Purple Prose:
blog tours

With the growing number of self-published writers and the dwindling marketing dollars for traditionally published books, authors have to be creative if they want to grab the attention of potential readers. This is probably how blog tours first came to be. The problem is everyone jumped on the idea. Each week at least two hit my dashboard full force.

Here are some blogging tips to get your book (or a book you love) talked about:

Targeting Blogs

The first bloggers to ask are your friends. But don’t feel bad if they say no. Not everyone wants to host a blog tour. If you approach someone who isn’t a good friend, please make sure you send them a personalized email. One author sent me a link to a form to fill-in if I wanted to participate in her tour. That’s all that was sent and it wasn’t personalized. It was instantly deleted. #blogtourfail.

Face it, most of us recognize each other’s names and avatars from the blogs we most commonly visit. Reach out and go beyond this group. Only then will more people find out about your book and won’t suffer from blog tour fatigue (especially since not everyone is a fan of them). This is why it’s vital to start growing your network early and not just before your book launch.

Look for blogs that deal with topics approached in your book. Maybe someone has a special interest in horses and would be interested in your novel situated on a ranch. And this means the blogger’s followers might be interested in the story, too.

Be Unique

Try to come up with something that hasn’t been done before. Okay, you can stop laughing. I know this is challenging. Everyone can do the same old thing, but that won’t necessarily grab bloggers’ attention as the market becomes saturated with traditionally and self-published books. Maybe you can tie it into the theme of your book. Lisa and Laura Roecker had great success with their launch because everyone knew about the pink-hair theme they had going, which was inspired by the cover of The Liar Society. The theme even ended up on Twitter.

Timing


We can all appreciate how much work blog tours are for the author. My suggestion is to not cram your tour into one week (maybe spread out over a month) and to save some posts for a few months AFTER your book is launched.

Repetition

The books I tend to buy are the ones I hear about again and again, over the several months (but not in the same week as with the typical blog tour). This is why I loved Christina Lee’s spotlight on debut authors last week. It was a chance for those who participated to remind you about the debut books we loved this year. Books you might have forgotten about since their launch.

Does anyone else have any suggestion as to how to make a blog tour rock or to create interest in a book months after it’s been launched? What has made you want to read a book (and actually do so) after seeing it mentioned on a blog?

(note: Wow, who knew my sales and marketing background as a pharmaceutical sales rep would be so useful?)

Last week I conducted a survey to see how bloggers in our writing community feel about blog tours and to get an idea as to how effective they are.

Remember, you can’t generalize the findings to bloggers at large. Nor can you generalize the finding to readers, period. The other weakness of the survey is that if you write YA, it’s not going to tell you how effective blog tours are with teens.

Also, I only asked four questions. Some questions could be further expanded on based on your answer to the previous question. However, I wanted to keep the questionnaire short so more people would answer it.

What the survey will tell you is how the individuals who responded (fifty-five in total) felt about the topic. This is not a non-biased group, randomly selected off the street. These are individuals who are, most likely, committed to blogging as a form of social networking. Someone who checks out a few blogs as a lurker might not necessarily share the same view as those who participated in the survey.

Results

Of the individuals who check out blog tours (4% never check them out), 52% check out those held on their friends’ blogs, 31% check out the tour if the author is a friend of theirs, and 56% check them out occasionally (i.e. the bloggers and authors were not friends of the individual.) (note: more than one answer could be selected).

Of the individuals who hadn’t already planned to buy the book before the blog tour started, 64% ended up buying a book they saw showcased on a tour and 31% didn’t. The question was not applicable to 5% of those who answered the survey.

Of the individuals who hadn’t already planned to buy the book before the blog tour started, twenty-two bloggers checked out blog tours only held on their friends’ blog and/or if the author was a friend of theirs. Sixty-four percent of them (n=14) ended up buying a book showcased on a blog tour. Thirty-six percent (n=8) didn’t. The result didn’t change when you factored in the individuals who also followed blogs tours occasionally (in addition to the above two categories).

Of the twenty individuals who occasionally follow blog tours (i.e. the bloggers and authors were not friends of the individual), 80% (n=16) bought a book showcased on a tour.

Of the individuals sitting on the fence about buying a book before the blog tour started (twenty-three individuals), 74% ended up buying a book and 26% didn’t. Remember, the individuals who said ‘yes’ might have visited blog tours for fifteen different books, but only bought one of the books showcased.

Sixteen percent of those who answered the survey decided not to buy a book showcased on a blog tour even though they had planned to before the tour. Ouch on that one if you were the authors.

Because I don’t want to make this a super long post, part 3 will be next Wednesday.

Do these results surprise you?

©Photographer unknown

Each week, my Blogger dashboard becomes home to whatever blog tour is going on at the time. This made me wonder how effective these tours are.

This isn’t a scientific survey. I haven’t come up with a null hypothesis. I won’t be performing any fancy statistical analysis. And I’m not presenting my results at a conference. Been there. Done that. No thanks.

But I am curious as to what others think about them. Don’t worry, this won’t be painful. Nothing like what I made my research subjects endure when I did my Master’s of Science thesis [insert evil cackle here].

If you have any additional comments, I’d love to hear them, especially what you love and don’t love about blog tours. Are there certain types of posts you like better (interviews, reviews, other)? I’ll be discussing the results next week.

(Note: unfortunately the questions are too long for my blog design, so I've also listed them below.)

1. Do you voluntarily read posts involved in a blog tour? (I’m not talking about reading a post just because someone commented on yours).

2. Have you bought a book you saw on a blog tour, and you hadn’t already planned to buy the book before the tour started?

3. Have you bought a book you saw on a blog tour, but before the tour started, you were sitting on the fence about buying the book?

4. Have you ever changed your mind about buying a book after you read a post on the blog tour? (i.e. you were going to buy the book but then decided not to.)

Chocolate kisses to all who filled in the poll. Remember, the answers are anonymous. I have no idea who you are, so you can be completely honest.

<<<3

This weekend is Canadian Thanksgiving. There won’t be a post on Friday, but I’ll be back Monday.