Virtual Book Tours

This week I read an interesting blog (www.morganmandel.blogspot.com.) . Morgan invited Angela Wilson to talk about professional on line book tours.

Angela Wilson is an author, freelance Web content director and Book Blog Editor for Pop Syndicate, a pop culture site with more than 8,000 hits per day. Each week, Pop Syndicate hosts authors on virtual tour.

I am always interested in new ways of promotion. Angela says in this series of short blogs that even virtual tours are time consuming and take work. Reading over what she advises should happen for a book tour, I agree. Sounds like a lot of work. But then I realized that there is lag time between books. So there is time to produce a short essay, or a character interview, etc. every once in a while-not all at once. Save these up and that part of the book tour will be ready. Then there's the research that goes into picking the right blogs...now that takes time and recommendations from friends. Again- some advance leg work-say five to ten minutes a day-spread out well in advance might ease the pain.

The real cringer for me was when Angela suggested you keep an Excel file with all the numbers and results of hits, etc. so you know which blog or site really worked and which didn't. Sounds like good advice-but I know myself too well- by that point I'll have my nose into another story...