ON THE (VIRTUAL) ROAD
Author Paul Beatty talks about taking his books on a blog tour, and how it can introduce new readers to your work
Paul Beatty
Ever read a blog? Given that you are reading a writing magazine, the answer is probably yes. Wikipedia defines a blog as a discussion website with informal diary-style text entries called posts. For an author, a blog can be an effective addition to a publicity portfolio since they are about comment and are mostly, but not exclusively, about sharing your thoughts and activities with people. They are rather like a personal magazine, and can help develop an audience, centred on you and your books.
Each individual blog will have its own readership. What if you wanted to try to talk to groups of readers from different blogs? Even if you only touched on literary ones, you would never be able to contact even a small minority of the readers.
That’s where a blog tour comes in. It’s a method of marketing writing, manageable and suitable for an individual author. It revolves around supplying material to a group of blogs in a consistent and progressive way over a limited length of time.
Mechanics
I don’t run a blog, so one of the difficult issues was how could I make a blog tour happen? By searching the web you could gather a list of likely blogs and at the same time see what they like to feature. But I took the easy way out and found a provider of blog tours, the excellent Rachel Gilbey of Rachel’s Random Resources.