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Establishing yourself as a new author requires getting folks to notice your book. Marketing
statistics show that garnering reviews and endorsements sells books. That’s because what others say about your book often
carries more weight with a potential reader than what you say about it. Many authors dream of having their book highlighted
by Oprah. The reason it’s a coveted endorsement is because she provides a stage with an audience of millions. With over
150,000 new books coming to market each year, only a select few will ever reach this plateau. As a new author, it’s up
to you to find as many smaller stages as possible that targets an audience who enjoys reading the type of book you have
produced. One of the best ways to do this is to go on a virtual blog tour.
There are millions of blogs on the Web, each devoted to a particular topic that draws the
attention of a targeted audience. Many have a very loyal following. Having your book highlighted or reviewed on blogs
that cater to folks who would find your book interesting is a great way to create buzz. Participating in a virtual blog
tour coordinates your marketing effort by having news about your book appear on several blogs over the span of a few weeks.
The information about you and your book could be presented on each blog in several ways. These include:
- A review of the book
- An interview with you
- The book’s synopsis
- Your bio
- Pictures of you and your book’s cover
- A guest post, where you have the opportunity to talk directly to the blog’s audience.
A virtual blog tour is one of the best ways to expose a new book to a wide audience of readers
in a short period of time. It will also help you establish yourself as an author. But, it does require time to coordinate.
You can tackle the project yourself or hire a tour coordinator. A few offer a mentored tour package to guide you through
the process. If this is your first book and your first tour, you may want to seriously consider hiring a coordinator for
two simple reasons, which are time and connections.
It takes at least a solid month to research potential blogs and contact the hosts. The acceptance
to invitation ratio is about half or less. In other words, if you want to do ten to twenty stops on the tour you will likely
have to contact forty hosts or more, which means finding that many appropriate blogs. For those who do accept, you will need
to provide them with all related post information (see the bullet points above) and perhaps a copy of the book. That’s a lot of time-consuming work.
The other reason to consider hiring a professional coordinator for your tour is that they have spent years building
connections with high-traffic blog owners. These bloggers are usually follow the tour coordinator’s offerings and count on them as a valuable
resource. Keep in mind that one of the reasons these blogs have a lot of traffic is because they are constantly posting about what’s new.
Being friendly with a tour coordinator helps them keep that edge.
If you really want to learn about the book business and marketing, you may want to consider a mentored tour.
If you have the time to devote to it, researching the blogs yourself will give you an idea of what interests your target audience most.
It will also give you ideas about ways to present your material that will stand out from the crowd.
Whether you do the tour yourself, hire a professional coordinator or do a mentored tour, you will make valuable
connections that will pay off down the road. If the blog owners you tour with like your book, they will jump on board quickly to host your
next tour. And, you can advertise their reviews and endorsements. Blog tours also give you a lot of link-backs to your own site, which gets
you ranked higher with search engines. Overall, virtual blog tours are one of the most economical ways to create buzz on your book and establish
yourself as a premier author.
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