To blog tour or not to blog tour?
I did not set up a blog tour for the release of my novel. That was a mistake I would later come to realize. Some people would disagree with me. They don’t like blog tours; they think they don’t work, that they don’t create sales. But I think they’re worth the money for debut authors, and this post will explain why.
What is a blog tour?
This is where you hire someone who has many connections to book bloggers and reviewers to contact several of these influencers and have them post about your book. More specifically, these influencers may read and review the book, or they may simply put an informational page together with cover, sales description, blurbs, etc. and post it during a specific week or on a specific day (such as your launch day). All of this, of course, must be prepared and scheduled ahead of time. The person putting the tour together does the planning necessary to make it happen. The idea is to broadcast the news of your release, or if it’s not a new release, to simply broadcast information about your book to a large group of readers in your genre.
What does it cost, and can you do it yourself?
A blog tour doesn’t have to cost a lot of money. You can find them in a range of prices, from $100 or less to several hundreds. One reason I didn’t take this very important step in the lead-up to my launch is that I’d attempted to set up a small tour of my own. I reached out to about twenty reviewers on Instagram (my social media platform of choice) and some of them said they would be happy to read my novel. I had messaged the reviewers with my starred review from BlueInk (the only one I had at the time) as a way to convince them the book was worthy. About ten of them asked me to send a paperback.
Some of these Bookstagrammers (those who read and review books on Instagram) have thousands of followers, so I was excited at the prospect of this exposure, though a small voice in my head said, “This feels way too easy.”
Long story short, of the ten who agreed to “read” my book, three of them posted a “book mail” photo of it months before my release date, six of them did nothing, and one gave me a mention in a post with a dozen other books. That was it, and believe me, I’m grateful to those who came through in these ways. But my Instagram exposure ended there, hardly making a splash.
I should have listened to the small, doubtful voice in my head. “Too easy” never works in publishing.
What did my “tour” look like?
Without the help of influencers, my launch went off with only as much as I could give it by way of posting and blogging, and asking friends to post. It wasn’t near enough. It’s my first book, and with so much to do, I became overwhelmed. I was reading marketing and promo books up to the day before launch (I’m still reading them), and my head was spinning in twelve different directions. I had my Street Team (which really came through for me!), my weekly blogs, a virtual reading (video), a Q and A article featuring my writer self, three Instagram posts that I created each day for about ten days, and a Jane Friedman guest post that published two days after my launch.
I’d also done a podcast interview that aired a couple of weeks before my launch, and my book was featured in the ezine called Shelf Unbound’s sci-fi issue, which was really nice.
It seemed like a lot. But when you consider what traditional publishers do—the carefully planned, sometimes very expensive advertising campaign and the many hundreds of review copies they give away—what I managed was only a drop in the bucket. The closer I neared to the day of the launch, the more I knew my novel was not going to get much attention.
I was right. I sold less than two hundred books the first week, both via Amazon and IngramSpark. And I secured twelve preorders. Twelve!
What should you expect from your launch?
The more research I do, the more I find that the results of my book launch were not unusual. Most first-time self-published authors are disappointed by their launch. But think about it: no one outside of your inner circle knows you or your books before your first book comes out. So, how could you possibly have a super-successful launch? With thousands of self-published books coming out weekly, yours is just one bright little star in a galaxy-sized library.
If you’re in self-publishing to establish an author career, you have to be in it for the long haul. In a Jane Friedman class I took last week, she said that self-published novelists don’t start selling well until their third, fourth, or fifth book. That means we need to hurry up and write more books!
So, no, my debut’s launch was not a big bursting firework of excitement, and that’s okay. A blog tour certainly would have helped spread the word about me as an author and my book as a new release. If readers don’t hear about it, they won’t take an interest, let alone buy it.
That’s why I think a blog tour (of the inexpensive sort) can be a good thing for debut authors and self-publishers in general. The idea is to get the book out there as much as you can, and to get your name as an author out there as much as you can. We independent writers don’t have big advertising budgets or massive email lists or even much in the way of connections to media. We have to use whatever is at our fingertips to market and promote our books, and a blog tour is an inexpensive tool we can use to help us gain the exposure we seek.
What has been your experience with blog tours? Comment in the box below.
Kim Catanzarite is a writer, editor, and instructor for Writer’s Digest University. She has worked as a developmental and copy editor since 1994. Her thriller, They Will Be Coming for Us, published June 1, 2021. Buy it from Amazon HERE or from your favorite local bookshop HERE.
