So after the Diamond of Darkhold tour, I started a conversation on what might make the blog tour better. And then I dropped out of the conversation.
Sorry.
I agree with those of you who said that instant success is not the greatest thing, but long-term success would be reached if we put up quality content on our sites.
And I’d like to hear more from both Robin and Noel on their ideas about community. I didn’t understand what the round-robin discussions would look like, Noel, and I’m wondering if you can give us a link to one, if you have time. And Robin, I’m wondering what kind of community you envision.
I also am thinking it might be best to run the tours over three days but only require two-days of participation. That way we’d all be posting links on the middle day for Technorati to read, and we wouldn’t be feeling like tours are a drudgery. If we wanted to post three days that would be great but for books that we couldn’t find a whole lot to say about, we wouldn’t have to go three days.
I’d like to start that after the Raucous Royals tour because for This is the Feast and Raucous Royals, the publishers agreed to the tours thinking we’d do three days.
I’d like to give prizes, though, to three-day bloggers. Maybe have three-day bloggers eligible for a drawing and give away a 25$ Amazon gift certificate every month or something. We could start this in January, I hope. I’m thinking maybe we could do a drive for bloggers in January, too. Because more bloggers would mean we could do more diverse books, I think.
Much of this will actually hinge on what the publishers do. They are getting kind of antsy about the economy, I’m not sure how many are going to be cutting back on their publicity departments. A friend of mine who owns a successful financial consulting company says we’re in for a tight six months but that we aren’t in for the next great depression. We might have to hunker down for a while. But we’ll talk more about this over the next couple of months. I’ll keep writing to publishers to offer them tours and we’ll see how things go.
In the meantime if we can talk a little more about discussions and community building measures, that would be great.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Becky // Nov 11, 2008 at 12:48 pm
I’d be fine with 3 day-2days required tours. I think some books easily stretch to fill three days. And others not so much.
I think one of the things we should focus on is consistency. If we can focus on consistency and quality first and foremost, then I think more bloggers will want to be a part of it. And I think more publishers will want to be a part of it too.
I could see in a way why publishers might hesitate to participate in future tours if they can’t be assured that the bloggers are going to do their part. If the consistency and quality aren’t there…what’s in it for them?
I can see it from both perspectives really. Real life does get in the way sometimes. And if family drama–either immediate or extended–comes up, then I can see why getting posts up would be the last of their worries. We’re only human after all.
I think community is important. But not as important as quality and consistency. I think community is something that has to come naturally. I don’t think you can force it. The better the posts, the easier it is to start conversations and have dialogues if you know what I mean. I think community is one of those things that come with time. Yes, it does take effort on the part of individuals. But it can’t be forced if it’s to be genuine. Artificial and stiff can be forced.
Perhaps–not to add any stress at all to the group–this is just an initial idea on my part. What if there was a yahoo group for blog participants. They could talk amongst themselves and get to know one another behind the scenes. And we could bounce ideas off one another when it came to posting. Also if we let each other know when we wouldn’t be able to join in on the tour after all. This is just my opinion, but to me it looks tacky to give links to bloggers who aren’t participating and never post about the book during the three days.
Becky’s last blog post..How To Build A House
2 sally apokedak // Nov 11, 2008 at 1:55 pm
I agree with all of this.
I already did set up a discussion board for this site. I did that a long time ago just playing around. But I never opened it because I thought we probably didn’t need another discussion board in our lives. I thought we should discuss books through comments on blogs, for sure, rather than on the site here.
But I did check out the site Noel spoke a while back and they have a discussion board they use.
Also we could have a private room only open to bloggers and that might be nice.
If any of you want to check it out, you can find it here:
http://kidzbookbuzz.com/bloggers_forum/index.php
I’ve not set it all up yet but would be happy to do so if people wanted to use it.
sally apokedak’s last blog post..Land of Enchantment Book Award
3 Noel // Nov 11, 2008 at 8:39 pm
Um, I think I lost the comment I just tried to leave.
In a nutshell: when I said round-robin, I was thinking of the way Marie, Robbie and I all read Diamond and discussed it and posted our discussion.
http://noeldevries.blogspot.com/2008/09/kidz-book-buzz-blog-tour-diamond-of_29.html
Sally could say, okay, bloggers a b c d e f g are participating in this next tour, would anyone like to discuss the book with another blogger? And a b c say yes, so they e-mail back and forth with their thoughts, or use the private chat room, and then each post one third of their discussion on their blogs, linking to each other so readers can finish reading the discussion on the next blog.
I agree with Becky: quality and consistancy are top priority.
$25 at amazon would be nice, but you shouldn’t have to shell out when you’re already doing all the legwork. I mean, we get free books already.
Leave a Comment