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. Iām even thinking of relaunching some of my titles because the tour was so effective for me.
Iād 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
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.
It was great for me, Jesse. I really enjoyed it and liked not having to set it up myself.
Cynthia, this sounds great. I will be doing a blog tour in Nov/Dec for my debut novel and I thrilled to hear yours was such a great success.
Amber, I wish you the best of luck with your tour.
Hi Cindy –
I have my first virtual tour coming up Oct 8th – October 17th with ABG Reads Book Tours. I’ll have to let you know how it goes! š
Laurel
Laurel, I’ll be interested to hear how it goes and if you enjoyed it as much as I did mine. I hope so. Good Luck to you.
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.
I can imagine that they would be exhausting. This was the perfect fit for me.
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!
Jen, I wish you the best of luck on your tour.
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.
If folks sign up because of you csn you get Black Lion Tour points or something. What type of tour was yours because it sounded do-able. Thanks again
Hi Morgan
I had a combination of two tours, each are $75. First is the Book Blast and the second is called the Hunter tour.
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.
Sheri, I’m sorry your experience wasn’t a pleasant one. I was very pleased with Black Lion Tours.
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
Annette,
Thats so great that you had a good tour. I hear lots of the horror stories but never many of the good ones.
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.
Jessica,
You’re doing a lot of work setting these up. I hope your tour goes well for you.
Thanks! I’ve done two stops already, and have two more in the works. Fingers crossed!
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. š
Congrats!
Regina,
I hope your Blast is very successful.
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. š
Tory,
Hopefully you’ll see the bump before the end of the tour.
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?
My novels tend to be short but I don’t know that it would make any difference one way or the other.
I’m going to look into it right now! My third book “The Salacious Marny Ottwiller is set to be published next month so I’d had better get on it.