Virtual Book Tours and Why I Do Them by Marilyn Meredith, Author of Bears With Us

People usually say they do virtual blog tours because they can stay in their p.j.s to do them. Sure you can, though I don’t, and there are a lot better reasons to take a virtual blog tour.

For me, they don’t replace my in-person promotion—but they certainly do enhance what I’m doing to promote my book, and a blog tour reaches far more people.

When I first did one, I thought it was a novel idea (no pun intended) and it might be fun to try. Blog tours are fun, but they are also a lot of work.

An author must come up with something different to say for each post for the many stops on the blog tour. You hope, at least I do, that some people may follow you around from place to place on the tour, and you want to have something interesting to read or learn about you at each stop.

Of course the idea behind the tour is to promote your book, so some of the posts will be about the book: how you came to write it, the characters, the setting, research you had to do, the road to publication, what your promotion plans are, and perhaps what’s next. Hopefully, what you’ve written will entice the reader to buy your book.

Another plus of blog tours, is that some of the hosts or hostesses want to review the book. The more good reviews you can get for your book the better—you can use them to continue with your promotion after the blog tour is over.

For a blog tour to be successful, each stop must be promoted on Facebook, Twitter, any other social network that you frequent and any lists that you’re on. You should promote at different times during the day.

Because you want people to comment on our blog post, you should go back and check each blog and thank people who’ve stopped by and left a comment. Some might have asked a question, and you’ll need to answer. (This is something I’ve seen some blog guests neglect and I think it’s an important part of the whole blog tour.)

Okay, now you probably want to know what the benefit is for all this work. What I’ve found is that people do buy books from what they’ve learned on a blog tour. One way you can check is to belong to Author Central on Amazon—of course you’ll only find out about a certain amount of sales. You also can check the numbers on your book at Amazon and if they go down, that means sales have occurred. Both of my publishers let me know via the royalty statement where sales came from and the time period. That makes it easy to see if a particular blog tour helped with sales.

Will I continue to do blog tours? Yes, of course, I will. It’s a great way to get information about my latest book out to the largest amount of people.

And right now I’m on a blog tour for my latest Deputy Tempe Crabtree mystery, Bears With Us.

Deputy Tempe Crabtree has her hands full when bears turn up in and around Bear Creek, a young teen commits suicide and his parents’ actions are suspicious, a prominent woman files a complaint against Tempe and her preacher husband Hutch, a love affair from long ago comes to light, and a woman suffering from dementia disappears.

It is available direction from the publisher in all e-book formats and as a trade paperback:
http://mundania.com/book.php?title=Bears+With+Us/ 

And from all the other online bookstores and can be ordered through any independent book seller.

Marilyn Meredith is the author of over thirty published novels, many award winning, including the Deputy Tempe Crabtree mystery series. Bears With Us is the latest release. Writing as F. M. Meredith, her latest Rocky Bluff P.D. crime novel is Angel Lost, the third from Oak Tree Press. Marilyn is a member of EPIC, Four chapters of Sisters in Crime, including the Central Coast chapter, Mystery Writers of America, and on the board of the Public Safety Writers of America. She’s also a been an instructor at many writing conferences including the Maui Writers Retreat, Central Coast Writing Conference and many others.

Visit Marilyn online at 
http://fictionforyou.com/
 and her blog at 
http://marilynmeredith.blogspot.com/
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CONTEST DETAILS: Would you like to be immortalized in print? Marilyn Meredith is running a contest during her BEARS WITH US virtual book tour. Whoever leaves a comment on the most blog sites during the tour, will have his or her name used for a character in Marilyn’s next book. Please visit
http://www.pumpupyourbook.com/2011/08/11/bears-with-us-virtual-book-tour-october-2011/
 for her entire schedule. Good luck!