Here’s what I’ve learnt:
Blogger tours aren’t a nice-to-have – they’re an essential part of your book launch or marketing strategy, something I didn’t know when my debut came out.
A blogger tour is when you or your publisher send copies of your novel to a number of book bloggers for review.
You agree a timetable for the book bloggers to post their reviews online (see image of the blogger tour for my 3rd novel Life, Slightly, starting today).
Blogger tours are usually conducted around publication date, as with mine, but they don’t have to be.
Bloggers aren’t paid, you don’t have any control over whether they’ll like your book or not – or whether they’ll review it favourably. (I’m not nervous, you are).
Tours usually run from anything from 7 to 14 days. It’s rare to see them last longer than that, but not unheard of.
They usually start a day or two BEFORE publication.
More than one review can be scheduled on your actual publication day, but generally it’s one review per day for the period of the blogger tour.
If you self-publish or your publisher doesn’t organise one for you (a lot of them don’t), you’ll need to organise one yourself.
You can do this in two ways:
1/ research and build a list of book bloggers who review books of your genre, visit their websites or social pages and contact each of them to ask if they’ll take part.
2/ pay a book blog organiser to arrange a blogger tour for you (usually this is around £100).
NOTE: if you choose option 1, it is vital that you read each book bloggers submission requirements and follow them to the letter…they get asked to review A LOT of books and they do it for nothing, so don’t waste their or your time by not knowing what they review and how to approach them.
Hope that helps a little – and wish me luck with mine!
About The Author
Nigel Cooper
Nigel’s debut novel Beat The Rain was a semi-finalist for Best Debut Author in the Goodreads Choice Awards 2016. His second novel The Pursuit of Ordinary was a finalist in the People’s Book Prize for Fiction 2019. It was also one of the 8-12 titles ‘called in’ for the Man Booker Prize, a first for his publisher. It was also long-listed for The Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize. His third novel will be released in September 2022 and is now available for pre-order. Nigel brings his own experience of the trials of getting published, building an author profile and marketing his own novels to AuthorSpark. As well as co-founding AuthorSpark, Nigel co-founded digital marketing agency and employee advocacy platform We Are Togethr alongside Andrew, alongside online content sister company Togethr Lab. Prior to that he was a newspaper subeditor and a writer and editor for Channel 4 Interactive.