Guest Post by Rosie Amber ~ author of Talk of The Playground

When the police have been seen at school on the second day of term, fighting breaks out amongst parents and gossip about individuals threatens to spiral out of control. Is this an idyllic English school? Sophie Grey lands a job where she must hunt out the inside story.

Available on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com

Learning from Blogging

Blogging opened up a whole new world to me and I have met some lovely people. I try to publish a blog post every single day because my blog is still quite new and I need to keep readers interested. I began my blog primarily to help promote my own book, but it has become a much bigger part of my life. I’m now able to use my love of reading and my blog to help promote other people books too. My most recent addition to the blog is a page I’m building on resources for writers. It features people who offer editing services, marketing, promotion, book covers, book reviewers etc and I shall be adding more.

My first published book is Talk of the Playground, a fun tale of the ins and outs of an English village school. I call it my work of love rather than my work of art because it meant so much to me at the time. I learnt a lot about writing and self-publishing and have learnt even more from blogging and reading other writers work.

Reading and Blogging Challenges

I love reading. In the Goodreads 2013 challenge I read 154 books, this year I expect to increase that number. Nearly every book I read gets a review on Goodreads, Amazon and my blog, with links to my Facebook author page, Google+ and Twitter. I also do Guest Author Interviews and take part in book related tours.

In 2013 I was lucky enough to be invited to write a monthly book review page for a local magazine called “Fleet Life”. 5000 copies go out locally and the magazine has an online version too, I usually review 5 books of my choice per month for the magazine. In 2014 I also picked up its sister magazine Elvetham Heath Directory which has 2000 copies and an online version, I do a different set of reviews in each magazine.

I love keeping my blog fresh; in April 2013 I took part in my first April A to Z Challenge and I blogged my way through the alphabet matching book titles to the letters of the alphabet. This year I took part for a second year and again promoted books using all the letters of the alphabet, it is a great way to meet lots of new bloggers from all over the world.

Never one to stand still for long I recently completed a year-long challenge that I set myself on the day I began reading a book called AYear of Doing Good by Judith O’Reilly. Judith challenged herself to do Good Deeds for a whole year and wrote a truly inspirational book about what happened. Judith undertook giant acts of good, my own challenge was to do just 1 Good Deed a day for a year. Every Sunday I update my readers with my latest deeds. On April 16^th 2014 I celebrated completing my challenge and am now carrying on for a second year. Do come and check it out at My Year of Good Deeds.

Book review Challenge Series

I’ve just launched a Book review challenge as I’m very keen to get more people to write reviews for the books they read. How often do you write and post a review of a book you've read? Ever wondered if your review would be of any use to anyone? Don't know how to write a review? We will be hearing from several book reviewers on how they go about writing a review and from authors about the importance of reviews. 

It began on Wednesday 25th June - Book reviewing by Rosie Amber + Guest piece from Melissa Newman of Martin Sisters Publishing + easy to follow tips for writing your own review.

* Thursday 26th June - Book reviewing by Bodicia from A Woman's Wisdom + How to download a PDF file of a book to your kindle + Non-fiction book reviews

* Friday 27th June - The Importance of book reviews by author Terry Tyler + a look at Goodreads + A bad or negative review, should you write it?

* Saturday 28th June - Book Reviewing by Diane Coto from Fictionzeal + Shelfari + Going in deep, talking reviews

* Sunday 29th June - Book reviewing by Ionia Martin from Readfulthings + Author Adrienne Vaughan’s views on book reviews + Reviewing to Amazon + Gearing up to write that review

* Monday 30th June - The Importance of book reviews by Lizzie Lamb + Authors should walk to the book reviewer’s side of the fence

Come and find out more and sign up for the challenge to read a book for FREE and write a book review at my blog Rosie Amber.

Rosie Amber

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 About the Author

Rosie Amber is an author, book reviewer and blogger, living in the county of Hampshire in the UK.  She is married with two children and juggles part-time work with full-time motherhood.  Rosie says, 'I was inspired to combine a love of writing with a desire to embrace social technology. Thus my first book was born from the experiences of being a playground parent.' Find out more on Rosie's blog Rosie Amber and find her on Twitter @rosieamber1 and on Facebook.