Organised Blog Tours

I just wondered if anyone has used a third party to organise their blog tour and if so, can you recommend anyone?

I've been contacted by Reading Addiction Blog Tours who seem to offer a decent service.

I'm just weighing up the pros and cons at the moment. On one hand it would save me a lot of time in terms of organising, and I'm pretty new to this so help would be great. On the other hand it's a small but significant amount of money to add to the slowly growing cost of self-publishing.

What are people's experience?

That's true and I am approaching with caution. But I don't have the contacts that they do. I'm networking via Goodreads and Twitter as well as Emailing bloggers with queries but the number of responses I acquire are fairly low compared to the effort I'm putting in. Plus there is then arranging dates. I generally have to work around them. Sometimes I find they surprise me and put the review up within a few days! I've not even released the book yet so I feel like I'm confusing my potential readers who will see the review and wonder where they can buy the book.

I also haven't got a clue how to facilitate a giveaway to full effect and it would be nice to get some guidance through it.

They have informed me that they'll send me a list of the blogs before I'm invoiced so I can have a look and see if they are appropriate. I'm quite tempted but I wanted to see if anyone else had gone through this method and had a bad experience first.