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Having read about the importance of Blogs in the previous section called Bloggers, you now know the important part they can play in book marketing, and in creating that much talked about “buzz”. In the distant publishing past, publicity often involved author bookstore tours; blog tours are the modern equivalent, but in the virtual world. An author can have a presence on several blogs over a set period of time in order to get a spread of exposure. The key here is to find blogs that are relevant to the topic of your book. You can do this yourself, hire your publicist to put in extra work, or find a company that specialises in blog tours by genre.
Blog tours require you to supply book information, much of which you can get from your Book Details page and your Profile:
To complete the circle on this kind of activity, you need to publicise what you are doing on your own social media networks. Link to each blog you are appearing on at the start of each stop. You can then include links on your website. If you have an email list of contacts, send them a press release or newsletter with a list of the blogs you will be appearing on with links.
If you do use a blog tour company, or take the time to organise this kind of activity yourself, add this to ‘activities’ on your Marketing page. To find out how, please go to Marketing Activities and How They Work. If you are part of your imprint/cluster Facebook page (Social Media – Our Reader Networks), share a link there so the Social Media manager for your imprint/cluster can also share those blog links on the cluster’s social media sites.
If you are using our database to search for companies that can help, go to Contacts and in the Search fields on the left, select the country you would like, and then ‘Type’, select ‘Blog Site’.
This will give you a list of blog sites, some of which will offer Blog Tour services. Prices vary widely. Do your homework on these company and perhaps ask for advice on your imprint/cluster facebook group, to see if other authors have experiences to share.
This is an author's typical experience:
Author Daniela I Norris, used Pump Up Your Book, a book marketing service based around bringing bloggers together and creating promotional opportunities to authors.
How many stops did you get?
20 - including a few reviews, it was a blog tour during the month of February (book came out on 29/1), this was their Silver Package.
What kind of book information did this include -
Mostly interviews with a photo of the cover and links to Amazon for purchase, and a few reviews (really nicely written, it was obvious that the person writing them read the book and even liked it).
Did you participate in spreading the word on social media?
Yes - mostly FB and Twitter.
Were the blogs involved a good match for your book genre?
Yes they were, they were not very well known ones but nice and provided good links. Google picked up many of them, so that they showed up in a search of book title and author name.
Did the blogs picked have a big enough audience spread?
Not sure about this one - there were 35 books sold during the 'book tour' and only a few after each month so not a huge audience but still worth it for me, for spreading the word.
Was it worth the money spent?
Yes, for me it was?
Do you mind telling me the cost?
It was an 'end of year deal' (2015) for $149
I believe the usual cost is $199+
