Should You Hire Someone to Organize Your Virtual Book Tour?
Today's guest post from Dana Lynn Smith, The Savvy Book Marketer, is part of the virtual book tour for her newest book marketing guide, Virtual Book Tour Magic.
The beauty of a virtual book tour is that you can reach a large audience of targeted book buyers by appearing on blogs, podcasts, social networks and other venues, all from the comfort of home.
Organizing a virtual book tour isn't difficult, but it does require good planning and organization, along with an investment of time. Some authors plan their own tours, while others turn to outside help. Here are three ways to organize your virtual book tour:
Do It Yourself
The main advantages of organizing your own virtual book tour are that you will save money and you'll have complete control over the entire process. As the author, you're in the best position to understand your audience and who would make ideal tour hosts. You'll also have more opportunity to develop relationships with your tour hosts, who may be valuable contacts in the future. The disadvantage of the DIY approach is the investment of time.
Hire Assistance
Another option is to use an assistant to help you. You'll need to consider all of the tasks involved in planning and executing the virtual book tour and decide which ones can be delegated. Researching tour hosts is one task that's commonly delegated.
Hiring help will save you time, but you'll still need to do some of the planning yourself and you'll probably need to write all or most of the content for the tour. If the person you're working with isn't familiar with researching venues and organizing virtual book tours, you'll need to educate them.
If you don't already have an assistant, you can search online for an "author assistant" or "virtual assistant" or hire someone from a freelance service such as Elance or Odesk.
Hire a Tour Manager
If you don't have time to organize everything yourself, or you'd just prefer to have someone else handle the details, you can hire a virtual book tour manager. But keep in mind that you will still need to devote time to creating content and promoting the tour.
One advantage of hiring a tour manager is that someone who specializes in doing tours in your book genre may have valuable contacts with bloggers who would be good tour hosts. The disadvantage is the cost and the lack of control over details.
Some book publicity and promotion firms offer virtual book tour management as part of their services, and there are also individuals and companies that specialize in organizing virtual book tours.
Tour services and prices vary widely, so be sure to compare services and be clear about exactly what you're getting. Also, find out if the company specializes in any particular type of book and how much experience they have.
Regardless of which method you choose, you'll still benefit from a thorough understanding of virtual book tours and how to produce compelling content to showcase you and your book.
If you're organizing your own tour, you'll find everything you need to know about planning and creating tour content in my new Virtual Book Tour Magic guidebook. It's also a good tool to educate your assistant in how to help you.
If you hire a tour manager, the information in this book will give you a thorough understand of the process, help you find the best tour manager and work effectively with them, and guide you in choosing the style of tour and creating great content.
About the Author
Dana Lynn Smith, The Savvy Book Marketer, helps authors and indie publishers learn how to sell more books through her how-to guides, blog, newsletter, and private coaching. For more book promotion tips, get her free Top Book Marketing Tips ebooks at www.TheSavvyBookMarketer.com
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Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of This Is the Place; Harkening: A Collection of Stories Remembered; Tracings, a chapbook of poetry; and how to books for writers including, The Frugal Book Promoter: How To Do What Your Publisher Won't; The Frugal Editor: Put Your Best Book Forward to Avoid Humiliation and Ensure Success; and Great Little Last Minute Editing Tips for Writers . The Great First Impression Book Proposal is her newest booklet for writers. She has three FRUGAL books for retailers including A Retailer’s Guide to Frugal In-Store Promotions: How To Increase Profits and Spit in the Eyes of Economic Downturns with Thrifty Events and Sales Techniques. Some of her other blogs are TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com, a blog where authors can recycle their favorite reviews. She also blogs at all things editing, grammar, formatting and more at The Frugal, Smart and Tuned-In Editor . If your followers at Twitter would benefit from this blog post, please use the little Green widget to let them know about this blog:
Carolyn, thanks so much for hosting me on my virtual book tour for my new book!
ReplyDeleteAuthors, I encourage you to give virtual book tours a try, and I wish you much success with your books!
Daan
Dana, thanks for coming by. Know this tour is keeping you busy but wanted to say that if anyone knows how to do this book tour business it's you. And you lead by example!
ReplyDeleteBest,
Carolyn