The Quickest Blog Book Tour Guide Ever

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Congratulations! Your book has been published and you are going on a book-signing tour. But wait. How much is that going to cost? Is your publisher going to pay for a tour? Not likely in this age of budget cuts and rising fuel costs. You, author, are on your own, and your book advance, if you even got one, doesn't come close to covering your costs. What to do?

Go on a blog book tour! Also known as a virtual book tour or vbt, a blog book tour not only saves money and travel expenses, it likely will reach a larger and more interested audience via the internet. All you need is pertinent blogs and creative planning. Here's a quick blog book tour guide to get your started.

The Top Reasons Authors Should Plan a Blog Book Tour 

  • Tour from the comfort of your home
  • Save lots of money
  • Help save the environment
  • Tour lives forever online
  • Target the market that is interested in your topic

Step #1 

Create your own blog

First have your own blog. You can start with a free blog at Blogger or WordPress.

Then make it a really good blog. How do you do that? Most importantly, have valuable and good blog content. For a writer, that means articles that show off your writing. As professional blogger,Yaro Starak calls it - Pillar Articles. Chris Garrett gives even more tips on how to build a fabulous blog that readers will return to time and again.

Remember to post regularly, at least once or twice a week. If you're not going to do this, don't have a blog only to apologize for not posting more often. This is the foundation for your blog book tour and online promotion, so give it a firm footing from the onset.

Step #2 

Getting to know you

Find blogs that look like potentially good blog hosts for your book tour and add them to a blogroll on your own blog. Every blogging service includes a blogroll widget in the programming. This is where you do the work of finding good tour hosts a little bit each day.

Then, make sure your blog has a site meter, an RSS feed, and bookmarks for your fans to stay in touch easily.

Read on to add and vote for your favorite bookmarking services.

Step #3 

Cyber-schmooze

Then go forth and cyber-schmooze as writer, Liz Zelvin explains. Favorite online communities for writers include , MySpace, GoodReads, Technorati, Twitter, and Squidoo, but there are so many more. Read on to tell us your favorite places to make friends and be followed.

Step #4 

Choosing your tour hosts

Now that you have a blog and blogging friends in cyberspace, you are set to plan your tour. Several months before your book release, invite the best bloggers from your blogroll to host a tour stop for you. If they enthusiastically agree, make sure they get a complementary copy of your book far enough in advance to read it should they choose to. Ask your publisher to supply these books free of cost to you. Good publishers will be glad to help you. Also get enough copies for a few contests at your tour stops.

Most blog book tours run from 2-3 weeks, with stops at different blogs on consecutive days. This allows for a high-powered tour that gets noticed by search engines without becoming too grueling to the author, or boring to the fans.

Remember that occasional stops at various blogs over the summer doesn't amount to a blog book tour. Those are just casual visits that you can work into your schedule anytime.

Create Buzz Early!

2-3 weeks before, start creating buzz on your blog.
Host blogs should start mentioning your tour, too! Get your fans excited!

Step #5 

Prep your blog book tour hosts

Once you have hosts lined up, create a host guide for the actual process so that everyone knows how to act before, during, and after the tour. You might have to do a little hand-holding here to ensure your tour runs smoothly from day-to-day. Reminders are good!

Make it easy on your hosts by sending them a small author photo and bookcover. A canned biography is useful, too. Give them a link to your entire blog book tour schedule and any other pertinent urls they should embed in their post. Some authors prefer to store all this information on their webpage so hosts can access it at leisure with a direct link they provide.

Also make sure they have a sales link for your book. You wouldn't believe how many authors forget to make a purchase easy for their readers! Amazon.com links like this are the easiest to add. Another link option might be your favorite independent bookstore if they offer free shipping to your fans.

Be sure to always leave a sales link like this 

Authors we've mentioned here

Make it easy for your fans to buy a book!
Death Will Get You Sober

Death Will Get You Sober

by: Elizabeth Zelvin

Amazon Price: $19.16 (as of 07/03/2009) Buy Now

Nightshade: China Bayles #16 (China Bayles Mystery)

Nightshade: China Bayles #16 (China Bayles Mystery)

by: Susan Wittig Albert

Amazon Price: $16.29 (as of 07/03/2009) Buy Now

The Tale of Briar Bank (The Cottage Tales of Beatrix P)

The Tale of Briar Bank (The Cottage Tales of Beatrix P)

by: Susan Wittig Albert

Amazon Price: $16.29 (as of 07/03/2009) Buy Now

Boneyard

Boneyard

by: Michelle Gagnon

Amazon Price: $6.99 (as of 07/03/2009) Buy Now

Searching for A Starry Night

Searching for A Starry Night

by: Christine Verstraete

Amazon Price: $10.99 (as of 07/03/2009) Buy Now

Step #6 

How to plan each stop on your tour

You'll also want to create a combination of stops that will be interesting to readers who follow the tour from day to day. Ideas include:


~an excerpt from your book
~an interview
~a book review
~a guest post
~a book trailer
~a family member's perspective
~a character interview
~how the bookcover was created
~a drawing for a free book to commenters
~notification of live tours
~dates and times for radio and television broadcasts



Some of your tour hosts will have their own ideas, and others will be glad if you take over.

Start writing!

Get your tour stop posts written early! At least get down the bones. You can always revise closer to your tour date. You'll be glad you did.

An Author Demonstrates His Confusion 

The rights and wrongs of book promotion

Have a good chuckle, but take his comments to heart.

book launch 2.0

http://denniscass.com/

Runtime: 3:20
59992 views
10 Comments:

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Step #7 

Almost time to start the tour!

Several days before, make sure the hosts have their completed posts ready and give extra help if needed. Be sure they have site meters installed so they can gauge how many visitors go to their blog.

Track your amazon.com rating at http://www.titlez.com so you know how you're doing on the tour.

Create a Google Alert for your book title at http://www.google.com/alerts and get reports every day to see how much buzz your tour is creating.

Numbers are important and, yes, book sales do count!

Here are some links to good blog book tours 

Follow each step of the way

This is the best way to learn how a good tour works. Read them all!
Michelle Gagnon's thriller tour
Be sure to look for the book trailer, too.
The Death Will Get You Sober tour
Another well-planned blog book tour.
Eric Maisel's mega-tours
These are long ones!
Susan Wittig Albert and the Nightshade Tour
The fine art of blog book tours demonstrated.

Step #8 

And finally the tour starts!

Remind each host the day before about their next day 8 AM post. Be available to answer blog questions at each stop. You may be in your pajamas, but you have to be on your toes each day of your tour for however long it lasts, be it five days or five weeks. The more interaction you get here, the more the search engines will notice you. Be your best!

Important Reminder!

After every blog visit, be sure to change the link at your tour schedule to a permalink. On really busy blogs, your tour stop will disappear in a hurry, so you must give the exact link to your post for future reference. Make sense?

Step #9 

Winding down

As your tour progresses or shortly after it's over, get statistics together, from your hosts and from your own sites to determine the relative success of your tour. A combination of reports will give you a pretty good idea of how the tour went. Remember it's not so much about immediate sales as building buzz.

And how long does all this take? Read the interview with Susan Wittig Albert here to find out.

Step #10 

Last but not least

At the end of your tour, a thank you to your hosts is appreciated, and even a nice little gift builds good will. Blog book tours take a lot of time all the way around. The best thank-you gift for me was a wall calendar that brings me a little joy every single day. I'd host that writer again in a minute!

Experience a blog book tour 

Click on a link below

Funny Strange is Lori Culwell's blog.: Book Tour: Last Stop, San Diego
So, tonight is the last stop on the whirlwind Summer of 2009 book tour, and I would be remiss if I didn't give you the info, lest you live in the San Diego area and want to come out. Hollywood...
Blog Book Tour & Giveaway: Elisa Lorello, Author of “Faking It ...
Blog Book Tour & GiveawayCan you tell us about the steps of self-publishing, i.e. do they offer editing services? Marketing? Book cover design? Great question. Lulu offers all of the above services, and has especially kicked. [...] ...
<em>Red Hot Internet Publicity</em> by Penny Sansevieri - Book ...
Penny Sansevieri, as creator of the ubiquitous and highly successful blog book tour concept, understands internet book publicity and marketing. Her ideas for selling books on the internet are not only free, but get real, ...
Kem Meyer on Less Clutter & Noise: Less Clutter. Less Noise. blog ...
Hopefully, this blog book tour will generate some new traffic for these guys and, at the same time, change the world with less clutter, less noise. NEXT Friday, May 29, I'll be stopping by the following locales to answer a different ...
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Need more help?

Join our Blog Book Tours Yahoo! Group.

Just give us your name and title when you join. No fees - just writers helping each other succeed. Don't be afraid to ask a few questions or share some ideas.

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What else to do??

Don't forget to ping!

Have you had a blog book tour? 

Give us a link to your tour schedule so we can visit you

We'd also like to hear if and why you would do it again.

Lensmaster

Enid Wilson wrote

Thanks for the tips. I finally understand what vbt is! I hope to have my first book tour in August so it's good to know what to prepare.

Reply Posted April 03, 2009

Lensmaster

Amadou M. Sall wrote

Extremely useful advice!

Reply Posted January 25, 2009

Lensmaster

Penny wrote

Thank you for the mention of Red Hot Internet Publicity and From Book to Bestseller! What a great resource this blog is - excellent step by step system...

Penny Sansevieri
Author Marketing Experts, Inc.
follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Bookgal

Reply Posted December 14, 2008

Lensmaster

pam wrote

this is great can! can I repost to www.ChocolatePagesNetwork.com (members would love this!)

Reply Posted October 21, 2008

Lensmaster

MaAnna Stephenson wrote

Thanks for the great information posted here, very helpful. Looking forward to the first tour for The Sage Age, which runs Oct. 19-27. Details at www.SageAge.net

Reply Posted October 05, 2008

Lensmaster

sreece wrote...

Great information here. Thanks for sharing. We are just a month or two away from having our book in print so guess I better get busy!!!

ReplyPosted September 25, 2008

Lensmaster

NashvilleWriter wrote...

Great blog. See some great people here too! Come by and chat with Writers in the Sky at www.writersintheskyblog.com

ReplyPosted September 20, 2008

Lensmaster

emmalarkins wrote...

Hey, I've read this over a few times, love the info though I'm still a ways off from my own tour! Don't know if you heard, but Karen gave you props during her interview on my blog if you're interested!

ReplyPosted August 23, 2008

Lensmaster

Cynthia Polansky wrote

Expect the Unexpected.
Visit www.cynthiapolansky.com

Reply Posted August 23, 2008

Lensmaster

Julia Buckley wrote

This sounds great! Thanks for all the good advice. Now I just need a new book . . .

Reply Posted August 21, 2008

 
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