This month, I’m providing a writer’s technology tip-a-day (along with other posts) to help you in your writing goals.
Today’s tip: Virtual book tour.
Published authors face a difficult marketing challenge between the time their book is accepted for publication, publication, and then pushing the envelope to help sell the book after publication.
It’s simple: publishing houses, especially for new authors, will provide little help marketing your book. In fact, if you don’t have a marketing plan to go along with your great manuscript, you may not even have a chance to have your book published.
Touring the country (or planet) to market your book isn’t high on my list of ways to spend my time or money either.
Enter the virtual book tour. Asking the writers of the blogs to interview you as part of your marketing plan for your book is most often accepted by the host bloggers. There’s good reasons, too.
It’s win-win:
- A blogger gets to interview an author for their audience
- The author gets to promote the writing to the very audience they are targeting with their writing
- You can do a virtual book tour from your home — no travel
- Virtual book tours cost little — a great expense to make is offer a signed copy of your book to one of the readers of your tour host blog.
- You can promote the tour — blog names, dates, cities — on your own blog and/or web site.
- You can help create a blogging community around the hosting blog sites as not all of the bloggers would necessarily know each other unless you were doing the tour.
Getting published is tough. Marketing your work is tougher. Doing a world tour to market your work through blogs is priceless.
Scot
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Cheryl Kaye Tardif 09.03.07 at 5:30 pm
Hi Scot:
Here is some more info on virtual book tours (VBT)–and by the way, authors don’t have to limit themselves to interviews only. Authors should be creative! That’s what makes a VBT FUN!
Virtual book tours, aka virtual author tours have been around for about 5 years, and started as a result of a handful of authors posting to other blogs to help spread the word about their books. Now this kind of author tour is becoming all the rage. It just isn’t feasible to do the physical cross-country bookstore tour anymore. Well, unless you are one of the super authors that get paid the big bucks, like Stephen King or J.K. Rowling.
As a Canadian suspense author, I decided to test out the virtual tour idea and for the entire month of August I was, so to speak, going from blogs across Canada, the US, Australia, Belgium and more. In 31 days I was hosted by about 34 hosts, and I am exhausted! Don’t think that just because the tour is via the internet that it isn’t a lot of work.
I found myself answering tons of questions, doing interviews via text or internet radio, writing articles on a variety of topics, talking about my newest novel Whale Song but also discussing my others, sending excerpts to my hosts, trivia and more.
A virtual book tour is very challenging, especially when one goes the entire month. My goal was to find unique and interesting things to do at each stop.
I advertised my VBT on my sites and blogs and social networks (about 15 places in all). And I also advertised my VBT dates at BookTour.com. I was invited to join BookTour a few months ago, and was the first Canadian registered with them, I believe. In fact, I asked them to make it available to Canadians and was very happy when they did. I was also spotlighted on their home page, right at the beginning of my virtual book tour.
In Canada, some bookstores are no longer allowing authors to do book signings. Limited space and time to organize is the common excuse. I do agree, stores have little space, but it really doesn’t take much to squeeze in a table. Time? Well, everything takes time, but it really doesn’t take much to set up an author for a signing. And I still enjoy the social aspect of a physical bookstore signing. I love meeting my fans…and potential new fans!
However, now that I have this 1 month VBT under my belt, I have to admit, there are some definite benefits. The main benefit is viral. Like a cold, my vbt stops will continue to spread even now that I am ‘done’. People will still come across them, enjoy them, maybe even try to enter my contests. And I am sure I’ll see more sales as a result. And that is the ultimate goal.
Book blog tours, or whatever you want to call them, are an economical and environmentally friendly way to promote a book…and I had a blast with mine! I highly recommend every author try it, at least once. For more information, there is a useful article on Virtual Book Tours at LesTout.com.
Cheryl Kaye Tardif
Bestselling author
http://www.whalesongbook.com