Question: Virtual touring

Hardly a book signing goes by without a writer coming up to the table to ask me about the business or craft. Likewise, my lovely wife Denise gets queries about publishing and since we’ve learned all we know from the doing, people know they’ll get the nitty gritty from us. For the next couple of weeks, we’ll try to respond to some of the most frequently asked questions, on the theory that if one new author asked, a dozen more want to know the same thing.

Here’s a pretty common one, and it’s timely as I’m about to set up a blog tour to promote Russian Roulette:

“I'm considering methods to "get the word" out on my first book, so I'd be very interested in your honest appraisal of the effectiveness of virtual tours for POD authors.”

Once you get the hang of it, the virtual tour thing is pretty easy. Assemble 3 or 4 documents – an interview with yourself, your opening chapter, a blog entry-type essay about something related to your writing – and offer them to bloggers on blogs relevant to your work, or to other writers’ blogs. You will also want to send them a jpg of your book cover.

The challenge for me has been finding the right blogs to appear on. The important thing is to find blogs that your potential readers are already reading. And be sure to give back to that blogger who hosts you. That means making an effort to drive traffic to their blog, and watching it closely the day your guest blog appears. If there are questions among the comments you’ll want to respond to them.

I have no real metrics that can tie sales to the “virtual tour” idea, although novelist Cheryl Tardif has had great sales success using them. As far as I’m concerned, anything that costs me nothing and helps make my name more recognizable is a good thing. Plus, it’s one of the few places where being POD is no different from being published mainstream.

But make sure you get a web site for people to link to. Your guest blog spots are only hooks to get people to want more detail about your work. They need to have a place to go for that. If you don’t want to build a site from scratch, consider setting something up on redroom.com.

And BTW, if you have a blog and would like to have a guest post some fun and interesting stuff in June, let me know. I still have some dates open.

Do Blog Tours Pay Off? Guest blogger Cheryl Kaye Tardif

I was recently asked my opinion on a company offering to send authors on a virtual book tour via postings on various blogs and web sites. For a few hundred dollars you could appear all over the internet. My response was that this plan just didn’t pass my "evidence-based marketing" test. I thought it was great for more and spreading your name, and I do guest blogs for that reason. But for me to pay someone a three-figure fee I have to have some expectation of seeing a tangible return.

But then I got a note from a fellow mystery author that changed my view. Cheryl Kaye Tardif, author of three bestselling novels (Whale Song, The River and Divine Intervention) responded to my comment that I hadn’t met a single fiction writer who told me that a "blog tour" had any impact on their sales. She said:


Well, Austin, you didn't speak to me. lol

I organized my own virtual book tour (VBT), aka virtual author tour, blog tour, guest blogging etc. I contacted blog owners, after pre-qualifying them, set up the dates and for the month of August 2007, I was hosted by about 35 blogs and sites, including internet radio. It was a lot of work, but was so worthwhile. And I would do it again.

Does a blog tour gain you sales? YES, if done properly. Unfortunately, most authors don't know what to look for when pre-qualifying site and blog hosts, and they forget to ask for orders. I would, however, do a 2- week tour over a 1-month one. A 1-month VBT will take about 5-6 weeks in advance to properly organize. A 2-week tour will take about 3-4 weeks to organize. The key to holding a successful and profitable VBT is knowing what content will sell your book, without seeming like a sales pitch.

Can you really get more sales? I did. In fact, all three of my novels made Amazon's bestsellers lists during my 1-month VBT. And that means SALES!

I have written an article on VBT's which has now appeared on some leading book marketing experts' sites. People who are following my advice are seeing results.

Would I pay hundreds of dollars for a service? No. I am a hands-on type of gal. I like to do things myself, learn from them. Don't get me wrong, I am a very busy person--I write and promote my books full time--12-16 hours a day on average. But I honestly don't think that a service would have gotten me better publicity. And that's because no matter what anyone else does for me--publisher, editors, publicists--I market my books 200% more.

For some authors, paying a service might work best. But for authors who are bold and confident, I say organize a VBT yourself first. Just do it right.

I knew how to find the right blogs by learning about Google Page Rank, by reading books on promotion like Plug Your Book by Steve Weber (I highly recommend this!!) and by looking for blogs that met my criteria.

Criteria to look for when searching for a blog tour host:

• High traffic sites (some will tell you their monthly traffic if you ask)
  
• Google Page Rank of 3 or more (4+ preferably)
  
• Visitors that post comments
  
• Blogs on themes found in the book
  
• Blogs that have been around for 1 year +
  
• Multi-author blogs or blogs that usually host tours
  
• Blogs that show up high on a Google search of common keywords used to find/describe your book
• Internet radio shows with good traffic and lots of past guests
  
• Hosts who have multiple blogs and offer to post on all are also great
  

The best thing about organizing your own virtual book tour is that you are in complete control. The advantage is that you can vary your posts more. I researched my hosts sites and found ways to take their themes and adapt them to the book I was promoting--Whale Song. I learned a lot from doing this, and I am looking forward to doing another VBT. I believe the next one I do will be even better! :)

Cheryl


I can’ t argue with success, friends, but I will just add that I think it's outrageous what some book promotion sites charge, with no regard for whether or not the blogs they book you on are duplicates, or whether or not they get any traffic. If you want to tour, follow Cheryl’s example and do it yourself.