Archives

Marketing

Virtual Book Tours: an introduction by Tristi Pinkston

2 Comments
This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series Marketing: Blog tours

by Tristi Pinkston

As you get more involved in Internet marketing, you’ll hear the term “virtual book tour.” What is that, anyway? Basically, a virtual book tour is where an author or publicist has arranged for several different blogs or sites to feature the book within a relatively short period of time. These posts should include the book’s cover, price, purchase link, and a little blurb about the book—and hopefully a review written by the blogger or a guest post by the author.

Virtual book tours are an excellent way to spread the word about your book. They can be as simple as asking five or ten of your good friends to blog about your book, or you can take it a step further and ask bloggers from all over the Internet and all walks of life to talk about it. You can determine for yourself how complicated or how easy you want the process to be, and whether you want to include any giveaways with the promotion. They can be inexpensive, or they can be a little more of an investment. It’s all up to you.

Regardless of how you set up your tour, there are a few simple steps you should take to ensure the best results.

1. Choose bloggers whose readers are likely to be interested in the topic of your book. Your favorite aunt might be really eager to blog about it, but if her readers are only knitters, and your book is about exploring coral reefs, this might not be the best fit. However, keep in mind that we can’t prejudge who will enjoy what books. For the most part, see if you can match readership with your topic.

2. Choose bloggers who have more than fifty followers. Of course, the more followers the better, but at least fifty is a good number to start with.

3. Provide the review copy to the reviewer. It’s bad form to ask them to review the book and then tell them where they can buy it … I had someone do that to me, and needless to say, I deleted the e-mail instantly.

4. Ask them to post their reviews on Amazon and GoodReads as well as on their blog. This will get you a ton more exposure, and it’s really only a few extra minutes on their end.

The Internet is the way everyone is marketing now. If you can utilize the Internet to spread the word about your book (or other product), you’ll be better able to keep in step with the future of marketing.

About the Author
Tristi Pinkston is the author of thirteen published books and works as a freelance editor. If you’d like to learn more about her new book Virtual Book Tours: Harness the Power of the Internet, click here.

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!

 
Marketing

Blog tours: Best practices for bloggers & authors

2 Comments
This entry is part 2 of 4 in the series Marketing: Blog tours

Blog tours offer both bloggers and authors a chance to get out there, find new books to love, find a bigger audience. I’ve participated in a few blog tours for other authors. Here are a few things I’ve learned over the years.

For bloggers

Be honest! While author-bloggers want to be loyal to fellow authors, we have to remember our blog readers are our real audience. If our blog readers go out and spend their money on a book we didn’t really enjoy but made to sound good, might that reflect poorly on us?

Be kind. To offset the above, just because you didn’t like a book doesn’t mean you should publicly rip on it. If you really, really hated it, I recommend contacting the author or blog tour coordinator first to let them know you don’t feel good about posting your feelings in public. I know of authors who’ve invited bloggers to post it anyway. You might focus on areas that you feel were strong and list other areas that needed improvement.

Link, link, link! You don’t have to list all the planned stops on the tour with links, but at the bare minimum, you should provide a clickable link to somewhere your readers can buy the book. Links to the author’s website and/or blog are awesome, too.

Remember your FTC disclosure: you received the book for free from the author/publisher, but that didn’t affect your opinion. In some cases, you might also need to disclose that it didn’t guarantee a review (such as newspapers, who receive free books to review all the time, but don’t guarantee a review just because you give them a free copy).

Make your blog post engaging! Just slapping the back cover copy on your blog only does so much to help to the author&madsh;or interest your blog readers! We’ll take a look at this in a little more depth in another week or two.

For authors

Be clear and communicative. Last week, Tristi Pinkston gave us some great advice on setting up a blog tour. Make sure you make your expectations clear from the get-go: tell the bloggers exactly what you’d like them to do. Offer gentle reminders about a week before a post is scheduled.

Be accommodating. Like Tristi said last week, provide an image of at least the book cover (an image of you would be helpful too!), as well as a clean, well-formatted copy of the back cover copy for them to cut and paste. If you can, offer your review copies in multiple formats: hardcover, Kindle, Nook, PDF, etc. And be sure to give them a direct link to somewhere their readers can purchase your book, to make things easy for them.

Cross promote, cross promote, cross promote! You do not want your blog devolving into a daily update of all the other places your book is being featured, but you definitely need to link to the reviews people are doing for you! If you have a Twitter account or a Facebook page, sharing those reviews there would be great. (Look for an awesome quote to go with the link to help draw people in.)

Recognize that not everyone will love your book. It’s just a mathematical impossibility. The purpose of a blog tour is getting your book out there in front of a wider audience, and not everyone will love everything they read. It’s not necessarily a reflection on you or your writing or even your book. So let’s put down the flamethrower, okay?

Consider whether you want to comment publicly on the blog posts. I have friends who don’t because they feel that their presence might stifle the conversation on the blog, emailing their thanks instead. Others pop by to say thank you publicly. Others engage in a dialogue (friendly, I hope!) in the comments.

Be gracious. The bloggers on your tour are doing you a favor, even if they post a negative review. Say thank you. Stay humble. Make friends.

A successful blog tour generates more than just sales. You’re building readership and creating relationships. Keep that in mind no matter which side of the book you fall on.

What do you think? What have you learned from doing blog tours, as a blogger or an author?

Photo credits: On the platform, reading—Mo Riza; Thank you sign—Avard Woolaver

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!

 
Marketing

Blog Tours: Keeping it interesting

2 Comments
This entry is part 3 of 4 in the series Marketing: Blog tours

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

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!

 
Marketing

Blog Tours: Finding & Measuring Success

This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series Marketing: Blog tours

by Rachelle Christensen

I think the most important key to a successful blog tour is organization. It’s tricky when you’ve scheduled 20-25 stops on your tour. You will need to answer questions, give reminders, and make sure each blogger has the information they need to participate fully. I keep a document or spreadsheet for each blog tour and keep track of things like who I invite to participate and their response, most reliable book reviewers, individual review and interview dates, email and web addresses, etc.

Jordan has covered some great information in this series, but you might be asking yourself, are blog tours really worth it? The answer to that is YES if you coordinate one correctly. If you don’t think the advice that Jordan has posted applies to you and that you can run a successful tour with a handful of unknown blogs, then no, a blog tour won’t benefit your book.

Blog tours are about seed-bedding. Have you heard the marketing phrase that a person needs to be exposed to an item anywhere from three to twenty times before they will purchase? Well, it’s true. So when an author decides to put their book on tour, they should be doing so for the exposure. Great reviews are priceless, but go look up a few books on Amazon. You might be surprised to see some well-known authors who have less than ten reviews, or you might be surprised to see some that have over 100. A blog tour creates buzz and plants seeds in prospective readers’ minds. Does this translate to hard sales? Not usually sales that you can measure, but it translates to many results that you might not even realize.

Here’s an example. Perhaps reader Jane hears about your book, then she sees some glowing reviews on your blog tour. The next time she is at the library, she asks them to order in your book. Reader Jane checks out your book and loves it. Now she is excited for the next book and because she enjoyed your book so much, she wants to buy the next one as soon as it’s available.

In the above example, you can see that I’m trying to share the vision of planting seeds. Sometimes you’ll get to enjoy an early harvest, other times the seeds will grow slowly and turn into a towering oak tree. Exposure is great for any business and the same goes for authors.

Say Thank you! I think it’s important to thank your blog tour participants individually and think about how you can extend that thanks in other ways. On a recent tour that I managed, we offered a special thank you gift to each blogger who posted their review on time and also on Goodreads and Amazon. It was a fun way to continue to get the bloggers invested in the tour and get the results wanted.

Stay positive. Look at each stop on your tour as a potential seed. Word of mouth is the best form of advertising and you never know who might see that post and decide to invest in your book. If you don’t see a huge jump in sales, don’t get discouraged. Remember, that you are offering readers many chances to get to know you and the quality of your writing. Think about other marketing avenues that you might use to piggyback on the blog tour. Giveaways are fun, as well as special “buzz-fests” or “book bombs” or hide-and-seek questions in the first chapter of your book. All of these work to increase visibility.

Have fun! Don’t be a stress-case if one of your reviewers misses their posting date. Life happens, and sometimes we have to pick up the pieces and be flexible. If I see that a reviewer hasn’t posted on their scheduled date, I send out a reminder just checking in and offer another date if they are unable to make it work that day. I certainly appreciate it when people are understanding of my brain cramps, so be courteous and keep things on the up side.

Keep a page on your website, blog, or sidebar with all of the participants and dates of the blog tour. When your blog tour is finished, make sure you have that page somewhere permanent in case you need to reference it.

There are many other benefits to blog tours, such as gathering usable endorsements from reviewers to be used for other marketing purposes and making lasting connections with your audience. Be willing to think outside the box to take advantage of every opportunity to create a successful blog tour—but most of all enjoy!

About the Author

Rachelle J. Christensen is an author who enjoys blogging and learning new marketing strategies. She organizes blog tours for a multi-million dollar worldwide company and has developed secrets for low-cost Internet marketing.
Her first novel, Wrong Number, was awarded Outstanding Book of the Year from the League of Utah Writers and was also a 2010 Whitney Finalist. Her second suspense novel, Caller ID, was released March 2012. She is also the author of a nonfiction book, Lost Children: Coping with Miscarriage for Latter-day Saints.

Is your writing any good? Join my writers' email group to find out how you can get a free edit & skill assessment!