Today is day four of our Klepto Cat Mystery Blog Tour and I’m engaging quite a few readers new to the series. You might avoid doing a blog tour because you believe that everyone who visits blogs related to your book genre or theme already knows about your book. Probably not.
This is my second tour with some of these blog sites and many of those commenting have never heard of my series. For me, that’s the point of conducting a blog tour—to attract new readers as well as inform former readers of any new additions to the series.
A blog tour is just one way to promote your book. There are hundreds of others. Check out my book, Promote Your Book, Over 250 Prove, Low-Cost Tips and Techniques for the Enterprising Author. Promotional activities such as the blog tour are all about exposure. In order to sell books, promotion is absolutely necessary. Yet, I still meet authors who refuse to do more to promote a book than build a website and get a Twitter account.
That’s a good start, but this is not going to put your book in front of very many potential readers. There’s so much more that an author can do and those who understand that and who are enterprising, energeticm and creative in their promotional efforts are apt to sell more books.
So let’s take the blog tour as an example. Once you’ve chosen anywhere from four to twenty-four (or more) stopovers where your particular readers might congregate, start promoting your tour. Use your blogs, your newsletter, your email list, your social media accounts, and post notices in other newsletters, at these and other blogs and so forth.
During the week(s) of the blog tour, use these means again to encourage visitors to stop at each of your blog stops.
When you are guest blogger, write something specific for each particular audience. For example, today’s Klepto Cat Mystery blog stopover is at Mochas, Mysteries and Meows. Reviews and posts at this site are often attributed to Truffles, a cat. So I wrote today’s post from my cat, Lily’s point of view—what it’s like to be an author’s cat.
If you’d like to join in on the fun, here’s the link: www.mochasmysteriesmeows.com
Be sure to sign up for a free Kindle copy of my latest Klepto Cat Mystery, Mansion of Meows.