Authors and Publicists

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Why does my book need a blog tour?
2. I thought blog tours took many days or even a couple of weeks. How can you have a tour in two or three days?
3. How many bloggers will participate in my tour?
4. Who pays for and ships the books?
5. Will you ever give my name and contact information to anyone?
6. What if the bloggers don’t like my book? Do I get to OK copy before it’s posted?
7. How many interviews do I have to give?
8. How much time will I have to spend on this?
9. Do you guarantee results?

Q. Why does my book need a blog tour?
A. Well let me ask you some questions. How many hours did you spend browsing in your local bookstore last week and how many hours did you spend on the Internet? How many books did you buy from your local bookstore last year and how many from Amazon?

Millions of people are shopping online. I buy my computers, my printers, my ink, my medicines, my airline tickets, and, yes, my books online. And there are many more like me. We like the convenience the Internet offers. But even more, we like to read reviews. Even those consumers who still buy in brick and mortar stores do research on the Internet before they buy. With all the competing companies, we have to read reviews to figure out which digital camera will best fit our needs. And with the price of books today, we want to see what other readers have to say about a book before we plunk down our money.

So even if you don’t mind spending a fortune in gas, driving around the country doing book signings, it would be foolhardy for you to ignore the Internet where millions of consumers hang out.

It’s also important to remember that many newspapers and magazines have web presences now and they are always looking for content. If you have a human-interest angle to your publishing journey or if you have expertise in a quirky field, publicize those things on your blog tour. The writers scrambling for content for their magazines and papers are scouring the blogs looking for interesting people to highlight on their sites.
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Q. I thought blog tours took many days or even a couple of weeks. How can you have a tour in two or three days?
A. There are two kinds of blog tours. There’s the one where you go from blog to blog, writing guest blogs, doing interviews, chatting with the readers. On those blog tours you’re like the guest on the late night talk show circuit. One night you’re with Jay Leno, the next with David Letterman. For those kinds of blog tours you don’t really need a blog tour company to set up the show for you. With a little bit of trouble you can find ten or twelve bloggers willing to take a free book from you and offer you space on their blogs. You make up a schedule and tell them which day you need their space and they either agree to review your book and interview you on that day or they let you do a guest blog post on the assigned day.

Those kinds of blog tours are wonderful, and homey, and every author should do them. (Here is a page Susan Wittig Albert used to set up this kind of blog tour for one of her books, Nightshade.) These friendly gatherings create a warm feeling about your book.

There is another kind of blog tour–the kind we do here–where we have a pile of bloggers all linking to the same book for two or three days in a row. We use a special Amazon link that Technorati reads. This causes your cover photo and link to be listed on Technorati’s “popular books” page.

This kind of saturation creates a different kind of buzz than the leisurely blog tour where you visit one blog a day. It’s like the difference between several weeks of light rains in the morning and one day of hurricane rains. Which one do you notice? We need the constant light rain, and we’d notice if we didn’t get it, but the hurricane often receives more attention on the evening news.

But we at KidzBookBuzz want the best of both worlds. We have studied both kinds of tours and believe we have taken the best from both plans.

We offer the hurricane force but it feels like a warm Santa Ana wind.

We don’t just blast links into the void hoping some of them will find their way to the monitor of someone who cares. This isn’t a “junk mail” blog tour. Our bloggers are established bloggers who love children’s books. We don’t just cut and paste your press release and your picture into our blog post and call it good. We are committed to writing quality content to draw readers to our blogs. It’s not that we are such generous souls, it’s that we know that quality content is as good for our blogs as it is for your book sales. We want readers to come back.

So we run contests that tie into the books we tour. We discuss the books. We invite reader participation. The more interaction we get with our readers the better for your book sales and the better for our blog traffic.
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Q. How many bloggers will participate in my tour?
A. That depends on how many bloggers you want and how many books your publisher is willing to mail out.
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Q. Who pays for and ships the books?
A. The publisher. If the publisher won’t, the author may.
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Q. Will you ever give my name and contact information to anyone?
A. Well, sure. That’s the whole idea, isn’t it? We plan to splash your name and the name of your book all over the blogosphere. And we plan to drive people to your web site where they will be able to contact you and buy signed copies of your books.

But, no, we will never, ever give your addresses or phone numbers out. Not even to our bloggers. When you sign on for the blog tour you will be assigned a KidzBookBuzz email address. All requests for interviews from our bloggers will go to that address where it will be automatically forwarded to you. At that time you may choose to contact the blogger from your own email account, or by telephone, or you may stay with the KidzBookBuzz email address. The amount of personal information you give out is completely up to you.
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Q. What if the bloggers don’t like my book? Do I get to OK copy before it’s posted?
A. One of the reasons we don’t take every author who wants a tour is that we want to highlight books on our blogs that we like. If we accept your book on the tour, we think it’s a book worth talking about. One that our readers might enjoy reading and wouldn’t mind spending their money on.

That said, none of you have written books that every single blogger on the tour will love. Some will like your book and be able to say some nice things about it, but they won’t rave about it. You are in no way guaranteed a gushy review on this tour.

What happens if a blogger just hates your book? He has the option, and he is strongly encouraged, to sit a tour out if he has nothing nice to say about a book. But he doesn’t have to sit out. If he really hates your book and he feels strongly that he should warn his readers to stay away from the book, then he is within his rights to post. His first responsibility is to her readers. He’s built up credibility with his readers and if he fails his readers he is of little use to any of the authors on the tour.

Just as your book got rejections before it found a champion at a publishing house, it will get bad reviews from some reviewers and maybe from some of our bloggers. That’s a risk you take when you put your work out for public consumption.
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Q. How many interviews do I have to give?
A. That’s completely up to you. The more you make yourself available, the better tour you’ll have, but you are not required to give any interviews at all.
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Q. How much time will I have to spend on this?
A. Again, that’s up to you. The best tours happen when the author visits the blogs and comments on the posts. If you take time to interact with the readers you will gain goodwill and the next time they are looking for presents for the grand kids or the boys in the Scout troop or the graduate in the family, your name will pop into their heads.

If you have a blog and you promote the tour on your blog and invite readers from the tour to your blog you can increase your traffic and keep the goodwill going long after the tour is over.
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Q. Do you guarantee results?
A. We guarantee that if you send out fifty books you will have fifty bloggers posting on your book using the proper links on the proper days, or you’ll be getting some money back. (With the exception of any blogger who has opted out because he hates your book.) We do not guarantee that your Amazon ranking will improve or that your sales will jump during or after the tour. We have no way of tracking sales generated by the tour.

Here are some articles and blog posts on the efficacy, and the inability to accurately judge the efficacy, of blog tours:

The Author Will Take Q.’s Now
Jeffery Overstreet claims that one of his blog tours caused a rise in his Amazon rankings of 75,000 spots. (second to the last paragraph).
Susan Wittig Albert discusses the pros and cons of her first blog tour.
And here, again, is Susan discussing her second blog tour.

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Help for those of you who want to set up your own tours:

A little info on blog tours from a guy who thinks they’re the next best thing after computer chips.
If you’re serious about setting up your own tour, start here. Loads of help for you.

Other blog tours:

Virtual Blog Tour
Pump Up Your Book
Sormag Online Tours
Red Hot
TheGRITS.com (this one is for writers of color)
Glass Roads
Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy (this one is FREE! They do children’s books, too, as long as they are Christian SFF book.)
Christian Fiction Blog Alliance
Mommy Talk (this is a great one for children’s books. After all, who buys the children the books if not the mommies?)