A THIRD TIME FALSE!

The verdict is still out on this one, but I’m still going to say it’s false. For now.

Blog tours certainly don’t create community unless that is a specific goal. I didn’t see many comments coming to me from folks on the tour. Mary didn’t either.

Again, CSFF is doing some good work creating community around a specific theme, but every month she encourages participants to comment on each other’s blogs. (Bonnie and Dee both have some experience running blogs first hand, too. I’d love to hear from them more in the comments back on the true false quiz post.)

Maybe we should change the purpose of our blog tours. Rather than trying to generate sales or raise awareness, we should perhaps rethink our goals.

Here are a few things to consider for the future:

• Invite bloggers to promote websites, not books.
• Invite bloggers to promote genre communities, not individual titles.
• Invite bloggers to make use of materials in a social media press release.

It seems to me that bloggers have two things: community and content. The more we can help them achieve community by providing them content, the better we can serve them.

And that’s what life is really about: serving others over ourselves. Mary, Tina, and I did our very best to serve folks in the Authentic Parenting blog tour. The goal to sell copies of Mary’s book was as much about finding a specific measurement tool as it was helping spread the word about a book that genuinely helped us as parents.

…back to the quiz…