Catriona Hoy is visiting my blog today for a wrap party! It’s the end of her blog tour to celebrate the release of her gorgeous new picture book, Puggle.

Puggle is based on fact and follows the journey of an orphaned baby echidna, cared for by wildlife carers until it is ready to be released back into the wild. Cat’s story, coupled with Andrew Plant’s wonderful illustrations, gives an endearing ‘puggle’s-eye’ view into the work involved in caring for injured and orphaned wildlife.

Since this is Cat’s first blog tour (and my first time hosting a tour), I thought I’d pick her brains to find out a bit more about touring in cybercpace….

Congratulations on finishing your first blog tour, Cat! Before we get the wrap party underway, can you tell me what made you decide to do a blog tour?

Thanks for having me over for the last day of Puggle’s Blog Tour. It’s been an eye opening experience, that’s for sure.

At the end of last year, I was lucky enough to attend Hodder’s christmas party in London. Just for a moment I felt glamourous and then intimidated and crept around the edges for a bit until I met my editor and illustrator. There was a general speech and one fo the comments that stuck in my head was that authors needed to get more involved in  their own publicity. We all have to have web pages, we should be blogging, tweeting. Eek, I thought I was doing okay with just having a website. I’d also previously attended a workshop run by Candy Gourlay at the SCBWI conference in Bologna in 2008. Candy was a fantastic speaker and is definitely a master (mistress?) of the web world. She showed us examples  of different author’s websites and those of publishers; some good, some bad. She said that these days people didn’t want to see static websites, they wanted to interact with the author.

I felt I was falling behind, so one of my resolutions this year was to upgrade my blog and actually put something on there and then join twitter. I still feel I’m a complete novice but I have a lot of writing friends who are very generous with their time and advice. Blogging was something I’d avoided, I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to read what I’d have to say.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I’d heard about blog touring but wasn’t sure how it all worked. I decided to just jump in at the deep end and start one up for Puggle. I joined a group called aussieblogtours run by Sally Murphy, which had lots of useful advice. It’s been a steep learning curve but thoroughly worth it.

Did it involve a lot of work?

My family would say a resounding YES! The advantage of a blog tour is that you have the questions several days beforehand and can think about your answers. The downside was that with 11 dates on my tour, there were 11 sets of i