Daily Archives: June 9, 2014

Jun 9 2014

Why Blog Book Tours Fail Most Authors

 

In today’s digital book world, the tired old book tour has been replaced with the digital blog book tour where authors will “travel” from blog to blog doing interviews, blog take overs, guest blog articles, and also have their latest book/story reviewed by blogs. Depending on what type of tour you are doing, how many blogs you plan to hit and the length of time you will ‘traveling,’ a blog tour of just a few blogs over the course of a month can create hours of work and dozens of headaches. And with the amount of SPAs (self-published authors) hitting the publication scene each day, there simply are not enough book bloggers and reviewers to go around. This has created a major problem for authors who are looking to get bloggers to sign on for their blog tours. Bloggers have become so overwhelmed with the requests for reviews and tour stops that many bloggers have to turn down more and more authors. The whole overabundance of authors and books has created the perfect formula for blog tours to fail for most authors.

 

There are many reasons why blog book tours fail. Here, I will cover my own experiences, why the tours failed, and the major problems with blog tours and why they fail for 99% of authors.

 

Book tour blogs and book review blogs do NOT attract readers, they only attract writers, and if you are not being seen by readers, then you are wasting your time. The first obvious flaw of doing blog book tours is that the only blogs who are going to be willing to sign on for the tour are blogs who routinely host these types of tours, who do book reviews, cover reveals, and basically cater to promoting authors. Blogs of this type rarely attract anything but other writers, not readers. Why? Because these blogs are owned by people who do this in their spare time for nothing more than a free copy of a book and little else. They are not professionals, they are not getting paid to do this, and are basically doing it to keep a steady stream of free books coming to them. Their blog consists of little else than a quick review and a cover reveal with no real quality content. The reviews are almost always good because in order to keep their free books coming, they cannot do anything to get on the bad sides of authors, so they rarely attract readers because readers quickly realize the blog exists ONLY to promote SPAs and that the reviews are very biased to keep writers happy. So if you are not being promoted on sites that cater to readers, then you are defeating the whole purpose of doing a blog tour.

 

So exactly which types of blogs do you want promoting your work? First, you want blogs that cater to readers, not writers. Most blogs that cater to readers are going to be those who do book reviews of works that they purchased on their own and who give honest reviews of the work. Blogs who do this rarely do review requests, and if they do accept your review request, then you better BE PREPARED for BRUTAL HONESTY. Those few blogs who attract readers are not going to baby your ego and they do not take kindly to authors who demand nothing less than a 4 star review.

 

These types of blogs attract readers because they give HONEST reviews, not paid endorsements for authors. It is why their opinion of your work is worth 500 fake reviews by bloggers who agreed to give you a glowing review in exchange for a free copy of your book. When these types of blogs, online magazines and other sites review your work, it is an honor and can make or break your career. If you are going to ask for reviews, your best bet is get it in front of one or two bloggers that attract a large number of readers each day. Otherwise, you will discover a blog post about your book drowning on a blog with 15 to 20 other posts done that same day, all about other authors, their books, their reviews, and their cover reveals.

 

Blog tours that are filled with blogs ‘reviewing’ your book can create several dozen 4 and 5 star reviews fresh out of the gate, but readers have learned to spot these types of paid/fake reviews and may not be willing to read your work because of it. With so many authors paying for reviews by either out right buying them or trading books for reviews, more and more readers are beginning to boycott any author who actively engages in trading books for reviews to ANYONE. Readers want unbiased reviews by other readers, and authors that are seen constantly being reviewed by review blog sites are soon blacklisted by readers. So while you may be racking up on paid reviews, your sales and thus your rankings on Amazon will plummet because of it.

 

In essence, unless your work is being seen by the right high traffic, high profile blogs that are well respected and attracting tons of reader traffic, you are wasting valuable time and energy on other blogs. Instead of spending months of coordinating blogs and dates, begging bloggers to review your work, and creating tour packets and sign up sheets, your time would be better spent researching online magazines and high profile review blogs and approaching those sites with requests to review your work. Small time blogs with low traffic cannot help promote your work and will not further your writing career. However, the correct high profile and high traffic websites CAN help get the word out about your book.

 

In writing, as in any business, you must surround yourself with the correct type and quality of professionals. If you were a musician, you couldn’t spend all your time hanging out with other unsigned musicians and expect to get a record deal, so why would you spend your time getting your work reviewed by bloggers who can’t connect you to publishers and other readers? It’s the same principle, yet authors seem to have a hard time grasping this concept. STOP wasting time with low profile bloggers who are only reviewing free copies of books during their spare time and START looking for high profile bloggers who do this for a living. If your work isn’t being reviewed by someone who can help you, then you are doing yourself a great injustice by not striving to connect with those who can help you further your career.

Jun 9 2014

Bret Michaels, I Hope You Wanted to be a Doctor When You Grew Up……

The hallway was always quiet at this time of the night, the hum of the florescent lighting the only sound breaking the endless silence. In the distance came a sudden, loud explosion, shattering the stillness of the night. Screams could be heard coming closer as muffled gunfire echoed through the halls. The overhead intercom system crackled to life, the static-filled voice tiny in the increasingly loud sounds of fighting. “Paging Dr. Sychak, Dr. Bret Sychak. You are needed in the lab. Bring security backup.”

Writing is fun, no doubt about it. When someone ticks you off, you can always make them into the bad guy in some twisted storyline, kicking their ass six ways from Sunday. And depending on just how messed up your imagination is (in my case, it would be a long stretch with serial killer Ashton Jones BEFORE he grew fangs and a conscience), those who have wronged you can either have a quick demise or a long, drawn-out and very painful time in the story. You get to make up worlds, rules, control everything and everyone in that world (usually, but all us writers know how our characters like to grow minds and opinions of their own and refuse to do what we tell them to do). You get to take readers on the most wondrous adventures, limited only by your own imagination. And for some of us, me included, those imaginations seem absolutely limitless.

There really is nothing like being a writer. For me, the majority of my characters are based in part from someone important in my life. The antagonist Sergeant First Class Steven Hall is a real person who really is a Sergeant First Class in the air force. He was a very dear friend of mine who I forever immortalized in the ongoing BTSR series. Ethereal is the name of a character I made up and used back when I was heavily into online RP games. The LeeLee character that will be introduced in an upcoming book in the series was another one of my RP characters. Her love interest, Akito, is based off of another online friend who also played in the games and is near and dear to my heart. The Vampire Stealth was coined in part after the wonderful Don Henrie. Because my characters are molded after real life people, they seem as real and are as dear to me as the people who inspired them. For me, these characters ARE real, as real as anyone else that I know in my day to day life.

Now I have decided to forever immortalize my mentor, Bret Michaels, into the upcoming novel IMMORTAL SINS, the next book in the BEFORE THE SUN RISES series. I plan to write two different characters into the series, the first one using his birth name and made into a doctor, Dr. Bret Sychak. The second appearance made by Bret Michaels will be in a yet –to-be announced novel. I may even bring him into another novel in the BTSR series before it is all said and done. Bret is an incredible person and has inspired me in so many ways throughout the years that the very least I can do for him is to write him into a book, or maybe even two or three.  And if I’m very VERY lucky, he might one day read all about those characters and all those characters that so many other people in my life have inspired.

Creating characters after those who have inspired me and then writing them into my storylines is my way of paying homage to them. It’s my way of saying “thanks” for all they have done for me directly and indirectly, for all their inspiration. It is a fun thing to do, and I do so hope that no one will ever become angry because of it. For writers, creating characters after real people not only help the characters feel more real, but it allows them to pay a great respect and a big “thank you” to these people in their own way.

So if you find yourself suddenly immortalized in an author’s novel, take a moment to realize that you have been greatly honored by the author, for they are paying you homage in the most sacred and special way that an author can. You touched their lives so greatly that they saw fit to coin a character after you – even if it is one getting his ass kicked six ways from Sunday.