Virtual Book Tour Q & A

[Cheryl C. Malandrinos]

Hello all,

I work with Dorothy Thompson at Pump Up Your Book Promotion. I figured I would get the discussions going. If you have any questions about virtual book tours, please feel free to ask them here.

Thanks. I look forward to sharing with all of you.

Cheryl

[Phyllis Zimbler Miller]

I'm already signed up for my virtual book tour in June so I'm asking this question for the other authors whose books are in the process of being published. (I only learned about PumpUpYourBookPromotion from BookSurge after my book was already out on Amazon.) My question: What do you think the ideal time for a virtual book tour is in relation to the publication date? And how many months ahead of that ideal time should an author contact PumpUpYourBookPromotion.com?

[Dorothy Thompson]

Hi Phyllis and thank you for your question! First of all, I strongly urge that the book be already released by the time the tour starts for the sake of the reviewers and other blog hosts who need copies beforehand. It gets a little too crazy unless the book is available. We've had to move tours up a month because the author jumped the ship and booked for the month they "thought" the book was going to be released. Something happened on the publisher's end which caused the book to be released later than usual and there the author was stuck with no books to send to blog hosts, so the only solution was to move the tour to the following month to allow for books to be available.

And how many months lead time do we need? One month minimum. The earlier the better. Even if the book hasn't been released (as in the case of a lot of our clients who book ahead), we can start our blog hunt early. We won't be able to send books of course, but it gives us more lead time to find the perfect blogs for our clients to appear on. If we had to go with the most ideal situation, two months is a great number. ;o)

Thank you for your question, Phyllis, and I look forward to seeing you in the blogosphere in June!

[Phyllis Zimbler Miller]

Thanks for this reply. And you just answered a question that another author asked me about in terms of my recommending PumpUpYourBookPromotion. He asked whether you put everyone on the same blogs or match blogs with books. I said in my experience you match blogs with books, and that's what you said above -- "more lead time to find the perfect blogs."

[Cheryl C. Malandrinos]

Exactly! We get to know our clients' books so that we can find the right kinds of blogs for them.

[Dorothy Thompson]

To add to this, I do want to say that to the outsider, it would appear that all our authors are on the same blogs because there are a few blogs we do use purposely. I'm in the middle of writing an article about this now. Some are our in house blogs and we use them for SEO reasons and article syndication reasons. Not all blog hosts understand the importance of SEO, but we do. I also like to cover all bases and think outside the box. I was talking to an author recently about this. People tell authors to aim for a niche audience. What they are overlooking is the fact that there are plenty of book buyers who will buy your book who are not in your niche audience. If you think outside the box and cover all bases, I find it's a better tour all the way around and you have the potential to sell more books. Also, I mentioned article syndication. The key to a successful tour in my opinion is for your online presence in the search engines to increase dramatically. A virtual book tour is excellent for this. But because I host authors on a few of my in house blogs, that gives me the opportunity to give authors even more exposure through article syndication in which I take their interview that is hosted on one of my blogs and syndicate it out to content ezines and that gives you exposure to perhaps thousands of potential book buyers. When you sign on with us, it's not just a simple case of being placed on 15 to 20 blogs and that's it. You could do that yourself. Our main thing is the promotion end of it...the more blogs and websites that you are hosted on, the more links you have in the search engines for your key search words. It's a system that can get you into the top placement in any search engine and that's what Pump Up is all about.