Virtual Book Tours 101…

In anticipation for the upcoming re-releases of both my MG/YA time travel books with Mirror World Publishing, I’ve decided to hire a book promotion specialist to help with the process of setting up and running a book blog tour. I’ve learned in the past that for me, it’s easier to delegate rather than take on certain tasks. However, if you love the thought of being in the driver’s seat and setting up your own book blog tour, then this post is for you.

Below is a 15 point checklist for planning your virtual book blog tour. It’s not rocket science, but it will give an author an idea of the different steps that are needed to pull off a successful book blog tour.

·         Make sure you plan at least 2-3 months in advance.

·         Determine your goals for your book tour. Remember you’re bringing awareness to your book(s) so make sure you’re clear on what you want to get across to potential readers.

·         What type of tour will you be running? Book blast? New release?

·         Determine the length of your tour and the tour dates.

·         Are you going to run a contest during your book tour?

·         Decide whether or not to offer giveaways or discounts. I usually use Rafflecopter to run a giveaway. It’s easy and picks the winner at the end of the tour.

·         Make a list of prospective hosts and research them. Hint: pull from your well of blogger author friends who write in the same genre as you do. You’ll be able to pay them back when they do a book tour.

·         Write an invitation and send to your top prospects.

·         Correspond with hosts and send confirmations.

·         Set-up a schedule of tour stops.

·         Post schedule on your blog or website.

·         Plan your promotional strategy, and include your tour hosts. Some may want to do a review. Others may want to share an excerpt. Do up a top ten list or dream cast based on your book. There are plenty of ideas to draw from!

·         Write articles/posts and send to your hosts at least ten days in advance. Don’t forget any images you may want to include.

·         Set-up a daily routine to follow during your book tour.

·         Finally—this is a must—make sure you COMMENT on each of your host’s blog. Check in periodically to see if anyone has commented, and reply to them. This is a common courtesy, and your hosts are going out of their way to help support you and your book.

BTW—my virtual book blog tour for The Last Timekeepers and the Arch of Atlantis begins June 17^th and finishes on June 26^th. I’ve hired Sapphyria’s Book Promotions to do most of the leg work on this one. It should be a blast! I’ll be posting the tour schedule on my blog in the near future, so stay tuned!

Thanks a heap for reading my blog. Authors, if you have time, please leave a comment and share how you go about organizing a virtual book blog tour. If you’re a reader, please share what you enjoy about virtual book blog tours? The giveaways? A chance at winning an awesome prize? Engaging with the author? Finding a new author? I’d appreciate your input. Cheers! 

Shouldering Author Morale…

If you look up the word morale in any dictionary chances are it reads: the degree of mental or moral confidence of a person or group. For me, as an author, morale means much more than that. It is that needed punch in the arm authors give each other, that WOO-HOO for a 5 star review, that tweet or share or shout out to help authors with their sales, and that blog post comment to help them get on the cyber map.

So how do you go about bolstering author morale? Follow the Golden rule. Treat other authors precisely as you wish them to treat you. If they don’t respond at once, keep at it, again and again and again. If there’s no response, no Esprit de Corps among them, then it may be time to move on and find another group of authors willing to help build your author platform with you. Then, once you’ve establish an Esprit de Corps, you go the extra mile.

Going the extra mile is the state of mind you must develop in order to build morale and keep the momentum going in ANY endeavor. And going the extra mile makes you indispensable to others. You do for them what no one else does. And if they ask what they can do for you, tell them. So the next time you find yourself perusing your favorite social network — go the extra mile and give an author a boost. Share their wares. Like their post. Comment on their blog. Tweet their stuff. Friend and follow them. Trust me—you’ll get it back in aces.

Thanks a heap for reading my blog. Authors, if you have time, please leave a comment and share what you do to go the extra mile with other authors. If you’re a reader, please share what you do to boost your favorite author’s presence? I’d appreciate your input. Cheers! 

6 Things I’ve learned when doing a Book Signing…

I finally had my first book signing! Cue the Snoopy dance music. It was arranged through a high school friend of mine who connected with me via Facebook. This event was part of a United Way fundraiser to raise awareness for literacy and included a used book sale. Before my book signing took place, I queried a few good author friends about what their experiences were like at their signings. I got a lot of feedback and great advice. One author suggested I wear loud, colorful clothing or a clown’s wig to draw attention to myself and stand out. Given the type of event I was invited to, I so HAPPY that I didn’t purchase Bozo’s wig. Here’s what I learned:

Thing #1 – Make sure you know what type of audience will be attending your book signing. I was anticipating that there would be some children present. Um…no kids in sight. Unless you count a few rambunctious adults happy to get out of work for a while! If I’d known there’d be no kids, I would have had different treats available at my table—something more adult friendly instead of red licorice and gummy fish. I’m willing to bet Jello shots would have gone over well and netted me more book sales!

Thing #2 – Stand in front of your table, not behind it. Go meet and greet people—that’s the reason you’re there in the first place! Get up front and show off your wares. As I mentioned, I had candy available (sometimes that can work like a fisherman’s net) and used a pair of tongs to serve passers-by. I asked them politely if they wanted a piece of candy, and they either nodded and stopped, or shook their heads, thanked me, and moved on. Now had there been kids there, I’m sure I would have been mobbed!

Thing #3 – Engage with everyone who stops by your table. Smile and talk up your books. I started off by telling potential buyers about the premise of my MG/YA time travel series and that I wrote a prequel too. I also mentioned that both books could be read out of order. Not everyone will be interested, but I did manage to sell ten books in three hours.

Thing #4 – Have freebies available for people to take with them. I have trading cards with my book cover on the front, and the blurb and my website link on the back. I also had postcards done up by my publishing company, Musa Publishing with other YA book covers printed on them. All these giveaways were autographed as a keepsake of the event. Plus, potential readers could check out my books when they felt they had more time.

Thing #5 – With table banners coming in at about $120 and up, I decided to go another route. I printed off my two book covers (plus the cover of my free short story available on my website), made copies of them, and placed the book covers in plastic sheet protectors. Then, at the book signing I taped my book covers to the table provided for me. My covers are eye-catching, so if you have many books to choose from, print out the most vibrant covers to display. It’s an inexpensive way to get your books and your name out into the public.

Thing #6 – After my book signing which ran from 11 am to 2 pm, and the oh-so-long drive home, I made

sure that I emailed my hosts immediately to thank them for inviting me to attend their event. Being thankful and having a positive attitude will go far, not only with the people who invite you to book signing events, but to potential readers. They’ll feel your sincerity, whether you realize it or not.

Thank you for reading my blog. Have you ever attended or been asked to do a book signing? If so, please comment and share your experiences. Love to hear from you! Cheers!

Help yourself to a treat...

Why Spying on Your Competition is a Great Way to Be Successful…

Spying is a catchy way of saying “do your research and stay tuned in.” Regardless of what you call it, it’s a mandatory part of being successful. It’s also a great way to build connections. There’s an old saying that to be successful you have to stop obsessing about the competition. I agree with that to a certain degree, but to not be aware of what other authors in your genre are doing is never a smart idea.

Regardless of what you write you need to be dialed into the competitive landscape. Knowing what others in your target market are doing, writing about and promoting can be key to your success as well. Not that I would ever encourage copying, but being in tune with your genre and market can be a fantastic idea generator, not to mention it gives you the ability to stay ahead of certain trends that haven’t even surfaced at the consumer level yet.

First rule of spying: study your target market, the books as well as other authors in the industry. It helps you to also differentiate yourself from them in products, services, and pricing. Again, you don’t want to copy, you just want to be aware. Another lesser known reason for doing this is that if you’re struggling with your social media (like me)—both from the aspect of what platform to be on to what to say to drive more engagement—keeping these authors on your radar will greatly increase your marketing ideas. Living in a vacuum never made anyone successful.

Whether you’re writing fiction or non-fiction, you want to know who else is writing on your topic or in your genre. Google search is a great place to start. The results will not just turn up names and book titles but also show you the best ways to interact with your reader.

Google is packed with names of authors who write about your topic or genre. As you begin to compile your list I want you to do one thing: ignore big brands because it’s likely that they can do anything they want and still be successful. If you’re a middle grade writer, names like Rick Riordan and Brandon Mull come to mind. These authors are big, powerful brands. You want the smaller names, the people you may not immediately recognize. Why? Because they have to try harder. If tomorrow Riordan or Mull decided to put out a book on poetry, while their fans might be surprised they would likely still buy it. But if a lesser-known author did that they’d look like they have writer-ADD. Not good.

So start putting your list together, as you do sign up for their mailing lists, and follow them on Twitter and any other social media site they use. That’s what I do. Aside from the obvious reasons why you want to do this, I’m a big fan of supporting other authors in my market. Share their Facebook updates, retweet their great Twitter posts, etc.

One of the hidden gems of this research is it will also show you what social media sites to be on. If you've been struggling to figure out where your market resides, this strategy should really clear that up for you. Why? Because if you’re plucking names off of the first page of Google you know one thing: whatever they are doing to show up in search, they’re doing it right. Google has made so many changes to their search algorithms that you simply can’t “trick” the system anymore to get onto page one. Look at their updates. What are they sharing and why? How often do they blog? Are they on LinkedIn instead of Facebook? Is there much going on for them on Pinterest? Really spend some time with this. Not only will it help you tune into your market but it will cut your learning curve by half, if not more.

Successful authors leave clues. Are you following their bread crumbs?

Goodreads 101...

Since I’m having a Goodreads Giveway for the next few weeks, I thought I’d do a post on building an author presence on Goodreads in order to get your book(s) into the faces or your targeted readers. First things first, authors need to be ACTIVE on Goodreads. That doesn’t mean you need to be on it daily—if you can that’s great—but try to organize your schedule so that you can pop your virtual head into Goodreads on a weekly basis.

Here’s a great plan to follow:

1. Add a new book to your shelves, one you are reading, want to read, or a book that inspired your writing. Simple and fast.

2. Write a review for a book. If you do a lot of Amazon reviews feel free to grab the content from there and repost it to Goodreads. And if you want to be a real rock star of the review world, grab your Goodreads review and cross post it to Amazon. Hey, why not? Wouldn't you love it if someone did that for you?

3. Rate books. This is easy and oh-so-simple. Give books a starred rating. You don't even have to write a review to do this one.

4. Blog post. If you update your blog post weekly that's fantastic, if you don't then I suggest that you update your Goodreads status once or more a week. You can also just add a favorite book passage or author quote. It doesn't have to be a long post. You're just aiming for profile activity, that's key.

5. Groups. Join them. Post to a group, comment or respond to someone's question.

6. Add friends. I recommend adding friends weekly if possible. You'll find people in the groups that you want to friend or reviews you want to follow. Building a healthy friend list is really key to expanding your network (and getting more reviews) on Goodreads.

Bonus: If you can, set up a Goodreads Giveaway (paperbacks only) at least four or more times a year. You won’t believe the feedback and the amount of entries you get. This alone will build your presence and help find the audience you’re looking for.

And speaking of a Goodreads Giveaway, here’s a chance to win the first book in my MG/YA time travel series, The Last Timekeepers and the Arch of Atlantis until December 10^th…

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Last Timekeepers and the Arch of Atlantis

by Sharon Ledwith

Giveaway ends December 10, 2013.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win