Take your e-book on a virtual book tour and share your message with more people

By D’vorah Lansky

Would you like to take your book on tour, around the globe without leaving home? Consider conducting a virtual book tour! A virtual book tour is where you take your message on tour, around the Internet, with the goal of being exposed to new audiences. You can visit blogs and share guest blog posts in the form of written, audio, or video posts, or you can conduct a teleseminar and invite people to listen in.

Think of the traditional book tour where the author gets in a car or boards an airplane to go from location to location to talk about a book, hoping that there will be a crowd at the event. Well, even very popular, bestselling authors face the same situation. They speak at well-attended events and have also arrived at venues expecting a crowd only to have no one show up.

With a digital book, you can still conduct a book tour. In fact, for either a print book or a digital book, you can conduct a virtual book tour. With a virtual book tour, you can take your book on tour, without having to pay for travel expenses or worrying if anyone will be at a destination when you arrive. When you conduct a virtual book tour and are hosted by well-known experts with a responsive following, your book can gain exposure to many new audiences.

By participating in a virtual book tour you will grow your audience, and you’ll sell more books. You will be travelling around the Internet to the blogs’ of experts who serve your target audience, and you will be seen as an expert by association.

Three virtual book tour formats to choose from

There are several different types of virtual book tours to consider. Today I’m going to share with you three popular formats, and you can decide which format is best for you.

The one-day teleseminar

The first format for a virtual book tour is the one-day teleseminar where you’ll be speaking about your book.  With this format you get the word out to your community and have your colleagues extend an invitation to their communities.

During the teleseminar, which is approximately 60 to 90 minutes in length, everyone is driving traffic and inviting people to this one event. In essence, you are creating a big gala celebration. This can be a lot of fun and is a great way to get your message out across the airwaves. Of course, you can record your talk and have it available for replay.

The one-day blog blitz

The next format is called the one-day blog blitz.  This is a very exciting way to conduct a virtual book tour.  However, it takes a tremendous amount of energy and a tremendous amount of organization.  Imagine this: You’ve connected with 10, 20, or 30 blog owners who serve audiences that are interested in your topic.  You coordinate either on your own or with your virtual team to get content to each of the blog owners, and the blog owners schedule your blog posts to all appear on a specific date.

The reason for this format is to create a lot of buzz about your book, on a given day. This would be an excellent strategy to coordinate during a book launch. The one-day blog blitz will give you a lot of exposure and create a buzz about your book in a concentrated period of time.

Over the course of the day, you travel from site to site, thanking your tour hosts and responding to people’s comments. Be sure to stop by these sites over the course of the week because people will continue to come to the blog and there may be new comments to respond to.

The multi-day, multi-blog format

The format that I prefer is the multi-day, multi-blog, virtual book tour.  This is where you decide on a time frame for your tour as well as how many days a week you’ll be touring during that time frame.

For example, let’s say we’re going to do a 15-day blog tour, and that your tour will take place five days a week. That means you’ll be touring Monday through Friday for three weeks.

I find this format to be the most effective and the most relaxed. This format also provide prolonged exposure to you and your book and builds momentum.

Staying organized

Post a virtual book tour schedule on your site with links to where you’ll be touring to each day. You’ll need to add the hyperlinks to each day’s post the morning that a post goes live. The reason for this is because if people visit the URL before the post goes live, they will land on an error page.

I find it really helpful to ask my tour hosts to go ahead and schedule the post for 9 am Eastern on the date I am touring to their site. I ask that they do that while it is on their mind and to email me the URL to the blog post. I then add each URL to a spreadsheet and list what date I am touring to that site.

Have you conducted a virtual book tour? Do you have questions about them? Add a comment with your information or question!

Before you comment, remember to stop by the Digital Publishing Virtual Summit to learn more about Sandra’s presentation about how to plan and execute your own virtual book tour, and to learn about all of the other exciting speakers, too! (Please note that the links to the Summit in this post use Sandra’s affiliate code.)