Thursday, January 24, 2008

Virtual Book Tour

I'm continuing to work a little bit each day to organize my upcoming Virtual Book Tour that starts on February 1, 2008. I'm busy as a bee getting all my ducks in a row since the tour will launch a week from tomorrow! Here are more tips on setting up your own:

Step One: See post on December 8, 2007.
Step Two: See post on December 12, 2007.
Step Three: See post on December 20, 2007.
Step Four: See post on January 3, 2008.

Step Five:
Get ready to launch the tour! Make sure all your stops are scheduled on your calendar and ready to go. Complete any author interviews and get a different author photograph to e-mail to each one. Send everyone on your schedule a press release and a jpg file of your book cover.

If your publisher didn't make a press release, it's not too hard to make your own. Include a picture of your book. (Scan the cover or copy and paste the picture from your publisher's website.) Write a short, catchy description of your book. Include the ISBN, price, and publisher's name along with contact information for those interested in purchasing the book. Add any pertinent news such as awards or availablity for booksignings, making sure everything fits on one page. And there you have it!

I also made a video on our family camcorder, burned it to a DVD, put it onto my Mac and uploaded it to YouTube. Then I copied and pasted the code YouTube gave me to put the video on my website. It's a video that explains the upcoming Virtual Book Tour and invites everyone to join in the fun! (You can see it on my post for January 19.) I also offer the video to anyone scheduled on my tour to post now on their website to alert their own online guests about the upcoming event.

If possible, start writing content for your tour NOW on your word processing program so all you have to do is cut and paste it into your blog each morning of the tour. This will save you lots of headache later if you wake up sick or something on a day of the tour. It will also help you work out the kinks now instead of under the pressure of the actual day's event.

Plan to connect with each of your scheduled stops the day ahead of their date to verify that everything is still a go. (Prepare an emergency plan in case someone doesn't follow through. I'm planning on posting various photos of my life as an author or a list of teacher tips in case something like this happens.) Before you actually post the link to their site, visit their site first thing that morning to make sure their site is ready for your online guests to visit.

If you haven't installed one already, post a counter on your blog to watch the traffic flow. Statcounter at www.statcounter.com offers a free, invisible one that provides lots of information and it's not too complicated to set up.

Tie up any final loose ends and finally--you're ready to go! Launch your Video Book Tour and enjoy the journey!

2 comments:

scribemom7 said...

Hey Nancy! These are wonderful goalsetting strategies! You are full of great ideas! Im printing it all out to put in my writing file and hopefully actually apply to my writing. Thanks again!!!-Val

Nancy I. Sanders said...

Glad you're printing these out! Sorry you couldn't make it to the Schmooze--hopefully jury duty won't be too involved.
-Nancy