I had never tried a virtual book tour before, and I might never try one again. I'm not sure if all tours are the same, but I certainly won't be using the same site I used for Camp Maple Creek earlier this month. Why? This is what I have concluded about book tours:
1. While there is a sign up page for bloggers to add their sites to the tour, I am certain that most of the sites are merely link farms. What makes me think this? Absolutely nothing but book tours. If this was a real blog, wouldn't there be actual posts from the blogger? 99% of the sites I visited were nothing but post after post of book tours. I'm not sure if these sites are paid to host them, or if the blogs are created solely to have a place to post book tours, but I'm guessing it's the latter.
2. I was told that the visitors like to engage with the authors, so I should make sure to visit all the sites and make comments. Why, when not a single comment was on any of the posts for my book or any of the others? The main site had plenty of comments, but that is a requirement to enter the giveaway. So clearly people only commented so they could get a shot at the $10 gift card. I have concluded that is the only reason there is so much traffic on the book tour site, even though I did get a lot of retweets about my book that week as well as about a dozen new followers. Though I have found that Twitter does minimal help in advertising.
Overall, it was too expensive and basically a waste of time.
1. While there is a sign up page for bloggers to add their sites to the tour, I am certain that most of the sites are merely link farms. What makes me think this? Absolutely nothing but book tours. If this was a real blog, wouldn't there be actual posts from the blogger? 99% of the sites I visited were nothing but post after post of book tours. I'm not sure if these sites are paid to host them, or if the blogs are created solely to have a place to post book tours, but I'm guessing it's the latter.
2. I was told that the visitors like to engage with the authors, so I should make sure to visit all the sites and make comments. Why, when not a single comment was on any of the posts for my book or any of the others? The main site had plenty of comments, but that is a requirement to enter the giveaway. So clearly people only commented so they could get a shot at the $10 gift card. I have concluded that is the only reason there is so much traffic on the book tour site, even though I did get a lot of retweets about my book that week as well as about a dozen new followers. Though I have found that Twitter does minimal help in advertising.
Overall, it was too expensive and basically a waste of time.
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Jude
Jude