[MaggieAkhurst]

I've just recently heard about these virtual book/blog tours you can do these days, but I don't actually know what an author is supposed to do in one... I tried googling but all I got were sites for people offering book tours and the forums here didn't seem to answer my questions either. If someone could please explain to me what is expected of the author and what exactly is contained in a book tour, or just point me in the direction of a previous post that explains all this, I would be very appreciative!
Thanks, Maggie

 

[kelleyrmartin]

There are different kinds of book tours. Some are review-only, where the host sites will simply review your book and you don't really have to do anything (other than providing the review copy, of course). Other book tours are more author-intense, and can include anything from book excerpts, to author interviews and guest posts. In these tours, you provide different excerpts for each tour stop, answer their interview questions in the form of an email, or come up with a guest post for them to post on their blog. Most blog tours are a mixture of these things, i.e. a review at one stop, an excerpt at another, and so on. Check out Goddess Fish and Xpresso Book Tours. They give you a pretty clear outline of what's included in every package. Hope this helps!

 

[Annette_g]

I host a lot of book tours on my blog for various companies as well as do interview/promo for authors who've contacted me direct.

Most will either include reviews of the book, author interviews, guest posts written by the authors, book spotlight/exceprts posts etc. The author decides what they want to do, whether interview, guest post, spotlights etc. Reviews depend on whether or not the hosts want to do a review, but I think goddessfish offers a review only blog tour, where everyone who wants to do that tour has to do a review. I'm not sure how that would work in practice.

 

[J Bridger]

I think FMB tours has the same policy about an option for review-only tours.

 

[Guest]

I've just recently heard about these virtual book/blog tours you can do these days, but I don't actually know what an author is supposed to do in one...

I run a virtual book tour service through Positively Published!. I can tell you what we expect of the author.

When we schedule a tour, the host sites will generally inform me of what sort of content they want. We try to vary it up to keep it interesting. So site A may run a book excerpt, Site B may ask the author to write a guest blog post on a specific topic, Site C may send the author a list of interview questions, etc. You provide the host whatever content they request, and the host posts the content on the assigned day. You should then at least visit the site and post a thank you for hosting you! Depending on the host site's design and how interactive it is, you may want to stop back periodically throughout the day to check the comments section to answer questions visitors might have. Otherwise, it's relatively painless.

Some of our hosts also offer to do book reviews, but we don't actually schedule the reviews during the tour. We leave that between the author and the host to determine. Because the tour is a promotional vehicle, we don't want to encourage the appearance of impropriety by scheduling book reviews during the tour. People may assume the review is "paid for" or fluffed up to promote the author. On the other hand, if the review is negative, it makes for an awkward situation for all involved if we had been promoting a review that is going to run and the review is a poor one.