Virtually touring
Write book. Publish book. Go on book tour in nightwear. Simon Whaley explain the modern way to promote books
Simon Whaley
Gone are the days when publishers organised country-wide book tours for every author, dropping them into every major town and city bookstore to promote their latest offering. Many authors are probably thankful for this, for such events were frequently gruelling and exhausting.
Today, a good book tour still requires energy and effort on an author’s part, but the modern virtual book tour means we can travel the world promoting our books from the comfort of our own home… even in our nightwear, if that’s what we fancy.
But what exactly is a virtual book tour? Rachel Gilbey, who runs Rachel’s Random Resources (www.rachelsrandomresources.com) to help authors with their book promotional needs, explains. ‘Instead of attending a different bookshop in the country for a signing each day, you are instead guaranteed being featured in virtual shop windows, or book blogs, for each day of the tour, potentially being in two or three places at once, so that even more people have the chance to see you and your book at any one time.’
And unlike physical book tours, where you deal with one person at a time in the queue, or even worry whether anyone will actually turn up, virtual book tours can take a variety of formats.
‘These shop windows, the book blogs,’ says Rachel, ‘are going to either feature a review of your book, or potentially a post that you have supplied to them, or an interview with you, or even an extract from your book. This allows your book to be seen all over the world and means that you could be displayed in the UK and USA simultaneously on the same day, thus allowing an even bigger audiences to see and hear about your book.’