During a virtual book tour, the author visits a number of blogs to promote their books. These books are known as ‘book blogs’, and they focus primarily on books – hosting giveaways, reviewing books, hosting author interviews, cover reveals, book release day parties and basically, everything book-related.

There are two ways to go about this. You can hire a book tour company, who will set up a book tour for you. As a virtual book tour organizer, they work as the “middle man” between the author and the bloggers. They set up the tour, get in touch with our tour hosts, set up a schedule, send out review copies and guest posts, send interview questions to the author and make sure the answers are sent to the right tour host. They coordinate giveaways and collect winners information at the end of the tour. You don’t have to do anything excerpt answers interview questions, provide a giveaway item and write guest posts.

We will talk about book tour companies and setting up book tours through these companies in our sub-series “Working with Book Tour Companies”.

Then there’s the other way, which means you do it all yourself. The upside is that you won’t have to pay any moneys. Book tour companies can offer low prices from about $29 for a week tour to $1000 for a full, month long (or maybe even longer) tour. The prices vary a lot. If you do it all yourself, then it’s free. The downside however is that you’ll have to look for tour hosts yourself, and that’s not an easy task. Lots of people I talk with tried to set up a book tour themselves but failed. They targeted the correct bloggers all right (namely, book bloggers interested in their genre) but because they had no previously established relationship with the bloggers, most of them ended up not responding, or not posting on the agreed date. Those experiences can be very dissapointing. I will give you some tips later on in the series about how to get bloggers to respond to you.

We will talk about setting up a book tour all by yourself in our sub-series “Setting up a Book Tour Yourself”.

Why should you do a book tour?

It’s a fairly inexpensive way to get the word out there for your book. If you do it right, you can gather a lot of reviews on blogs, Amazon, Goodreads, etc. You can also gather some more fans, blog followers, and Facebook likes by setting up a giveaway and asking people to follow you to participate. You can make people interested in your writing by guest posts, or interested to know more about you by answering author interview questions.

But most importantly – the buzz is consistent. You visit another blog every day or every other day during the tour. You will have constant promotion somewhere, and that’s the key here. People don’t purchase a book they see once. But third time they come across a book, they may say “hey, I’ve read about that somewhere, and the review said it was pretty good”. That’s the kind of response you’re looking for, and what you might get through book tours.