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.