The Ever Project

The Quickest Blog Book Tour Guide Ever

1 - I can do better 2 - Jury's out 3 - Pretty darn good 4 - Splendiferous 5 - Awesometastic (by 5 people)   Your rating: 1 - I can do better 2 - Jury's out 3 - Pretty darn good 4 - Splendiferous 5 - Awesometastic

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.

Name your favorite bookmarks 

Some or all, everyone has a favorite. Be sure to vote so we know what's best!

#1

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How to increase StumbleUpon traffic? | SEOptimise

Having noticed StumbleUpon come up regularly in my more...1 point

#2

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Add This Button | drupal.org

Apr 7, 2008 ... Provides a addthis.com button to l more...1 point

#3

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Digg - All News, Videos, & Images

Digg is a place for people to discover and share c more...0 points

#4

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Technorati Favorites

Check out Technorati Blogger Central. Your resourc more...0 points

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.

My favorite on-line communities 

Tell us your favorite communities to meet other book-loving people.

#1

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Goodreads | see what your friends are reading

See what your friends are reading. Keep track of w more...2 points

#2

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BlogHer

2 points

#3

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MySpace

An international site that offers email, a forum, more...0 points

#4

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Facebook - The Complete Biography

An in-depth profile of Facebook, written by Mashab more...0 points

#5

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LibraryThing | Catalog your books online

LibraryThing catalogs yours books online, easily, more...0 points

#6

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Why Build a Lens?

Squidoo is a website hosting hundreds of thousands more...0 points

#7

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Welcome to Shelfari! Read, Share, Explore! - Shelfari

This social media site is focused on books. Member more...0 points

#8

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Eons: Lovin' life on the flip side...

Information, tools and communities for people over more...0 points

#9

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LinkedIn: Relationships Matter

LinkedIn strengthens and extends your existing net more...0 points

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: $18.68 (as of 08/28/2008)

Nightshade: China Bayles #16 (China Bayles Mystery)

Nightshade: China Bayles #16 (China Bayles Mystery)

by Susan Wittig Albert

Amazon Price: $16.29 (as of 08/28/2008)

The Tale of Briar Bank: The Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter

The Tale of Briar Bank: The Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter

by Susan Wittig Albert

Amazon Price: $16.29 (as of 08/28/2008)

Boneyard

Boneyard

by Michelle Gagnon

Amazon Price: $6.99 (as of 08/28/2008)

Searching for A Starry Night

Searching for A Starry Night

by Christine Verstraete

Amazon Price: $9.34 (as of 08/28/2008)

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://www.denniscass.com/

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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

    Blog Book Tour: Welcome Liza Monroy!
    Looking for a good read this Labor Day weekend? Consider Mexican High, a fascinating novel about Mila, an American girl who spends her senior year at an exclusive high school in Mexico City when her diplomat mom is assigned to Mexico. ...
    Mama, PhD -- Mother Talk Blog Book Tour
    This is not your average book review, let me tell you, and you will soon find out why. When I first learned that this book was going to be edited I could not contain myself, I was beyond excited! It was like a dream come true! ...
    Blog Book Tours Help
    The best way to understand more about the concept of blog book tours, is to click over to Dani's guide called The Quickest Blog Book Tour Guide Ever. This will give you a run-down of what you, as an author, will need to do to plan your ...
    Blog Tour & Giveaway!
    I'm participating in a Blog Book Tour this week. And there's a giveaway! Wild Goose Chase by Mark Batterson. ABOU T THE BOOK: Most of us have no idea where we're going most of the time. Perfect. ?Celtic Christians had a name for the ...
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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.

    emmalarkins

    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!

    Posted August 23, 2008
    Cynthia Polansky

    Expect the Unexpected.
    Visit www.cynthiapolansky.com

    Posted August 23, 2008

    Julia Buckley

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

    Posted August 21, 2008

    BigGirlBlue

    Excellent step by step system for bog touring.

    Posted August 07, 2008
    daoine

    I will definitely do that as soon as I meet your criteria for joining ;)

    Posted July 06, 2008
    HotbuttonPress

    Easy peasy :). Come join the Y! group when you're ready for some brainstorming and help. It's a good bunch over there.

    Posted July 04, 2008
    daoine

    This is a great checklist to keep handy - I admit the idea of planning a blog book tour daunts me.

    Posted July 03, 2008
    qlcoach

    Your site is definitely 5 stars! Thanks also for networking with mine.

    Sincerely: Gary Eby,author.

    Posted July 01, 2008
    HotbuttonPress

    Be sure to visit my BBT Blog at http://blogbooktours.blogspot.com !

    Posted May 24, 2008

    Creative Commons License 

    Creative Commons License
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.