Five Tools To Help You Plan Your Online Book Tour
Online book tours, along with other forms of online book promotion, are the obvious way to promote your book in an efficient, cost effective way. An online book tour (or virtual book tour, as they’re often called), is simply a series of interviews or guest posts on blogs that reach the book buying public, with a link to where they can buy your book online.
Traditional book tours are a thing of the past for most authors. Unless you’re J K Rowling or an author of similar standing, your publisher won’t spring the money for a book tour any more. The return on investment is too low.
You may be tempted to fund your own book tour, but I’d encourage you to think twice. The chances of you selling enough books to cover your costs range from slim to fat, and more importantly you could damage your long term career. If you fund your own book tour for your current book you will make extra sales, but unless you can do it for your next book you may find sales of your next book are down on your current one. Publishers care about the bottom line. Falling sales are never a good thing. You’ve actually jeopardized future book deals.
If you’re traditionally published whatever you do to promote your first (or current) book should be sustainable for the next one. That way your sales should (all other things being equal) go in the right direction. If you’re a self-published author you can promote your book however you want, but I’d still advise an online book tour, and if you take my advice you’ll definitely want to check out these resources.
Savvy Authors Blog Tour Wizard
The blog tour wizard at SavvyAuthors.com is a program that puts authors with a new book out in touch with bloggers who are willing to ‘host’ those authors on their blog. Authors and bloggers fill out a short form so the wizard can match them with the most appropriate partners. Authors can request up to 10 stops per blog tour, and once the wizard has made the matches it will put you in touch to confirm details.
This service is only available to premium members but premium membership only costs $30 a year and if you’re an author there are lots of benefits, such as writing tools, an agent/editor database and blog pitch events with agents and editors. If you’re a blogger you can submit your blog for free. As an author, you can also try out the basic (free) membership first if you just want to get a feel for the site. Find the details here.
A Step-by-Step Guide to Guest Blogging by Shelley Hitz.
This guide is specifically aimed at authors planning a virtual book tour. It’s the perfect resource if you really don’t know where to start, or need help pulling together all the details. It’s very affordable, at only $10, and currently comes with several bonuses that make it even better value. If you’re on a tight budget, this may be the only resource you need to invest in. Check out the details here.
If, however, you’re on a bigger budget…
Virtual Book Tour Packages from Pump Up Your Book
Pump Up Your Book offer three virtual book tour packages (silver, gold and platinum) ranging in price from $399 to $799. These packages offer one to two months of tour stops, personalized tour pages and banners and lots of publicity.
They claim that their online book tours reach “USA Today, Chicago Times, Washington Post, Reuters and more.” The price seems a bit steep but it’s possible the publicity could be worth it. I haven’t personally used this service. If any readers have I’d appreciate a comment about whether you thought it was worth the money or not.
Book Blogs “Promote Your Book” Page
Book blogs have a “promote your book” page where authors can add their books, book trailers and announcements of online book tours. You have to be a member but membership is free. Once you’ve got your online book tour organized, this is a simple, no-cost way to promote your book tour to a targeted audience of book lovers.
Writing forums and social media
We’re back to no-cost options here. If you’re a DIY enthusiast on a budget you can certainly find opportunities through writing forums and social media. I interviewed Lynda M. Martin (author of the wonderful This Bird Flew Away) right here on my blog after ‘meeting’ her in a writing forum, and this guest post, (Na)No Pain, (Na)No gain? by author Maija Haavisto was the result of a shout out I sent out on Twitter asking NaNoWriMo participants if they wanted to share their experiences and promote their books.
What are your plans for your online book tour? High budget, low budget or no budget?
As always, if you have friends or followers who may find this post useful, please share or forward. Thanks.
Image by JSCreations at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Twitter: ulharper
says:
I’ve used Pump Up Your Book Virtual book tour, and I used the $399 package. They do a couple things that for me make it worth it. They see that the blog you visit has a certain number of followers so that it’s worth everyone’s time. Also, I got several interviews because of the exposure from that virtual book tour. To add to it, long after the book tour, I had interviewers referring to some of those interviews. In other words, my online presence was such that someone could research me and my past articles. No, I wasn’t a big fan of all the stops but I knew I wouldn’t be when I got started. Not all bloggers are journalists, just keep that in mind. But that’s to no fault of Pump Up Your Book.
Twitter: writeandchange
says:
Thanks so much for weighing in on that. When I researched Pump Up Your Book tours they looked like a really good service but the prices did seem high (especially when you consider that you could arrange a basic virtual book tour at no cost, as long as you are prepared to put a lot of time and effort in). It’s good to hear that you felt it was worth it and that it had a snowball effect that carried through to some longer term publicity. Thanks for commenting.
Karen Banes´s last post ..Twenty Twitter Tips For Writers
Twitter: krissybrady
says:
Gotta say, your blog totally rocks! I’m so glad we found each other. I’m bookmarking this article for my future reference.
Krissy Brady, Writer´s last post ..Review: Making Work Work for the Highly Sensitive Person
Twitter: writeandchange
says:
Thanks Krissy. I’m glad too