had to depend on self-report (not always accurate, and a couple of bloggers forgot to tell me that they didn’t have a statistics package). But on this tour, I had two other statistics of my own: the number of people who came to the tour schedule page, and the number of people who entered the drawing for each blog event. Those are my “hard” numbers. I’ll be curious to see if my next blog tour brings in more traffic—or less.

Thanks, Susan, for giving so generously of your time and insights once again.

An interview with Susan Wittig Albert

Unlike Susan Wittig Albert, I had a most unfortunate childhood. I did not learn to read with Beatrix Potter books. I was introduced to them much later in life, when as an aspiring children’s book writer, I took a job as a gift rep selling Random House books. In the many boxes of book samples I received weekly, one held a re-print of a Beatrix Potter book. Immediately enchanted by the story, I was even more taken by the illustrations. Potter’s skill as a naturalist artist is legendary. It is her life-like imagery in completely fantastical scenarios that makes the stories so mesmerizing for children and adults alike. One truly feels transported into another world.

It was certainly another world when Beatrix made a career of her little books, first by self-publishing and soon after through her publisher, Frederick Warne & Co. Much has been written about this part of her life, but today we’ll discuss the art and book publishing from a different angle as we visit with Susan Wittig Albert, author of the recently released The Tale of Hawthorn House. This is the fourth book in The Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter series. The charming cozy mysteries for adult readers are set in the Lake District that Beatrix so loved, and features Bea with a supporting cast of real and imaginary characters.

Author Susan Wittig Albert

The Tale of Hawthorn House

Dani: Susan, most fans of Beatrix Potter know quite a bit about her life, but one question that nags is why was Beatrix so intent on publishing the books?

Susan: Well, I think most artists—people who feel they have a talent and want to share it—are compelled to find an audience. Beatrix Potter was no different. As a child, both she and her brother Bertram were encouraged by their parents to develop their artistic aptitude. In her mid twenties, Beatrix sold some of her drawings as greeting cards and shared her gift of storytelling through the picture letters she wrote to her former governess’s children. As time went on, she wanted to share more widely, and came up with the idea for a book about Peter Rabbit, which she published herself when it was turned down by other publishers. After that, one thing led to another, and before long, she had an audience which demanded her work and a publisher who was eager to promote her. But even Beatrix was surprised by Peter’s acceptance. When the sixth printing was ordered, she wrote to her editor, Norman Warne, “The public must be fond of rabbits! What an appalling quantity of Peter!” Tongue-in-cheek, of course, but I think she was always amazed by her commercial success.

But the commercial success of her art meant something else: the possibility of personal independence. Beatrix noted more than once how nice it was to have some money of her own. She used her earnings to buy Hill Top Farm, which gave her the opportunity to escape from London and from her parents’ demands on her time.

And finally, there was her editor, Norman Warne. Beatrix wrote the early books (through 1905) in collaboration with him. He became increasingly important to her, and since her parents would not allow her to have any other connection with him, the books were a way of sustaining their relationship

Dani: What role did her fiancé, Norman Warne, the youngest son in the publishing firm, play in promoting sales and ensuring the financial success of the ventures over the long term?

Susan: I think the role Norman Warne played in shaping Beatrix’s stories was far more important than the role he played within the firm. Yes, he did go on extended sales trips to booksellers in various cities, soliciting orders for books—that was part of his job.

But more importantly, he was a mentor to Beatrix. He guided her in her choice of projects, encouraging her to develop her own original stories, rather than simply illustrate nursery rhymes, as she originally wanted to do. He offered suggestions for the drawings and the text. He was knowledgeable about the printing process and about ink and paper, and when she had changes or corrections to make, he saw that they got made. He also probably ran interference for her with his brothers, Harold and Fruing, who sometimes wanted her to do things she didn’t want to do, such as to illustrate another writer’s book.

Most importantly, Norman was a supporter, a cheerleader (a wonderful, wonderful quality in an editor!) and her friend. Without him, it’s entirely possible that she wouldn’t have gone past the first book or two. And it took real courage for her to go on working after his death.

Dani: Did Beatrix set the stage for merchandise sales related to the books long before Disney padded its fortunes this way? Any idea how much success the publisher had with these add-on sales?

Susan: In the early 1900s, there was (as Beatrix said herself) “a run on toys copied from pictures.” English and German toy-makers were using storybook characters as models for their wares, and she was afraid that her popular characters would be copied. So in 1903, Beatrix patented her Peter Rabbit doll, with whiskers pulled out of a brush and lead-weighted feet, and urged Norman to find a manufacturer to make the doll. She created a board game, wallpaper, and other book-related merchandise, to the point where (as I suggest in The Tale of Hawthorn House) there were almost more “sideshows” than she could keep track of. However, she was always more keen on licensing toys and other items than her publisher was, and after 1906 or so, she became increasingly frustrated with Warne’s seeming inability to keep up with her creative ideas.

Dani: Warne owns most of the rights to artwork and images of Beatrix to this very day. How did they gain such control over it all? Was it difficult getting permissions for your series? Did you discuss with Warne using Beatrix’s own artwork for your book?

Susan: When Beatrix died in 1943, she bequeathed her shares in Frederick Warne and the rights and royalties in her books first to her husband, Willie Heelis, and after his death to Norman’s nephew, Frederick Warne Stephens. These were later given to the publishing company as a way of honoring her relationship to Norman and her long friendship with the Warne family, which continued long after Norman’s death. (You can find more details about this in Linda Lear’s biography, Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature.)

In 1983, Frederick Warne was acquired by Penguin, which also owns my publisher, Berkley. So when I needed to get a license to use Beatrix’s characters (Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, Jemima Puddle-Duck, and so on), the legal folks were able to work it out. I don’t think we ever discussed using Beatrix’s art. From a marketing point of view, that would have been a good thing, but I want The Cottage Tails to stand on their own, and prefer the freedom to develop the art for the series.

Dani: I love the images you ended up developing for your own books, which capture the spirit of BP without copying. Can you tell us about the process of choosing that artwork and who the artist is?

Susan: Normally, authors don’t have any say in their cover art. This was the case with the first book in the series, The Tale of Hill Top Farm. The artist did a nice job, but I was deeply disappointed, because there was no image of Hill Top Farm, one of the most famous houses in England. Through a friend, I found artist Peggy Turchette, and commissioned her to do the art for the Cottage Tales website and other advertising materials, including a postcard for the second book, The Tale of Holly How. My editor saw it and liked it and asked Peggy to do the cover art. So we’ve worked together ever since—certainly a happy arrangement for me. All of the art work that you see on the Cottage Tales website also comes from Peggy’s talented brush. You’re right—her animals are reminiscent of Potter’s without being duplicates—that’s important. For example, Peggy had originally put a shawl on Jemima Puddle-Duck for the cover of the editor at Frederick Warne (who approves my manuscripts and our art work as part of the licensing arrangement) asked us to take it off. The shawl made my Jemima look too much like Beatrix’s Jemima. That’s the sort of thing we get into.

Dani: Thanks, Susan!

Also, plan to visit all the tour stops for more interesting interviews and guest posts by Susan Wittig Albert. The entire blog book tour schedule is posted here.

You can read the prologue to The Tale of Hawthorn House by clicking here.

Buy the book by clicking here.