Anne Cater: Running blog tours for authors and publishers

It started off as a blog in her own time, and then Anne Cater moved on to organising tours for publishers and writers, writes Heather Martin

Queen of spreadsheets: Anne ‘colour-coded’ Cater (Anne Cater)

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.”