by Scot Herrick on September 3, 2007
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
by Scot Herrick on June 13, 2007
If you wanted a face-to-face explanation of how technology can help market your work, come to Write On The Sound in Edmunds, WA, (Seattle-land) October 5-7th. I’ve just signed a contract with the hosts of the the writers’ conference and am pleased to report I’ll be doing a seminar on…technology for writers.
More details to follow.
If you have never been to a writers’ conference before, it is a very good experience and one I would recommend. There are always a few good things to learn at these conferences.
Write On The Sound inspired the theme for this blog — technology for writers where one can learn how technology can help market your work. My presentation will be the oddball one in the group, no doubt. Amongst the publishing, fiction oriented, non-fiction writing skills, I’ll sneak in there and talk about blogs, web sites, white papers, virtual book tours and all things technology that can help you in your work — in a way that a writer will understand.
And, I’m planning a really great leave-behind as well with lots of resources and links.
“There are a million blogs about technology out there. Very few are written from the viewpoint of a writer trying to develop a voice and market their work.”
You’ll get that point of view in the Technology for Writers session at Write on the Sound.
I hope to see you there!
Scot
by Scot Herrick on June 12, 2007
Book tours for an author can be a lot of work — and a shot in the dark as well. What works, what doesn’t?
In Lessons from a 40-date book tour, the Church of the Customer shows us how to set up a reader driven book tour that really helps cement marketing of your work.
Essentially using reader feedback and some logistics, the authors set up forty events in forty business days. A little crazy, to be sure. But effective in that they sold almost 8,000 books in the time frame.
Now, this is tough work, no doubt about it. Open to criticism as well: some have said that this approach is simply waiving traditional speaking fees for required purchase of books. In a way, buying your own books through waiving of speaking fees. And forty events in forty days is not workable for many families.
But these negative items — legitimate as they may be — miss the point: these authors used their blog to determine a book tour. They asked their readers where they should go where there was interest. And their readers delivered.
Even if this approach does not work for you, don’t throw the idea out along with the sales of 8,000 books. I’d try and figure out how this idea could work for you in a different, modified form if all this doesn’t fit neatly into your life.
There are vast possibilities for using your blog to promote your work. A reader driven book tour idea has a lot of possibilities, regardless of format.
Scot
by Scot Herrick on February 15, 2007
One of the things that I’ve really enjoyed lately with some of the books that I’ve read is that a DVD/CD has been included with the book. Always a non-fiction book, of course.
The point of the DVD/CD has been to provide a supplement to the book on the concepts that have been written there.
Many of the items on the DVD/CD has also made the content portable. For example, taking the content of the DVD/CD and adding it to an iPod. That way a person can take the concepts of the book, work the excersises through either words or video, all while your reader is on the road.
If your publisher balks at working with you on producing such a great supplement to the book, consider doing a series of podcasts on your blog that you can offer your readers that would supplement your book (and, perhaps, help you sell more of your book!).
Technology can help you provide all sorts of “support materials” that you can create around your book. Make the support materials critical content to have and create a buzz around your work.
Scot
Tags: ten-keyboards, writing, technology for writers, DVD, CD, book-supplements
by Scot Herrick on January 31, 2007
Once you have built up a base of readers, subscribers, and commenters on your blog, the blog format opens up additional avenues for interacting with readers of your work.
One of those avenues is sponsoring contests on your blog.
You can use your blog to announce contests based upon all sorts of criteria: the next twenty people that comment on a post with a random drawing for a winner, people who blog about your new book win something, and others that only your imagination can tell you.
Contests, if done well, can create great buzz around your work and engage your readers.
Alison Kent is a romance author who writes for her blog and has contests around the romance theme. She also has a great relationship with the readers of her blog (and just updated her theme on the site — very nice!). Take a look at some of her samples: And the Winners Are…, Pssst… and others.
Contests can be a cool technology tool where your blog can help market your work.
Scot
