Some things just naturally go the way of the dodo, but apparently what appeared to be a gradual waning in the popularity of book blog tours was just a small lag in the industry. While there are certainly many blog tour companies out there, Indie and self-published authors have discovered this marketing strategy can be an effective tool in the promotion of a new publication that doesn’t have to be simultaneous with the book launch.
You already know that a blog tour is the virtual visit of a number of willing host blogs in a pre-set time period, whether one or two weeks to a month, on a pre-set date. Each of the tour stops results in a unique promotion of your book through an:
- Interview
- Review
- Excerpt
When it comes to blog tours, however, there are two sides to it–isn’t there always?
The Blog Hosting the Tour Stop
The Author Looking for a Blog Tour Stop
While there are many articles on the internet dealing with blog touring from the author’s POV looking for willing hosts, there are many fewer covering the responsibilities of the tour host. Therefore, this post will focus on the former. We’ll look into the latter in another post.
So where do you begin? 
First, will you be organizing the launch of the blog tour yourself or hiring a blog tour company? What is your budget? Examine and set your goal. If you choose to do the work yourself, you’ll begin by contacting blog owners with which you may already have a relationship who are willing to host a tour stop for you–and then proceed with organizing all the following. If you’ll be using a blog tour company, you’ll discover a wide range of charges, although some offer a free cover release blitz:
- It’s a tour company and like any for-profit company they’ll charge anywhere from $25 for 10 stops in a one day blitz to several hundred for a month long tour.
- You will want to find the tour company that looks at relevance for your publication and places your promotion on the blog sites where you’ll get appropriate coverage.
In varying degrees and varying prices, the blog tour company may be responsible for:
- Contacting interested, available bloggers
- Creating blogger incentives
- The blog tour schedule
- Coordinating contact with committed bloggers
- Setting up media links with Facebook and Twitter and set scheduled media releases
- Offering a contest or giveaway
- Blog tour banner
The blog tour company will likely require that the review be posted to Goodreads in addition to Amazon and the blog host’s website. You may also wish to find a blog tour company who specializes in a specific genre. As with many bloggers, most tour companies have long lists of acceptable hosts who have been vetted and classified into their specifically preferred genres–find one that matches your own.
Blog tour websites may be straight-forward, such as Blog Tour, or as multi-faceted as Enchanted Book Promotions with many in between such as Novel Publicity and The Creative Penn. Several of these websites cite Rafflecopter as the go-to for raffle contests and giveaways and these incentives can be incorporated into the pitch to the blog host. (BTW, I’m not affiliated with any of these, but their websites have degrees of good information.)
Blog touring can be complicated and require a serious amount of time. The rewards, however, may be the creation of the buzz you were looking for with increased media attention and a push in sales, along with traffic to your website. Of course, your host is always looking for good content to share with readers and the blog tour may result in new subscribers and increased traffic to your host’s website as well. And that’s the win-win to take away.
Are you considering hosting a blog tour or have experiences with your own promotional tour? I’d love to hear your results! ©2017 Virginia Williams 
Rosepoint Publishing 