Blog tours and book sales

Show of hands, how many of you are familiar with blog tours? Okay, it looks like most of you raised your hands.

Now, how many of you have purchased a book because you heard about it on a blog tour? Okay, not as many. That sounds about right.

As a part of a group of writers I am very familiar with blog tours. About a year ago Mary DeMuth did a blog tour where she did a quantitative study of the results of her blog tour. Did a blog tour really equal sales? That is the purpose right?

Well, it depends on where you are in the game.

I really have begun to wonder about the effectiveness of blog tours as it pertains to books. Maybe it is simply because most of the people I know who do blog tours are writers and each writer invites another writer and they write about other writers....and it gets to be like that bad tupperware party where everyone keeps booking a show off of each other and you end up running out of money because you're going to one a week.

But I also see a really great side to blog tours.

If you are not to the published stage yet, blog tours may help you introduce yourself to a possible base of readership. I have had MANY people come over to my blog to visit because they heard about me on another person's blog or they linked to me from an author/editor/agent's website.

So really deciding the usefulness of a blog tour is really about deciding what your goals are and what your definition of success is for the tour. Once you've decided that then you can create a realistic plan for marketing YOU.

And that is the first step in creating a platform for YOUR book.

Your Coach for the Journey, Tiffany Colter