Last year, Mud and I were asked by the lovely bloggers at the Smut Report if we could give an “inside view” of sorts on blog tours. Why are they important? What is the point of a blog tour?
While we hope we were able to give a few insightful answers, there was one we didn’t think we really answered below and that is that it’s a great way to introduce an author to a blogger. Authors are generally homebodies that just don’t see the glamour in the minutia of their work, writing one sentence twenty times “because it didn’t look right at first.” While authors are often readers that adore the authors of the books they love, they put this glass ceiling of their own making between them, separating themselves from the “real” authors.
Authors work hard on pieces that often start out as “side projects”—it takes time away from their sleep, their family, their work, their sanity, and to offer any more of themselves on something that maybe won’t work out, on a bad review, or a soured experience—a lot of times, they just can’t do it. They can’t make themselves pry more time away from their lives to offer themselves up to an email they might never hear back from and they can’t afford to pay for someone—a personal assistant or a promo company charging hourly wages—to do it for some indeterminable period of time.
A blog tour has a few really great aspects that makes them perfect, especially for indie authors: one, it has a flat rate; two, an expected timeline; and three, at the end the author can freak out at being so brave as to put their work out their into the world and then go back to the hermit lifestyle.
That, of course, isn’t all authors, but it’s a lot of them. Blog tours have formed so many blogger-author relationships that it’s almost always included in the checklist—edits, cover materials, and blog tour.
And that makes Mud and I, as blog tour organizers, really happy.
And another cool thing? Blog tours aren’t just an indie author thing. Big, NYT-bestselling authors do blog tours, just like small, self-published authors. Big and small publishing companies realize the value in blog tours, so by promoting, you’re joining the playing field of all authors, with sales big and small.
Now onto the questions we were asked below.
Continue reading “Guest Post: Talking Blog Tours with Psst… Promotions and Let’s Talk Promotions”
The Smut Report 