We all know what a book tour is – an author will travel from town to town, visiting bookstores, schools, church gatherings where appropriate, and either speak directly about their book or about topics related to their book. The author is gone for a week to three weeks, generally, and they hope to generate a lot of sales and name recognition for their efforts.
A virtual book tour is a new way to use the Internet for book promotion. The author will arrange for several blog sites and websites to feature either reviews of their book or interviews with the author, and sometimes both. Then the author will post a list of “appearances” on their own site, and fans of the author can go from place to place around the Internet and read all the interviews and reviews that have been posted.
There are some definite pros as well as cons to touring this way. Let’s take a look at both.
Pros: When you’re on a virtual book tour, you never have to actually leave your home. You conduct all the interviews through e-mail, you send over a nice picture of yourself, and no one needs to know that you really did the whole thing in your jammies. You save yourself wear and tear from traveling. You don’t need to worry about who’s going to foot the bill for your food and hotel. You can do it on your time – someone sends you questions at 6 am and if you can’t get around to it until noon, that’s okay. Overall, it’s a much less stressful, time-consuming way to interact with the world at large. And I do mean world – where you might not be able to afford to travel to France to promote your book, you will have blog readers from France. And Korea. And Spain.
Cons: Readers really enjoy meeting authors and making a face-to-face connection with them. Reading about an author on the Internet isn’t quite as personal. You do also need to make sure that all the blog authors have the information they need in a timely fashion, and that they know for sure which day they are supposed to post.
You can arrange all this yourself, or you can hire a company to arrange it for you. A company will charge you around $500 for a medium-sized tour (that’s a ballpark figure, so don’t hold anyone to that!) You can find these companies by doing a Google search for “virtual book tours.”
You can also find blog authors yourself by doing Google searches for “blogs” and then your search term. Say, for instance, your book is about origami. “Blogs origami” will bring you a list of blogs that feature information about origami, and you can then contact those blog authors. What’s in it for them? You’ll send a whole lot of traffic their way, and if they are going to do a book review, you can send them a copy of the book.
I really think that more and more authors are going to add a virtual tour to their regular marketing avenues. I don’t think the traditional book signing will ever go completely out of vogue, but as the Internet becomes a way of life for more and more people, we’re going to see it used in more ways than we had originally anticipated.