Blog tours are great for introducing new audiences to your book. But for your existing audience, they can sometimes get a little . . . repetitive. Boring.

Most blog tour posts consist of the back cover copy and a review of the book. We definitely want the blogger’s review in the post, reading the same back cover over and over can get tedious, and even your biggest fans won’t read 25 identical posts, even for the reviews.

What’s the solution? Variety, of course!

But first, Announcements!

TODAY, July 16, is Sell Books for Steve Day! Steven Kerry Brown is the author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Private Investigating, a really useful book if your character is a PI (or if you want to be one, you know, if you want to look at the intended audience. Whatever). I’ve had a chance to “meet” Steve online and see how much he gives back to other writers, and have been the beneficiary of his expertise more than once.

Steve has leukemia, and recently had to undergo a bone marrow transplant. As a PI, he’s self-employed and doesn’t have insurance. The transplant comes with a price tag of $500,000. To help someone who has helped so many people, Jeffrey Phillips has brought together more than a dozen authors who will donate part of their proceeds from today’s sales to Steve’s treatment. You can see all the available books or donate directly on Jeff & Steve’s blog, Handcuffed to the Ocean, where Steve is also reporting on his recovery.

Next weekend, July 27-28, I’ll be presenting on HTML at the iWriteNetwork Conference. If you’ll be in the American Fork area, it’s only $50 for two days. Check out the schedule in the sidebar of the iWriteNetwork blog.

Finally, remember that every comment on this blog in July is a chance to win a free 15-page critique from me!

Now, back to blog tours.

Encouraging variety to keep your blog tours interesting

Although bloggers are endlessly creative, it’s up to the author to encourage bloggers to use that creativity. You might include a list of ideas for bloggers so they know you’re open to them thinking outside the box when it comes to their posts.

• Author interviews—answer a few questions for the blogger, about your writing journey, the process of writing this book, your characters, or even you.

• Character interviews—if a blogger has a favorite character, you can answer questions as that character, which is not only fun but helps to draw potential readers into a character more.. I’ve also seen fellow authors have one of their characters interview one of the characters from

• Giveaways—these are generally sponsored by the author and often have a big, overarching prize (I’ve seen Kindles and the like). However, if the individual blogger wants to also sponsor a giveaway. The blogger might offer their [hard] copy of the book, or if the author provided them with an extra copy to giveaway. If the blogger is an author, Another option might be a book of theirs in the same genre, though that might be a little sketchy.

• Book features—this is my favorite, because you can go so many directions with it. My friend Annette Lyon had someone on her book tour blog about the smells in her book. How cool is that?

What do you think? What are the coolest blog book tour posts you’ve done or seen? (Links welcome, but if you use more than 2 I’ll have to manually approve the comment.)

Photo by Kevin Dooley