VIRTUAL BLOG TOURS BY MARILYN MEREDITH
Having been on several of these virtual book or blog tours, in many ways they are much easier than going on a physical book tour however, they are time consuming if you do it right.
I must confess that I paid a company (Pump Up Your Promotions) to set-up my blog tours and to create a book trailer or video.
However, since I added a few stops on the way myself, I can tell you what you have to do for a successful blog tour.
First, you must do some research of blogs that might be receptive to host you and your book. One way is to use the blogs that you like to visit most. You also could see what place other people with similar books have visited on their blog tours. You’ll need to set up a calendar and ask the blog owner if they’d be willing to host you on your blog tour during a set period of time—a two week period or a over a month. It’s best if you only have one blog stop a day and you might want to skip the weekends.
Setting up the tour takes awhile and should be done a couple of months ahead of the actual tour because some will want you to answer interview questions, others might want a writing or promotional tip. Some may want to read the book and write a review—which of course means you have to send them a book and give them enough time to read it. You should come up with something different for each blog stop. You’ll want to send each one a .jpg of your book cover and a photo of yourself. Be sure to include links where your book can be purchased and your website and/or you own personal blog.
Once the tour begins it’s up to you to do the promoting. Each day of a new blog stop you need to let people know where you are on every list you’re on, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and any other social networking site you belong to, as well as lists that you subscribe to.
You must also go to the blog and leave a thank-you message in the comments. One or two times during the day you should go back to see if anyone has asked a question in the comments so you can answer it.
Does doing a blog tour help with sales? I do notice that my numbers on Amazon go down when I’m on a blog tour—but like anything else, it’s hard to track whether it was the blog tour that did it or something else.
Though a blog tour is work it is also a lot of fun. I’d love to host someone on my blog site who is going on a blog tour.
My latest tour was for Dispel the Mist from Mundania Press http://www.mundaniapress.com
Marilyn
http://fictionforyou.com
http://marilynmeredith.blogspot.com
VIEW THE BOOK TRAILER: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmZhaJgHUx0
I enjoyed my blog book tour, but like people say, it did get tiring. Lots of my stops kept my post up for more than one day, some up to a week. It was my happy duty to go back to those blogspots each day until my post was down and check the comments and respond to them.
ReplyDeleteI think I need to make an explanation, since someone thought I'd made a mistake about the Amazon numbers. When people buy books, the numbers on Amazon go down, not up. When the numbers are in the millions, that's not good, when the go down into the hundred thousands, that's better, and down into the hundreds even better.
ReplyDeleteThis post has a lot of good advice on it, and neatly put together. I'm thinking of doing a virtual tour in the spring, for a book coming out in May 2010. If space is available, I'd love to drop by here.
ReplyDeleteSusan Oleksiw
Under the Eye of Kali (May 2010)
Susan, I'd love to have you guest blog. Just send me an email when you're ready.
ReplyDeleteJoan
Good points to keep in mind when planning a tour. Thanks for posting them, Marilyn. I like doing the virtual tours as I am so far away from bookstores to do personal appearances and I am not able to travel much. Hard to measure the success, but I sure have met a lot of neat people on the Internet.
ReplyDelete