The Quickest Blog Book Tour Guide Ever

Ranked #3,643 in How-To, #39,813 overall

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

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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

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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

Comedic-Genius Media | Book Tour » Scott's Photo Blog Book Tour ...
Scott's Photo Blog Book Tour Spectacular ? National Museum of American History. by Scott Sevener ? September 5, 2010 ? Email this column ? Print this column ?. Meeting a true American icon? We had such a great time exploring the ...
not martha — Creative, Inc. blog book tour (and giveaway)
I'm so happy to be part of the Creative, Inc. blog book tour today. Creative, Inc. is written by Meg Mateo Ilasco who wrote Craft, Inc. and does a lot of things, and Joy Deangdeelert Cho who is a prolific designer and whom you might ...
bozarthzone: "Social Media for Trainers" Blog Book Tour Starts ...
Take a look at the blog book tour schedule and watch for the posts from my colleagues. Many thanks to them for their help with this project! More? Follow "Social Media for Trainers" on the book's Facebook page and on on Twitter ...
decor8 » Blog Archive » Creative Inc. Book Tour: 8 Tips For ...
I'm really looking forward to reading this book and am enjoying this blog book tour. I have to second how important it is to make genuine personal cnnections. We get all consumed in our web based world which is great because it allows ...
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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.

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  • Reply
    Enid Wilson Apr 3, 2009 @ 5:13 am
    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
    Amadou M. Sall Jan 25, 2009 @ 3:18 pm
    Extremely useful advice!
  • Reply
    Penny Dec 14, 2008 @ 9:39 pm
    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
    pam Oct 21, 2008 @ 10:31 pm
    this is great can! can I repost to www.ChocolatePagesNetwork.com (members would love this!)
  • Reply
    MaAnna Stephenson Oct 5, 2008 @ 11:22 am
    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
    sreece Sep 25, 2008 @ 11:49 pm
    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!!!
  • Reply
    NashvilleWriter Sep 20, 2008 @ 8:50 pm
    Great blog. See some great people here too! Come by and chat with Writers in the Sky at www.writersintheskyblog.com
  • Reply
    emmalarkins Aug 23, 2008 @ 10:58 pm
    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!
  • Reply
    Cynthia Polansky Aug 23, 2008 @ 2:42 pm
    Expect the Unexpected.
    Visit www.cynthiapolansky.com
  • Reply
    Julia Buckley Aug 21, 2008 @ 4:07 pm
    This sounds great! Thanks for all the good advice. Now I just need a new book . . .
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