On the net, too much simultaneous talk looks like spam, which people routinely tune out.
The Skinny on Virtual Book Tours
Many authors measure the success of a blog tour by how many books they sell. Be sure to look at your KDP, Nook, or Smashwords dashboard before you embark on a tour so you will have a point of comparison. But there are other ways to measure success. Getting your name out there is important, not just for your current book, but for future books. One way to determine if your blog tour is increasing your visibility is to sign up for Google Alerts, and create alerts for your name and for your book title.
You can compare how often you are mentioned before and after the tour. Keep tracking to see if the buzz continues, and when it starts falling off. That will give you a time frame for how successful your tour has been, and it will allow you gauge the success of your other promotions. What you want to see is steady conversation about you and your book for several weeks prior to the release, and a couple of weeks after. Amazon offers that feature as does Smashwords.
Character Worksheets
How many people visit your website during the tour, and are they following? In light of the planing involved, some authors turn to book tour services rather than spend the time to organize their own tours. There are a couple of advantages to using a book tour service: There are also disadvantages: What to look for in a book tour service. First, check out their stats.
If their site ranks in the millions on Alexa , it means they get very little traffic. The lower the number the better.
9 Steps to an Effective Virtual Book Tour | tandjfoods.com
Numbers in the hundreds of thousands are good. Next, check to see who is on their list of bloggers. How many bloggers are listed? Follow them, comment, and share their articles with your followers. Compile a list of blogs that accept guest posts, including their contact info. Before you pitch any ideas or write your blog posts, make sure you know what you hope to get out of this blog tour. Every post should tie into your goal and include a clear action step for readers to take.
What is a Virtual Blog Tour? How Do You Set One Up?
Are you trying to sell a lot of books? Or, are you trying to drive traffic to your blog? Come up with a list of post ideas that display your expertise, pertain to the blogs on your list, and align with your promotional goals for the blog tour. Jot 10 to 20 post titles, outline them, and write up a few complete posts to get ahead of the game before sending a round of pitches.
Remember to include blogs that will interview you or review your book if applicable. Send a personalized pitch email to each blogger. When your post is accepted, make sure you know what the blogger wants and allows you to include in the post.
Plug your blog tour stops into a calendar to help you stay on top of the planning and deadlines. Once an author has identified her target blogs she can begin to interact with them—posting comments, tweeting, and linking to them on social media. Next, authors should prepare a short, professional pitch tailored to each blogger. Pitches tell bloggers a bit about the book, why it may be a good fit for their site, and conclude by asking if they would consider being a stop on the tour.
There are many useful online templates to guide authors through this process. Follow-up materials are important to have prepared in the event an inquiry is successful—this can include a PDF of the book, a high resolution image of the book cover, an author photo and author bio, and a short description of the book.
If just 14 of the 50 bloggers approached are interested, an author will have laid the groundwork for a two-week book tour. Authors can then work with each blogger to ensure they have the content they need. Promoting the tour on social media is key.
DIY Network Blog Cabin
An author should tweet links to each blog post as it goes up and link to the posts on her own blog or Facebook. As a final step, the author should track what kind of posts and which blogs were the most popular in preparation for future tours.
Additionally, it's important for writers to be realistic about the potential benefits of virtual book tours, according to Nereyda Gonzalez of YA Bound Book Tours.