A Blog Tour from Scratch

I became a Resident book blogger at the WriteHive community back in April and since then, I have had so much fun interacting with writers and readers there. WriteHive is a non-profit organization and when we were looking at financial opportunities, I thought of blog tours. Who knew that the idea would be received well and I would find myself organizing my first blog tour – a trial without any money involved, a pilot to see how this would work out!

In this article, I will touch upon the steps I followed to set up this blog tour, takeaways from it and what I would change for next time. One of the main ideas I will address is the existence of paid services in the form of blog tours in the reviewing world and their effects. Even if you skip/skim the first section, please read my thoughts around doing this again and the conclusion.

---

Setting up a blog tour – How I did it

Choosing the Book

I decided to do the tour for Between Starfalls because I had heard good things about SK’s works from friends. I wanted to share a book that I hoped my bloggers would take something away from, which I was excited to read myself. 

Learning from Existing Blog Tour organizers

Having been on multiple blog tours and worked with numerous organizers over the past year, I decided to take the best from each place. If you aren’t signed up with these tour places yet, please do check them out!

• The WriteReads have a huge community of bloggers and I think part of that is due to the ease of signing up for tours. Dave sends out one email with the tour info and all bloggers do is reply with their availability for the tour. There are usually 2-3 months to read the book and reviews on the tour are honest. This isn’t relevant to the tours but I have to say this because Dave also does an amazing job at community engagement by sharing a blog post of the day and a review of the day, spotlighting the bloggers. 
• Storytellers on Tour is a blog tour organizer focused on Indie Science Fiction and Fantasy books. I have learned a lot from Timy and Justine, especially when it comes to graphics and asset organization and their wrap up posts at the end of the tour. This interview in my Creator’s Roulette series is the one to check out if you are interested!
• Tomorrow Comes Media, managed by Stephen Zimmer, is the first tour company I signed up for. Stephen genuinely tries to know his people and look out for them and I really appreciated that as a new blogger a year ago. That genuine connection matters a lot. I also like that Stephen corresponds with his bloggers individually closer to the tours rather than always sending mass emails.
• Blackthorn Book Tours is another tour place I like. Isobel reads every book that goes on tour and I really appreciate that. As someone who does not read thrillers and crime/noir fiction, I like finding books through them. This is another place that makes it super easy to sign up for tours with lots of lead time, and very personable and likable people, open to ideas and feedback.

Taking the above into consideration, I thought about running a small tour, 5 bloggers (which eventually grew to 9 because I kept remembering more cool people to bring on board). I wanted to give the bloggers at least 2 months to read the book and a week before that, I reached out to these bloggers who I admire, presented a premise of the book and asked if they officially wanted to be on the tour. If yes, then I sent them a form with a couple of questions – 

• Format of digital ebooks that they prefer
• If the blogger would like to do an interview or guest post, in addition to the review
• Dates that work for posting the review and any scheduling preferences
• Monthly views to give me some idea for reach
• What makes a successful tour as a tour host (if you are a blogger, answer this question and see if your responses match the ones below. Feel free to share anything we missed in the comments!)

The answers to the last question reflected my thoughts as well on what makes a blog tour successful for me. Here is a summary of them:

• A good book

I was scared. I could not speak to the book because I had not read it. But I believed in it and each of my bloggers had liked the synopsis before signing up.

Review Policy on the Blog Tour

Before I sent out the books, the negative review policy was super important to nail down. This was something I was going to keep if we were to do this again and as a reviewer, I wanted to make sure that it would work for me. I chatted with my blogger friends about this before I asked for approval from the WriteHive team.

I don’t like to post about books I did not like. There is always the possibility that someone will not like the book we chose for the tour. 

Reviews are supposed to talk about the book. A negative review talks about the book, not the author. I have been on tours where I did not like the book and compromised by posting an Excerpt instead. I have also been on tours where I was encouraged to share my thoughts freely about what worked and didn’t work in the book. The best practice in this case is to not tag the author on social media. After much formulation of ideas this is what I presented:

My WriteHive colleagues agreed with me and looking back at it now, I don’t think I would have organized the tour with a different policy. This whole process made me realize my values when it comes to reviewing and being a book blogger. It felt like for the first time, I had a voice in something I had always felt like an outsider in. 

Setting the author expectations

Having a negative review policy was one thing and sharing it with the author (SK) was another. Here was my next scary moment. Before I asked SK for digital copies of her books and how many people they were going to go to, I had to share my expectations as well as the whole process of how this tour was going to work.

I am thrilled to say that SK agreed to everything and the wrap up was a beautiful post, I highly recommend you check out here!

Send Those Books!

Once SK agreed, I sent out the books in preferred format to each of my bloggers, confirming their tour dates. I promised to be around if they needed to chat and to send them graphics and tour packages closer to the tour date. I also noted the review policy.

A Couple Weeks in Advance

Three weeks before the tour started, I collected image files from SK for the book cover and her author photo, created graphics, and compiled the tour package with instructions for bloggers around hashtags and accounts to tag so that I can find the posts easily. I sent this all two weeks before the tour.

Between starfalls blog tour quote graphics

Exactly a week before the tour started, I shared SK’s guest posts for those stops and tweeted a shout out to the bloggers through the WriteHive twitter account to highlight them.

During the Tour

I was excited and scared. How many times have I mentioned that in this process so far? 

SK and I agreed to share blog posts that we see for the day with each other so that I could send the tweet to Siri to post through the WriteHive account. I connected with bloggers in case any changes to schedule were needed. All the while, I tweeted and commented on the stops and coordinated interviews.

Towards the end of the tour, SK compiled her wrap up post for the tour, and helped me flesh out this one!

---

What I learned in this process

As a first time blog tour organizer

The Good Experiences

• I loved connecting with the bloggers personally during the tour. Whether it was sending them the books, coordinating dates with them or turning to them when I needed encouragement that the graphics and tour package was useful, I had more opportunities to chat with them. Ollie, especially, I talked to more through the tour! Related to that, some bloggers even shared their thoughts about the book with me as they read.
• I loved making the graphics too. Dabbling in Canva is one of my favorite self care activities and it was nice to bring those skills to another use. Realizing the gravity of that just now – a simple image I made is part of some wonderful blog posts in the community!

The Challenges

• Keeping on top of the posts as they were coming out and making sure I shared them through all the accounts was a challenge. I wanted the tweets to be staggered between bloggers’ personal accounts and WriteHive account to give the content more visibility. No matter how organized I may be, some of this depends on the bloggers too and there were some days when I was stressed when it would start to get close to evening and I still didn’t see anything. Thankfully, having a relationship with the bloggers led me to reach out to them and made adjustments as needed. The tour schedule was a great help in that!

I heard a saying recently which goes as follows:

“Don’t expect too much. It is always better to be surprised than to feel disappointed.”

In times of frustration, I kept this quote close to my heart. All that I sent in the tour package was with the hope that bloggers would use and incorporate the relevant details to their blogs. In this world of book blogging that we pursue for fun, there is no expectation since there is no money or contract. There is only hope and following through on our words. And this links to my second point:

• Though the main intention behind blog tours is to promote the author, bloggers also get a spotlight. When blog tour posts get the same amount of traction as any other review post, I find myself resigning to the idea that my role is nothing beyond reviewing the book. As an organizer, I really wanted to change that. I wanted to share about the wonderful bloggers who agreed to work with me!

I hope my actions spoke to this: I retweeted tweets from my personal account, SK retweeted from hers, and we separately tweeted about the post from the WriteHive account. Having a page with all the bloggers on a list and making graphics that showed their names increased visibility of participating blogs on all blogs who integrated these little details in their content. All these little pieces that I put together were for this purpose – to share awareness about blogs on the tour, and book blogging, in general.

As a blogger

I usually read books closer to my tour date. However going forward (not this month), I would start reading the book about a month in advance. I love doing interviews and giving myself enough time to read and write questions will take my stress away as well as the stress I think I cause the blog tour organizers I work with. SK was super nice about answering questions close to the tour date (I sent mine three days before my interview stop though I did share my reading moments with her all the way) and though most authors I have worked with have been amazing this way, I would rather than not put that kind of pressure. 🙂

I am glad that my experiences in blogging have developed practices that help organizers find the blog post easily. I will continue to do this.

---

Would I do it again?

Throughout the blog tour and its preparation, I loved working with SK. Whether it was our impromptu ideas on how to give back to the bloggers (we decided to make bookmarks to mail to them) or sharing our excitement around the reviews, interviews and guest posts, I had a companion to confide my worries and experiences with. Others in the WriteHive community – Arina, Layton, El, Kota, Siri and Jerusha – helped me keep going. I was doing this for the first time and their feedback and support was very important to me.

Since this was a trial for blog tours, there were 9 bloggers in total on this so that I would not overwhelm myself. When I do this again in the future, 

• I would open the tour to anyone who is interested. There would not be a cap on the number of bloggers.
• Types of posts: This time I had offered reviews, interviews, guest posts and excerpts. Fariha did a beautiful mood board and that could be another cool post or part of first impressions! I would suggest that as a post idea too.
• Like I mentioned above, I had not read SK’s book but knew trusted people who had. I would at least like to read a potential book for the tour and identify trigger warnings and content notes before reaching out to bloggers. SK’s book already had content notes which was super helpful for me as an organizer. Alternatively, if there is a choice of books, I could ask the bloggers to choose which ones they would be interested to read based on the blurb, and just vet those ones for content.

The Price

This deserves its own little section. We started with the idea to do a blog tour as a potential means of earning. Personally, nothing I do with regards to book blogging and reading involves payments. Doing a blog tour for WriteHive as a volunteer does not bring money to me in any case but I would rather not set a price for how much it costs. I am also hesitant about turning down bloggers who have shown interest in reading a book, and this comes from being turned down for books I wanted to read.

Every single aspect of the tour, whether it was connecting with the bloggers or making graphics or promoting the content, I do all of that for my blog regularly and I cannot bring myself to put a price on it. 

Blog tours, traditionally, are a service where the author pays an organizers to find bloggers and the bloggers review the book on a scheduled date. AT WrietHive, we want to make blog tours accessible to authors who might not be able to pay for them, while at the same time giving back to the bloggers. But if I can’t price a blog tour, we have to find other ways to generate income and keep some of it aside for bloggers, because bloggers are monumental in spreading the word about books. Hence, there is much to think about. 

WriteHive organizes a yearly free writing convention with a grand prize for a writer, paying for necessary services. We are trying to grow our book blogging community and, similar to the authors, we can give back to the bloggers in some manner during the convention. Could we do one or more lucky draws for all our active bloggers for the cost of domain name and self-hosting for a year? Or buy them a book or two? If you have ideas, please do share in the comments and we will take those into consideration. It’s a small token for their continued support to the writing community at large.

In this post, I have been transparent about everything I did and, once I have the details of the full process, I will share them with you. 

---

Conclusion

Expanding my circles to go beyond avid readers to include people who write stories has led me to have deep conversations as well as discuss publishing with my friends. By being a part of WriteHive, I saw a number of authors interact with the tour posts too and even writers who are currently in Work In Progress (WIP) stage for their stories getting excited with the content. That was so refreshing to see. Book bloggers, our audience is not just readers and fellow bloggers!

Blog tours were such an enigma to me and with the mixed experiences I have had with them, I sometimes wondered why that happens.

Why do I get denied for some tours? Does communication break down? Or are expectations and hopes just never shared? What does the introduction of money in a payment free system do?

As an organizer, for the first time, I had the opportunity to look at this process closely and try to align it better with what I want to see in the blogging community.

Did I make a positive impact? I hope so.

Did I help an author connect with bloggers? Yes. 

Did bloggers find a new connection with an author? I think so based on the tweets I have seen.

Did I find a book I loved? Yes. I loved Between Starfalls.

This was fun. And I would do it again.

Would you like to be on that tour? You can fill out this form to get the news. If you are genuinely interested to read the book, we will see you on the tour! Anyone with a blog (writer, author, reader) and the desire to read is welcome on WriteHive tours. These free tours will not be a regular occurrence so rest assured, I won’t be sending you weekly or monthly emails.

Join us on Discord too, and thank you so much for reading and indulging in another one of my passion projects. 🙂