Blog Tours 101 for Authors
Part 3: Why do you need a PR agency’s help
with a blog tour?
by Audra Jennings,
Litfuse Publicity Group
Have you ever watched How I Met Your Mother? One of the main
characters, Barney, is always exasperated at all of his friends when he thinks
they are out of the loop about something. “Haven’t you read my blog?”
The truth is lots of people have
blogs. Anyone can start a blog for free. A lot of people start a blog just to
get free stuff. And, unfortunately, a lot of people have blogs their best
friends don’t even read. Just like Barney.
This is one of the biggest
reasons you should entrust your blog tours to a publicity/public relations
agency. There is no limit to the number of blogs that you can find online that
review books. One of our most important jobs is reaching out to the bloggers who
are the best fit for your book, and screening the ones who aren’t.
Here are some of the benefits of
working with an agency on your blog tour:
- Researching quality blogs with readership and getting contact information takes a lot of time. An agency will have already done that work and is always adding new reviewers to their rotation.
- Pitch your book to specialized groups of bloggers, such as Mommy bloggers, homeschool groups, Amish fiction lovers, etc.
- Screen new bloggers who request your book after seeing information about the book from other sources.
- Decline bloggers, for whatever reason (limited number of books, new blogger with only one post on his or her blog, etc.), so that you don’t have to do it. Let us be the bad guy for you.
- Compile mailing lists so you don’t have to keep up with potentially hundreds of emails coming into your inbox.
- Schedule posting dates for bloggers.
- Track review postings and provide links to reviews.
- Push bloggers that have not posted reviews.
- Provide content to bloggers (interviews, book trailers, contest information, book summaries, etc.) in an easy-to-use HTML format.
If you are not able to work with
an agency to set up your blog tour, some tour groups out there can help you contact
bloggers. There are a number of blog tour groups out there, but one piece of
advice we would always give—do not join a tour you have to pay to be a part of.
There are groups that tour books as a ministry, and the tour coordinators don’t
believe in charging to send information about your book. As a rule, paid tour
groups usually do not provide anything that free tours don’t, and most of the
bloggers overlap.
While tour groups will help you
distribute information about your book to potential readers and provide content
for the bloggers to post, they don’t provide the services outlined above that
an agency will provide.
At Litfuse, we want to free
authors to do what they do best: write! Your time is better spent writing while
you let us take care of all the details and use our expertise to promote your
latest work.
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For more
information about Litfuse Publicity Group,
visit these links:
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