How to Organize a Virtual Book Tour - a Review

Self-published authors are responsible for their books marketing and promotion. If the book is to succeed the author must do everything reasonable to promote the book and give it the best chance possible to be discovered by its target audience. Readers of this blog will be familiar with the name Morris Rosenthal who is one of the recognized leaders of the self-publishing industry. Mr. Rosenthal urges authors to establish an author platform by creating an internet presence. His model mainly impacts non-fiction authors but is a good idea for authors of fiction as well as he advocates creating a content based site providing free and valuable content to readers who are interested in what the author writes or writes about.

Book tours by authors has long been a favored promotional tactic to market books. The cost and time involved today would prevent many self-publishing authors from engaging in this type of promotional activity. As with many things in our lives, the internet has changed how book tours can take place. It is no longer necessary to physically travel and do book signings or interviews to engage in a book tour. A virtual book tour done on the internet is a new and low cost method to "tour" and promote a book.

How to Organize a Virtual Book Tour, by Carol Denbow, is a step-by-step guide complete with short to-do check lists at the end of each segment. The book is available from Amazon as both a Kindle edition and a traditional paperback.

This short book consist of seven chapters and allows the reader to follow the process of organizing a virtual book tour in a logical, sequential process from start to finish. Just a few of the chapters include descriptions of both a virtual and a physical book tour, how each of these works, how to prepare for a virtual tour, scheduling virtual tour stops, how to write the blog posts or interviews for each stop and the follow-up process.

Ms. Denbow writes in a clear, concise and easy to follow manner.  It seems evident to me her ideas are based on experience (Ms. Denbow has other books in print) and while some of the information seems fairly common sense, much of it is not and appears, to me, based on the experiences of someone who has done several tours, made mistakes and learned from them.

I hope to have a new book out in late August or early September and the information in this book has me including in my list of promotional activities a virtual book tour.

At $0.99 for a Kindle edition, I don't see how any author planning to promote a self-published book can pass on this title. Even if you don't have a dedicated Kindle device, simply download the FREE Kindle app to your Mac, PC or other electronic device and spend the $0.99 with Amazon.