Book Marketing Buzz

I love the very beginning of a new month because it means a new set of authors will be taking a crash course in online book promotion via a virtual book tour. I love getting to know them and helping them in any areas they are not familiar so everyone can get as much out of their virtual book tour experience as possible.

It’s fun but very eye-opening, to say the least.

Through my experiences putting these tours together and acquainting authors with the wonderful world of online book promotion, I can tell you right now that about 95% of these authors are not prepared. Not that they don’t come through for me. They do. Every time. But ask any of them and they’ll tell you they never thought it would be so much work.

But they braved the storm and came out unscathed; in fact, I believe they are so much stronger than they ever were before because now they know their books inside and out than they ever did and, more importantly, they discovered how great virtual book tours really are and how much promotion it takes to make their book noticed.

Yes, they are quite surprised but they listen to me and do what I ask and before you know it, their books are seen by thousands of potential buyers. And that’s always a good thing.

Every month, we send a questionnaire to our clients to see how their tour experience went. We encourage criticism as this is how we learn and grow. We study these questionnaires to see if there’s anything we need to work on and no other study could be more effective than straight from the author’s mouth.

Linda Thieman toured with us this past month. Linda is the author of the children’s book, Katie & Kimble: A Ghost Story.

Linda was kind enough to fill hers out and send it to me and I would like to share it with you completely unedited.

How would you compare your virtual book tour experience with a live tour?

I’ve never done a live tour, but I can imagine that I spent more time writing interviews and guest posts for the virtual tour than I would have for a live tour.

Did you combine a live tour with your virtual book tour?

No

On a scale of 1 – 10, how would you rank your tour in terms of increased online exposure, and overall satisfaction?

Taking everything into consideration, I would have to rank this experience a 10 out of 10. For one thing, when Dorothy Thompson claims that her system is optimized for search engine effectiveness, you can see the truth in that immediately. Previous to the book tour, I thought the Katie & Kimble: A Ghost Story series was doing pretty well in the search engines. But the other day, I noticed someone had found my blog by searching for “Katie and Kimble,” so I followed the link back and was amazed to discover that the whole tour was taking up the first five Google pages! That is going to have far-reaching effects.

Would you consider your tour a success? If so, in what way? If not, would you care to explain?

I would consider the tour a success on many levels. For one thing, I now have a nice portfolio of guest posts, interviews and reviews, all about Katie & Kimble, which since Katie & Kimble is a series, will serve me well in the future, too. I also noticed that on the days I had a tour stop up on the promo page, the hits to the Katie & Kimble blog more than doubled. In addition, there were some nice “extra” benefits. Some book bloggers read some of my reviews or interviews and offered to review the book, so having additional contacts was a nice surprise. Other reviewers wished to also review Katie & Kimble: The Magic Wish, the second book in the series. Plus, I found Dorothy Thompson’s system of blanketing the PR sites with press releases and her in-house blogs to be of great benefit as my press release was picked up by the [Chicago] Sun-Times News Group and my interview on The Writer’s Life was picked up by USA Today.

What was the hardest part of your tour?

Being left off the promo page was grueling. It was like the momentum died. I understand that it is not always possible to time these things exactly, but maybe things could be spread out, i.e., instead of having 3 tour stops one day and no tour stops the next, why not do 2 and 1?

Which did you find easier – filling out interviews or writing guest posts?

I think filling out interviews was easier but took longer because so many of them were long. It’s a more casual style of writing. When doing a guest post, you need a solid main point with a good beginning, middle and end. Either way, you want to provide something fresh and different for the blogger who is hosting you.

Of the two, which would you have liked more of?

I think I had a great plenty of both of them. I did 6 guest posts, all of which got used, and I did 8 interviews, only 6 of which got used. That surprised me a bit. I had assumed that if I were being given an assignment by my tour coordinator that my work would be used.

How much time did you invest in the actual pre-tour process of filling out interviews and writing guest posts for your stops?

Hours every day. Seems like I was writing and writing throughout the whole tour. It wasn’t just before the tour. Sometimes I wouldn’t receive the interview questions until just a few days before they were due.

This whole tour was like a highly-concentrated graduate level course where you attend class all day long and then on top of it, you have a written assignment due four days a week. Always trying to give thoughtful answers and digging deep into the history and process of my writing and of the writing of the Katie & Kimble: A Ghost Story series, I was able to see my whole project in an all-new light. Things I’d known or patterns that had emerged over the years were now up for discussion. I credit the tour with sharpening my focus about my life’s project, and with giving me a real workout in exercising my writing muscles!

How much time did you invest in promoting your tour?

I’d say I spent up to two hours a day, sending out links to interested parties, posting on Twitter, posting on my blog, etc. Plus doing thank you comments on blogs that hosted me and following any discussion that popped up and adding to them. That was a lot of fun.

What part of your virtual book tour did you love the most?

I loved it when the tour hosts created cute little presentations to go with my info. That really touched me. Or when the reviewers really “got” what I was trying to do with the Katie & Kimble stories. That was a thrill.

What part of your virtual book tour did you find a bit disappointing?

As mentioned above, on the days I didn’t find myself on the promo page, that was disappointing.

Did you notice your Amazon rankings change during your tour?

I failed to pay attention to this!

Did you notice more hits to your website or blog during your tour?

Absolutely. On the days when I had a tour stop or stops listed on the promo page, my hits doubled—except for the first week, which went kind of slowly. Seems like as the tour moves along, the momentum really builds.

How did your internet presence (e.g. Google) change from the time you started your tour until the end?

I answered this above, but just to reiterate, my Google presence was pretty good before the tour, but during and after the tour, it was just amazing. The press releases from the tour showed up and all the tour stops show up. And then the interviews also show up on other blogs that use the Blogger system. Signing up for Google Alerts, as Dorothy Thompson advised, was a wonderful way to follow my new Internet presence.

How can we improve?

1) I think it’s so important for the author’s momentum to be up on the promo page as often as possible. So, I’d say, unclump tour stops and hold some over for a blank day.

2) Plus, I had 4 tour stops listed with incorrect url’s or that pointed to blogs where I was not hosted. That was frustrating.

3) One other thing—if the post is already up, then having the exact link to that article posted on the promo page would be a great help. Otherwise, you click on it and have to search for the article, and if much time has passed, then it’s just gone forever, and I think most people will give up before going on a long search to find a post from two weeks ago. Also, then if someone is drawn to your promo page a month or two later, they’d be able to find the article in a snap instead of never. It’s a long-term kind of a thing.

Any final words?

Yes, I thank you. I feel that this book tour will have a longer reach than is obvious at this moment.

To reiterate, we at Pump Up did learn a few things. I don’t feel it’s in the author’s best interests to clump more than one stop in one day. The reason why we feel we have to do this is because we want to give the authors as many stops as we can and sometimes the days in the month just aren’t long enough. In Linda’s case, some of her stops didn’t go up as planned and they had to be grouped into one day toward the end of her tour. Five stops in one day is too much, but we didn’t want her to lose any. On the other hand, who in their right mind has the time to visit all five stops and I think this is the point Linda was making. It was one of those Catch-22 situations but she makes a very valid point.

I want to thank Linda again for taking the time to fill out our questionnaire and I believe we’ve all learned a lot from her experiences. More importantly, both author and tour coordinator walked away from the tour having learned more than when they started. Online book promotion is a constant learning tool of which we all have to participate if we want to sell our book. I am happy we could help Linda do that. Good luck to you, Linda, and continue to pump up that book!

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