October 10th, 2007 — writing
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…
October 10th, 2007 — writing
Blog tours can sell some books, but not at rates any better than regular direct mail. And getting the kind of audience you need for direct mail appears to be much trickier than we all thought it would be. 85 blogs participating in a tour just doesn’t translate into that much exposure, traffic, conversion, or sales.
Dee has a different approach. She apparently estimates that book sales will be 10%-20% of the number of participating bloggers. That’s the industry standard, she says. It’s an interesting approach.
Regardless of the sales figures, blogs can be a way to connect interested readers with the author. The original goal of a book tour was to let the author speak in person with his or her potential audience.
Blogs can allow interaction between writers and readers. For example, I told Michael Lindsay that the best thing he could do to encourage buzz about his book Faith in the Halls of Power, was simple. Just comment on the blogs that link to his Amazon.com page. We talked about how to set up an RSS notification for this in Technorati. (You may have noticed that he commented on my review last week.)
Also, if blog tours aren’t great at selling books, they may work to help authors develop relationships with potential readers. In the language of direct marketing and fund raising, blog tours could be an acquisitions tool to promote a particular newsletter. (Mary has two good newsletters: Inside Renewal and Relevant Prose.)
…back to the quiz…
October 10th, 2007 — writing
Hardly. Try again, doofus.
…back to the quiz…
October 10th, 2007 — writing
Priming the pump just doesn’t work well in the way that many blog tours are going about it. It may even damage the credibility of the participants by making it easier to see how everybody is saying the same thing.
We don’t want to look like a collection of zombie bloggers, right? Nobody likes zombies.
The possible exception may be the Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog Tour. They like zombies, but that’s not what I mean. They also seem to have created some genre buzz that has legs. Although they promote a specific book or website each month, the tour seems to have created a loose community of bloggers interested in the same topic, rather than the same person.
…back to the quiz…
October 10th, 2007 — writing
I promised a true-false reading comprehension quiz based on all the confusing blog stats from Monday. Don’t panic. It’s just three questions folks, and it only counts 80% of your six weeks grade.
Are you ready? Here we go!
THE BIG TRUE FALSE QUIZ ABOUT BLOG TOURS!
Directions: Read the questions and click on the correct answer. After you are done, exchange computers with your neighbor so he or she can check your work.
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October 10th, 2007 — writing
Help! I need advice.
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