How Indie Authors can use Blog Tours for Book Promotion

For those who have never heard of a blog tour before try Googling it. You’ll likely find lots of sites that list blog tours. The primary purpose for participating in a blog tour is to promote your book. Through the use of blogs and other online resources, an indie author can go “on tour” with their book without ever leaving the comforts of home. Don’t start out by thinking that it’s a simple task and there’s not much work to it.  A blog tour will take plenty of hard work, determination and discipline to be effective. But the end result of selling your books will be well worth it!

What is a Blog Tour?

A blog tour is not really a new concept for the online community or the indie author. Probably the easiest way to define a blog tour is to say that instead of an author going from store to store like they would on a traditional book tour, they go from blog to blog. A blog tour can take many different forms depending on the blog type. It may be designed as a simple book review, a question and answer session, an interview, or even a book giveaway. In most instances an author will set aside a predetermined amount of time such as a week or a month in which to  schedule a specific number of stops, or blogs to participate in.

What is the Purpose of a Blog Tour?

In most instances, a blog tour is scheduled to coincide with the release of a new book. Some authors choose to participate in a blog tour as long as 6 to 8 weeks prior to publishing their books. However, the primary purpose of a blog tour, no matter how it is designed, is to generate buzz about a self-published author’s book. For this reason, any time is really a good time.

Blog Tour Sites

If you Google “blog tour” you’ll see that there are literally pages of related results. It can be difficult for the indie author to know which ones are best to look into. Some authors prefer to try shorter blog tours to get a feel for how they work, others prefer to just be a guest blogger and write about their books. There are literally thousands of tour operators to choose from but here is a short list of a few to sample.

• Xpresso Book Tours – This site has over 100 successful tours to show as examples and the site has an average of 30,000 page views every month. The blog tour site is not free but you get a lot for your dollar. While they offer several options, you can get a basic tour with 15 stops for $100. The audience is primarily young adult and romance readers so for self-published authors in this genre it’s well worth looking into.
• Worldwind Tours – This is a very well established blog host and they carefully scrutinize interested blog posters to ensure the highest quality. The author must simply prepare their own guest posts, excerpts or interviews and the site’s staff takes care of the rest. Authors must meet their stringent criteria with features like a well designed cover, well written blurb. 
• Orangeberry Book Tours – Orangeberry coordinates an online tour for the indie author, which consists of online appearances on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter or on a variety of blogs in order to promote their book. They are possibly one of the most versatile book tour operators as they offer a wide variety of packages, which include personalized choices such as: guest posting, author interviews, blog advertising, and promotions on twitter.

The team at Babelcube wish you and your books happy and successful blog touring.