Managing a Blog Tour: The Day of the Post

Having run a blog tour for Coffeehouse theology over the past three weeks, I’ve been learning from some of my mistakes, especially as I compare my tour with the tours of other authors. I think I have a few more clues regarding how to make the tour more effective an interesting.

For example, one author has been posting lists of links on his blog whenever bloggers review his book. It’s just a sea of hypertext without any individuality, nothing to set one review apart from another. I was essentially doing the same thing by simply writing one to two-line posts each day simply linking to whoever reviewed the book that day.

After seeing how disinterested I was in the hypertext sea of that other blogger, I started rethinking the way I share the blog reviews. Remember, these are incredibly valuable endorsements for my book, so it’s in my best interest to market them effectively.

I began by reading and rereading the blog posts about my book. After settling on a key paragraph that set that review apart from others, I copied and pasted it into a post for my own blog about that particular review. This gave me something substantial to discuss on my blog, provided interesting content for my readers, and offered a sampling of the review to tempt readers to click through. In the end readers have a better opportunity to decide whether or not they want to read the review, rather than glancing past a simple hyperlink.

Helping Readers Use Social Networking Tools

Here are a few ways that readers can use online social networking tools to spread the word about your book.

I’ll be asking readers of Coffeehouse Theology to do at least one of these:

• Write a Review…

• Write a brief review at amazon.com, buy.com, borders.com, and barnesandnoble.com. These aren’t exactly “social networks,” but these reviews are sitting right at the point of sale, which is a tremendous tool if enough readers share their thoughts.
• Post a review to your blog (looking to start a blog? Visit www.wordpress.com to set up a free account)

• Add it to your book list
• Add it to your Visual bookshelf or other book application. Share a brief review there.
• Join the Coffeehouse Theology group
• Post a link to the book’s page www.inamirrordimly.com/coffeehouse-theology/

There are plenty of other tools out there that authors themselves can use, but as far as what readers can do, these are all simple ways they can talk back via reviewing and help spread the word of your book.

How to Publish: Organize a Blog Tour

The more I look into the prospect of promoting my book, the more I’m interested in focusing my time and resources on a blog tour. Instead of organizing an event and traveling to it only to have 10-15 people show up, I can write up a few e-mails and set up a virtual tour on a blog that receives hundreds if not thousands of hits every day. If readers like the book, they can easily order it online. But even if sales don’t result directly from the tour, I still increase my book’s visibility. Thinking this is the way to go, I did a little digging into online tours.

By far the best resource I found is this step-by-step guide. I recommend carefully reading through it, if not printing in out so you have time to digest all of the steps involved in a blog tour from working on your own blog, to contacting bloggers, to following through on the day of the virtual tour. I was especially interested in finding out how long a typical tour lasts–2-3 weeks if you were wondering too.

Steve Weber, author of Plug Your Book, offers the following key steps for a blog tour:

• A short book excerpt displayed on the host blog previewing the tour appearance.
• A one-day appearance where you submit an opening statement – a short essay or commentary on the topic of your book, opening the floor for discussion.
• Follow-up visits for the next four to seven days to answer questions and comments from the blog audience.

This is a tall order, but if bloggers are willing to help by forwarding comments on to you and if you can plan ahead, then this massive task shouldn’t be too hard to pull off. Of course the big difference will be how many bloggers you can interest in the tour and how much traffic they receive. That all depends on your niche market, as the top bloggers in each niche will have very different traffic. I would imagine bloggers in fields such as cooking, politics, and management will have higher stats than say, religion, which happens to be my field of choice.

Technorati can help you get an idea of who you need to include, but don’t forget to check the blogs listed in the sidebars of each blog you visit. If you see the same blog pop up over and over again, then you’d better add it!

For a broader view of blog tours and what they mean in the publishing world today, check out this NY Times article. In short, publishers really, really like them. The reason? Cheap publicity. Take note of this comment:

“If I had to choose, I’d rather have an author promote themselves online,” said Felicia Sullivan, the senior online marketing manager of Collins, an imprint of HarperCollins, who maintains that the Internet exposes authors to a broader audience than most bookstore readings.

“You can reach at least a few hundred people on a blog, and save time, money and the fear of being a loser when no one shows up to your reading.”

If you’re still swimming in the possibilities here, let me offer a few steps to follow.

1. Research bloggers and ask them who they would include in a tour besides themselves. You’re essentially helping their friends get free books and extra online traffic, so they’re likely to help you out.
2. List the bloggers in a spreadsheet with the following fields: name, e-mail, mailing address, status on the blog tour, and date on the blog tour.
3. Prepare a review kit that will provide bloggers with all of the information they will need about your book: endorsements, author bio, author online information, table of contents, etc.
4. Don’t forget to send out a picture of yourself and possibly a sample chapter they can post with the review.

This should move things in the right direction. Provided you can stay organized and keep on top of who is posting when, you should be able to drop by each blog on the tour and help make it a success!