Take Your Ebook on a Blog Tour

You’ve heard of book tours, right? Where you travel all over the country, promoting your book in various  locales?

Well, book tours are expensive, and it’s especially hard to do a signing if you’re an ebook author. Fortunately, the book blog tour was invented as a less expensive way for authors to get the word out. There are some willing to feature indie ebook authors as well.

What is a blog tour?

It’s just what it sounds like: your book appears on various book-related blogs, preferably blogs that have a good-sized audience of regular followers who read in your genre. This gets the word out (creating buzz as the marketing gurus say) about you and your work.

You may not generate a pile of sales at every “stop” on the tour, but you’ll make more folks aware of your books. Sometimes people need to see things a few times before deciding to give them a try, so the more places your name and your book appear around the web the better.

Typically, “tour dates” are staggered over a week or a few weeks, and you may appear on 6-12 blogs over the course of the event (though there aren’t any rules here). A blogger may simply feature your work with the cover art and blurb, but some may wish to do interviews, book reviews, and giveaways as well.

How much does a book tour cost?

A book tour need not cost anything if you put it together yourself. This may be perfect for people who like networking online and already know quite a few bloggers who cover their genre.

If you prefer to leave the hard work to someone else and have your book featured on blogs outside your normal circle, you can pay a fee and have the tour arranged for you. I don’t have enough information yet to let you know the upper price range, but I’ve listed sites below that charge 0 to $50.

Where can you sign up for an ebook blog tour?

Here are a couple sites that run blog tours and accept (or prefer) ebooks:

• Author AdvenTours — These guys only charge $10.50 (50 cents for the transaction fee and $10 to create gift-card giveaways for readers). Their blog isn’t updated very often, but it looks like they are arranging tours on a regular basis.
• Book Lovin’ Bitches Ebook Tours — The gal who runs this site has a cadre of reviewers and book bloggers ready to look at ebooks, new or old, but your work must appeal to at least eight team members to get picked up. (I signed up with Emperor’s Edge and Encrypted and enough folks were interested that the tours were confirmed within a couple days.) There is a free option that runs for four weeks (eight stops) and a souped up “diva” version that costs $49 and runs for eight weeks with sixteen stops. You’ll also get book reviews from team members if you sign up for the paid version.
• Indie Book Collective’s Blog Tour de Force — I have no idea how much this one costs or how to sign up (I’ve asked on Twitter and recently signed up for the newsletter, but no word yet), and I never got a response earlier in the month when I emailed about advertising, so I almost didn’t mention them here. But they’re very proactive on Twitter with promoting their authors, and if you’re not big on tooting your own horn, it can be useful to have someone who will do it for you. Their current tour is featuring twelve authors and a kindle giveaway. I think this is their first tour, and I hope they’ll put a how-to-sign-up page on their site soon.
• Goddess Fish Promotions — These guys specialize in romance (genre romances OK). They do books and ebooks, and they throw in banner creation even for the super budget tours (buy one of the bigger tours, and they’ll do a book trailer video for you too). Prices start at $30.
• Nuture Your Books — They don’t list their rates on their website, but I recognize at least one indie ebook author from their collage of covers, so I’m guessing they are affordable.

Do you know of any other ebook blog tours that should be listed here? Leave a comment, and let me know!