Have you ever heard of organized Blog Book Tours? I hadn’t — until Twitter pointed me to The Quickest Blog Book Tour Guide Ever. Here you will find a 10-step guide to creating a tour. One caution: it’s a long-term process — you need to begin setting things up months in advance of your book’s publication.
The good news is that these ten steps should be taken by any writer serious about promoting him- or herself as a writer.
But there’s more. The Blog Book Tours Yahoo Group takes the lessons from the guidebook and helps authors put them into practice. This group is unusual in the way it does business. It is essentially a repeating “class” for authors with books to promote. Membership is limited to 100 for a specified period of time — and the group is renewed at each class cycle. Group members learn together and support one another — but the Yahoo Group is not itself a platform for selling one’s book.
QUESTION: Have any of you readers had first-hand experience with a Blog Book Tour? Please share it.
IN RELATED NEWS…
I just picked up this info online:
BookTour, an online directory of author events, has raised $350,000 in seed capital from Amazon. The company’s chairman, Chris Anderson, is the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail.
BookTour lets authors create pages that update their fans on relevant news and events, and include biographical and other information. Authors can update their profiles whenever they like and users can search the site’s database to find out when their favorite author will be at an event near them, contact authors with questions, or invite them to speak at events.
This new online directory, which is at www.booktour.com, is in beta stages and therefore not yet ready for prime time. As I write this, it seems to be offline, though i was able to take a look at it yesterday. Still authors may wish to keep an eye on it.
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Comment by
Kimberly Zook
14 Apr 2009
I am a novice in terms of both blogging and writing, but as a reader I love learning from authors. I've hosted to authors on my blog (Christina Katz, of Writer Mama, and Rachel Dillong, of Through Endangered Eyes), because their advice and experiences gave readers of my blog a good understanding of what it's like to be a writer and a mother (the focus of my blog). It was a great experience hosting them. While one author was a guest blogger and wrote the entire post for the day, the other author answered questions like an interview. I also tried to draw in more readers for both days I hosted the authors with the offer of a free book (donated by the authors) given to a random winner in the comments section. It's fun to also follow an author along on a blog tour to see what he or she has to say each day on different blogs.
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Comment by
Kikolani
16 Apr 2009
Sounds like an interesting way to do book tour promotion. I know that in the case of local bookstores, I never hear of an author coming by until it's too late – you almost have to follow your favorite authors online, or visit every bookstore in your area to pick up an events calendar.
~ Kristi