Blog Book Tours
By Kathleen Bolton | September 5, 2007 | Comments Off on Blog Book Tours
Well, well, well. It’s nice to be appreciated. From the NYT:
Bloggers have written about books since, well, the beginning of blogging. But a blog book tour usually requires an author or publicist to take the initiative, reaching out to bloggers as if they were booksellers and asking them to be the host for a writer’s online visit. Sometimes bloggers invite authors on their own. In an age of budget-conscious publishers and readers who are as likely to discover books from a Google search as from browsing at a bookstore, the blog book tour makes sense. Although a few high-profile authors have had their books sent to bloggers — James Patterson recently promoted a young-adult book this way — most of the authors are lesser-known and less likely to be reviewed in the mainstream press.
Here in our little corner of blog-land, we at WU try to do our bit for the author. Hard data of the effect of blogs on book sales is impossible to come by, but our traffic far exceeds that of a bricks ‘n mortar book store on any given day. And the interview or post will remain as long as we continue to pay our webhost. :-)
I don’t think blog book tours will replace the old fashioned ones entirely, but some combo of the two is surely a smart move for authors who need promo opportunities.
Kathleen Bolton is co-founder of Writer Unboxed. She writes under a variety of pseudonyms, including Ani Bolton.
She has written two novels as Cassidy Calloway: Confessions of a First Daughter, and Secrets of a First Daughter–both books in a YA series about the misadventures of the U.S. President’s teen-aged daughter, published by HarperCollins, and Tamara Blake, for the novel Slumber.
