4 Reasons to participate in blog tours

One of the books I have on tour this month
One of the books I have on tour this month

Since I started working as a Promotions Specialist for Musa Publishing, I’ve started to think a lot about what I’ll call karmic marketing. 

Karmic marketing is when you actively spread the word about somebody else’s work or host authors on your blog.

Writers are great people, and we’re all struggling to be heard, to stand out despite all the noise on the internet today. The vast majority of small press authors will notice if you share a lot of their blog posts or write a really stellar review of their book. They’ll notice and they might just take the time to thank you.

This gives you the opportunity to build a friendship with a fantastic writer. You’ll enjoy the friendship for the great conversation now, and someday they might end up hosting you on their blog and reviewing your book. 

Over the years I’ve made interviewed dozens of authors here on The Dabbler, and I’ve made some pretty great friends that way. Some I keep in touch with and know I can approach if I need guest content in a hurry at some point down the road. Others have subscribed to the blog and stuck around for a while to join the conversation. I’ve even been personally invited to submit to an ebook publisher by an author who turned out to also be an editor.

This is the power of karmic marketing. Someday when my first book is published, I know a large number of authors who will interview me, review my book, and participate in the launch. And some of these people are already my biggest cheerleaders, celebrating each of my accomplishments with me on social media.

With that in mind, here are 4 reasons to participate in blog tours:

1) It helps you keep your blog updates regular. I like to keep a posting schedule of twice a week, and coming up with two articles for my blog every week on top of freelance work can be exhausting. So I post interviews once a week. These are usually done pretty far in advance and I don’t have to do much thinking.

Most blog tours will come with options: you can use a pre-written and formatted guest post, request to interview the author, or review the book. Reviewing the book will be the most time consuming of those options, but none of them require you to come up with a fresh article idea.

2) You might get a book out of the deal. If you want to review the book, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to obtain a free ebook copy. Even if you don’t, there’s a chance the author will offer everyone participating in the tour a free ebook in the hopes of garnering more reviews or just to say thank you.

Even if you don’t, the author will almost always send you a personal thank you note, and there’s pretty much nothing more awesome in the world than being thanked by an author you love.

3) You’ll get an idea how blog tours are run. You are here because you want to become a published author someday right?

You might be doing the occasional guest post now and it might even bring in enough traffic for you to be happy with your blog’s growth, but when you do publish that novel you’re going to want more. A few guest posts here and there won’t be enough to build your reputation as a great author.

Paying attention when you participate in blog tours can give you a pretty good idea how most of them are run. You’ll see what a standard post looks like, what kind of giveaways are involved and how much attention different tours attract.

4) You’ll probably make some friends. The more often you participate in blog tours, especially blog tours run by small press and indie authors, the more likely this is to happen.

There are several ways to make friends through a blog tour. Many of the people who stop by your website will only stay long enough to enter a giveaway, but some will comment, subscribe and even become part of the community. You can also reach out to other bloggers in the tour, discussing the experience with them on social media. And you can develop friendships with the touring authors, some of which will last a lifetime.

You’ll want to be picky about which blog tours you’ll enter, because you only want to advertise good books on your blog, which means reading blurbs and bios to make sure the books are interesting and the authors have merit. Often small press authors write their own blurbs and bios, as do most self published author, which means these are great little writing samples.

If you’d like to participate in blog tours throughout 2015, I have a surprise for you. I’ve decided that I don’t want to flood this blog with new releases, so I’ve created a newsletter you can subscribe to which will send you information about new releases from Musa Publishing and information on how to get involved with the associated blog tours.

Sign up here to find out about upcoming blog tours throughout 2015 and beyond.