Anne Cater: Running blog tours for authors and publishers

Anne Cater runs blog tours for authors and publishers. In 2021 she organised a grand total of 506 tours, at the rate of approximately ten a week. Each tour involves a minimum of ten bloggers; often as many as fifty. Anne shares each post across all of her platforms, acknowledges each one personally, and thanks the whole crew on the final day of each tour. The number of individual interactions is enough to make your head spin. And that’s without counting recruitment, liaising with the client, and commissioning promotional assets. Oh, and reading a ton of books.

None of it fazes the self-styled “queen of spreadsheets”, Anne “colour-coded” Cater. “It’s my admin skills,” she tells me. “That’s my thing.” She’s been honing them since she left school at the age of sixteen and got her first job selling nuts and bolts to builders.

How did it all begin? It wasn’t intentional. She was simply blogging about books for the sheer joy of it. “It took me a long time to realise it was work.”

Now it’s serious. The growth is due partly to the rise in self-publishing, partly to the increasing power of reader feedback in the social media age. But business exploded during lockdown, with authors and publicists desperate to compensate for the lack of live events and in-person signings. The 2021 mix comprised tours for around 150 individual authors and 350 publishers.

Blog tours amplify word-of-mouth recommendations of any given book through the power of social media, with individual bloggers committing to a schedule drawn up by the tour supremo to ensure new reviews are posted each day and shared across ever expanding networks. It’s crowdsourcing applied to book promotion, and helps mitigate against the budgetary inequality inherent in the publishing industry.

Random Things Tours is the professional offshoot of Cater’s amateur blog, Random Things Through My Letterbox, which was inspired by a conversation she had with a writer in 2009. Ian Carpenter had just published Guardianwork, about how, having been made redundant, he had set about applying for every job on the Guardian jobs page, from chief bottle washer to leader of the Liberal Democrats, and blogging about it. Anne told him how she was always getting free stuff through the letterbox, and how it started when she was a child, because she loved getting post. “I had a book called Free Stuff for Kids that my mum got me from a Scholastic Book Fair.” You should blog about it, Carpenter said. So she did.

It wasn’t long before Anne abandoned loaves of bread and tobacco pouches and stop-snoring aids – a random, yet representative sample of stuff she got sent – to focus on her first love: reading. Her mother taught her to read before she started school, and kept her supplied with bag-loads of books from the second-hand market stall in the tiny Nottinghamshire village of Laneham, where Anne grew up, and the mobile library, which came on Wednesday afternoons. Anne devoured the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys stories, and later Danielle Steele and Jackie Collins and Barbara Taylor Bradford. Her mother was a fan of Catherine Cookson.

They wrote together too, to Anne’s maternal grandmother in Donegal, who they saw once a year in summer and who didn’t have a telephone. “We grew up in this house of getting letters.” She had a penpal in Glasgow who boasted of having a pair of corduroy jeans in every colour (Anne had one, in brown, bought for a school trip). Her paternal grandmother lived round the corner and had a phone on a shared line. Sometimes she would pick up the receiver only to hear another voice; other times she would turn up on the doorstep to summon Anne’s parents to answer a call.

Anne’s father worked at a coal-fired power station. The family lived in a two-up two-down, the middle cottage in a row of three, with an outside toilet. They had a bath once a week at their gran’s place, and in between it was a cold wash over the sink. But Anne’s dad was a practical man who could fix your kettle, or buy a car from the scrapyard and rebuild it, and when Anne was eleven he bought the three houses for £11,000 and knocked them through into one. He was still working on it when she left home at twenty-two. They still didn’t have central heating, but she had happy memories of her first wee inside the house. “It wasn’t his trade. He learnt as he went along.”

Which is a trait Anne inherited. She taught herself to type on a manual typewriter wearing fingerless mittens against the cold, as she would later teach herself Excel. “It’s just in me that I have to provide for myself.”

The first thing the young Anne saw when she woke up each morning was Rampton Hospital across the field. Her mother was a nursing assistant there and her gran ran the staff social club. Anne soon followed them to work in the allocations office, keeping timesheets for the 1,500 nurses. Soon she took on a newly created role as a clerk on the male admission ward. Back in the day, when people were put away for being illegitimate, or an inconvenience to society, she would regularly run into inmates wandering round the village. But by the time she joined, it had become a high-security facility akin to Broadmoor.

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There were eight male staff to eighteen patients, plus Anne. On day one she was welcomed with the words: “You’ll see things here that no woman should ever see.” Even so, she lasted ten years. Why did she leave? “I was becoming too hard. I would see the news and nothing affected me, because I was reading about it and seeing it every single day. I couldn’t go on thinking, so what that so and so was murdered and cut into pieces.” Then a patient poured boiling water over a nurse. “I never heard a scream like it in my life. All I could think of was that if he’d done it to me, my colleagues would’ve had to cut my clothes off, and they’re all men. He was all swollen.”

Anne found her niche with young people. She worked with care leavers, with young offenders and those at risk of offending. She felt if she could catch them early enough, “maybe we could stop them getting as far as Rampton. But once the Youth Justice Board was disbanded, once the Labour government were out, all that funding disappeared and we were scrabbling around for money, and work that we were doing successfully just got stopped.” She’d loved that job. “We wanted them to look back and say, I remember when I worked with that person who helped me, even if it was just taking me shopping or to the park, or looking at reading and writing.”

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It was on her fiftieth birthday that Anne decided she’d had enough of scrabbling around and resolved to retire from full-time employment. She’d made a name for herself as a blogger. She was a regular at London book launches. Her face was known from Twitter. She didn’t need to advertise. She was soon approached by No Exit Press to organise her first blog tour, followed rapidly by Orenda Books, who shrewdly got her inputting data too. Now she also runs tours for big name imprints across the “big five” as well as indies like Unbound and Dark Edge Press. It would probably be easier to list the publishers she doesn’t work for rather than the other way round.

When her husband accompanied her to Harrogate’s Crime Writing Festival in 2017, he felt like Prince Philip trailing after the Queen. “He said it was like being married to a celebrity,” she says, with a mischievous grin. “But only in book world.” One morning she sat next to Lee Child and Simon Mayo at breakfast and was unimpressed. But then she met Judith O’Reilly. O’Reilly is a journalist turned crime writer, then self-published, now with Head of Zeus, author of the Michael North thriller series, but her pulling power that day was her acquaintance with Jeremy Vine, also in attendance. Vine was Anne’s “guilty pleasure”, so O’Reilly brokered an introduction, and Anne and Jeremy “got quite drunk”. Then O’Reilly rocked up and said: “‘OK then, are you going to do my blog tour?’ So we shook hands and it went from there.” Which is how O’Reilly became the first author to enjoy a Random Things tour without mediation from a publisher.

“Jeremy took a video of my tattoo and put it on his Facebook page,” Anne confesses. Turns out the tattoo comes from Jimi Hendrix: “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.”

Cater is an eclectic reader. But like many bloggers she tends to specialise in crime. And she’s known a lot criminals. I wasn’t the first to ask why she isn’t writing books herself. “Dialogue frightens the hell out of me,” she answers. Then adds: “Anyway, I eat lots as well, but I’m not a chef.”

@drheathermartin