Promote Your Novel

The second kind of blog tour I call Participation Tours. Like cookie-cutter tours, they focus on posting about your book on a certain day or series of days. However, bloggers don’t have content to cut and paste (though some still paste information like back cover copy), so the posts require significant more work on the blogger’s part. Media copies are usually still provided, and you may be asked to provide unique content for specific bloggers.

You can see that this type of blog tour may get time-consuming, especially if you’re getting interview requests from ten different bloggers that all need them within the week. Usually, however, this type of tour has a smaller number of participants than the cookie-cutter tour.

Another aspect (not always present) of a Participation Tour is linking to other bloggers on the tour. While this would make little sense in a cookie-cutter tour, in a Participation Tour every blog has unique content. There is often a list of links to the other blogs on the tour at the end of the post, and bloggers are encouraged to comment on other posts in the tour.

This type of tour may not generate the sheer quantity of Amazon links that cookie-cutter tours do, but it outclasses them in quality. People will be actively discussing your book. One drawback to this is that their opinions may not always be positive. They (usually) invested time to read your book, and if they hate it, they’ll let you know. Or at least point out a few things that may make you squirm.

Don’t response in anger if a blogger doesn’t like your novel. If you can’t reply civilly, ignore the post. Often, if the remarks are unjustified, other bloggers on the tour will come to your defense.

If you have the time (and if you don’t, try to make it!), comment on all the tour posts, thanking the bloggers and addressing any questions that may come up. You may want to wait until the day or two after the tour so others have time to comment first.

I belong to one Participation Tour group, the Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog Tour.

Seasoned literary publicist Sabrina Sumsion has an excellent post on publicity this week on Seekerville:

Publicity 101

Within the past 5 years, blog tours have become an increasingly popular form of novel promotion. I myself am a part of three tour groups that focus on Christian fiction. There are many different types of book blog tours, and groups tend to focus on one in particular.

Each of the different types of tour have their own strengths and weaknesses. Which ones you (or your publisher) decide to schedule for your novel will depend on what kind of publicity your book needs.

The first kind of blog tour (or blour, as author Brandilyn Collins deemed them) I’ll call a Cookie-Cutter Tour. Blog tour participants simply have to cut and paste content telling about your book into a blog post on a certain day or week, and hit publish. Often the tour group leaders encourage individual reviews and content, but it’s not required. The publisher or author agrees to supply media copies for the participants to review if they choose, along with content for the blog post. Some groups (like the Christian Fiction Blog Alliance) charge for this service, others (like FIRST Blog Alliance) do not.

Cookie-Cutter Tours generate a lot of links to your book’s Amazon page and your website within just a few days. Their effectiveness to create buzz is, however, hindered by the sameness of the posts. Buyers usually need a number of exposures to the product (in this case, your book) before they will purchase it, but those exposures need to be varied. While each blog that hosts your book on a tour gets the message out to more potential readers, in truth there’s a lot of overlap between blog viewers. If a blog viewer sees an identical post about your book on blog after blog, he or she will tune it out quickly. It will be like viewing the same commercial a dozen times in a row.

So if you choose to book a Cookie-Cutter Tour for your novels, for the most impact try to find a diverse group of  bloggers without much viewer overlap.