Book Tours. Have you tried one?

I just got off a virtual book tour for Tame A Wild Bride. It was a fantastic experience. One that I highly recommend. The first stage of my tour happened the last two weeks in August. For ten days my blurb, my bio and a short excerpt were blasted to my stops, one per day for ten days. Nothing else. Just that. I provided it once and they, Black Lion Tours, http://www.blackliontours.com, did the rest.

The second part of the tour happened starting September 10th. Every couple of days I would have a review or an interview or a blog that I wrote (they gave me the topic so it was super easy) or some combination of the three go up on the tour hosts blog. So there was always something new up for my book. Then all I had to do was promo the blogs and answer any comments I got. I got quite a few. These are all things I do for myself on my blog and now someone else was doing it for me.

My blog ended yesterday. My sales are booming and I have Black Lion Tours to thank for that. I highly recommend that you, as an author, do a virtual book tour with each of your books as they come out. Iā€™m even thinking of relaunching some of my titles because the tour was so effective for me.

Iā€™d like to know your opinions of virtual book tours. Are you in favor of them? Would you build your own or have someone else do the hard work like I did with Black Lion?

I have a $5 Starbucks card for one lucky commenter today, so be sure and leave me a comment answering my questions in the paragraph above

27 thoughts on “Book Tours. Have you tried one?

  1. Wow. Sounds like it good for you, Cindy! I’ve done tours that I’ve scheduled, but not through a service. My small press is going to offer that service once we get to that point. :0) I’ve got it all setup and currently collecting hosts. LOL.

  2. Cindy, I’ve done less formal book tours and they were fun but a bit exhausting since I came up with new, rather long, posts for every stop. Hmmm I’d like to try something like this some day.

  3. Sounds great! I’m on my first tour right now (and I hired it out), so I’m encouraged by your experience. I think anything we can do to give us more time to write is valuable!

  4. Thanks Cindy. I really looking for someone to recommend a good tour. I used a tour out of Canada by a woman who hadn’t really set herself up properly. She charged me $200 and did almost nothing. I had to remind her to the posts sometimes, she did, sometimes she didn’t, sometimes they showed up at midnight of the proposed day. Even though I lost money, I refuse to name her publicly. If interested you can email me privately.

  5. I had a 13 stop tour with a popular tour company I won’t name. I was disappointed that many of the pitched items didn’t come to pass – like my reviews for instance. A few tour stops were never posted and I had to ask more than once for questions & topics for interviews or blogs that were scheduled. While I won’t use this company again or recommend them, I will use another company in the future. You get what you pay for, and cheap isn’t always best.

  6. Hello Cindy,
    I did a book tour with a different company and I was very pleased. They found bloggers and reviewers who were appreciative of my sweet contemporary romance. I think that it is worth the $ to have someone do the organizing. And if I would have been more organized I wouldn’t have been as pressured.
    Thanks for telling us about Black Lion tours.
    Yours truly,
    Annette Bower

  7. I am new to marketing my (self-published) books, so I have to admit, I didn’t really know what a “book tour” was until recently. I’ve been doing my own tour, without knowing I could call it that, setting things up and contacting people on my own. It is a lot of hard work and very time-consuming, but it seems like with some of these tour services, you can’t be sure of what you’re getting.
    As nice as it would be to have someone else do the arrangements for me, at least doing it this way, I’m making new connections and friends that I can hopefully contact again in the future.

  8. Hi, Cindy! I am about to participate in a “book blast” of 50 blogs in one day, so I’ll have to let you know how that goes. I am thrilled to hear your book tour was beneficial. I won’t be so hesitant about trying the longer venue. šŸ™‚

    Congrats!

  9. I’m in the midst of mine. I’m not seeing any noticable bump in sales, but it’s been a great experience. I’ve also picked up some new followers on Twitter, and I like talking to people, so that’s nice. šŸ™‚

  10. Glad your blog tour was so successful. I haven’t tried one, but this seems reasonable. I wonder, would it be worthwhile for a novella, or best for a full-lenth? Any thought?

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