Here’s a great post that gives a clear, quick definition of a blog tour.

The only part of the equation that I think might change in the future is this part:

Are bloggers paid to participate in the blog tour?

No — paying anyone to cover any books would be unethical.  (Paying for ads is a perfectly ethical practice, of course, but with PR, coverage — good or bad — should come free).   To clarify — since this can get confusing – with blog tours (or with radio or TV tours), publishing houses aren’t paying bloggers (or radio or TV hosts) to cover a book; we’re paying someone to schedule the tour:

I do agree that it is unethical for publishers to pay bloggers to review their books. I do, however, know that reviewers for School Library Journal and PW and The Horn Book are paid. They don’t write their reviews for free. These magazines charge for advertising, but they do not charge for reviews. The magazines hire and pay their reviewers,  so the publishers don’t directly pay for reviews.

So if a group of bloggers banded together to create an online reviewing “magazine” they would expect to get paid and it wouldn’t be unethical for them to get paid. In that case, they would have to work like the print magazines. The blog review company would make money off the ads they ran and then the company would pay the reviewers they hired. The publishing company would not pay reviewers directly, and they would have to accept that some of their books would receive no reviews and others would receive less than stellar recommendations.

So while I think that most book bloggers will never get paid for their reviews, I do think that a few quality Internet sites will rise up and sell advertising and pay their reviewers.

The thing that makes the Internet so exciting and so unpredictable is that everyone can afford to publish here. What will set apart the bloggers that make money from the rest, will be quality of content and traffic. If you have an eye for setting up an attractive site that is easy to navigate and filled with great content, you are likely to rise to the top. You will build up a community of readers. We have some blogs on our tour that are in the top one percent of blogs (of all blogs in all genres)  in regards to traffic. Publishers are going to start looking at those numbers, I think. and start picking and choosing which blogs they send their advance reading copies to and which blogs they want to advertise with.

Not that we have to make money off our blogs. Blogs are fun and don’t have to make money. But for those who want to make money, I think more opportunities are going to open up.