What to expect from a blog tour?

Posted February 13, 2021 by Lola in Posts for authors

For today’s post I want to talk about blog tours and what to expect from them. There are a lot of different types of blog tours and many companies that organize them so every blog tour will be different in the execution and what to expect from the tour and process. I am not going to talk about that today, instead I want to talk about what you can expect from blog tours in the most general sense of the word, the big line expectations and results you get from blog tours in general. Blog Tours can be a great promotional tour and I hope this post will clarify a bit why and also make sure you know what to expect from a blog tour.

Want to know what a blog tour is? I wrote a post about that which you can read here.

What to expect from blog tours

The main goal and result you can expect from a blog tour is exposure/ visibility. You can expect the tour company to post about the book and tour and let their tour hosts know about the tour they’re organizing for your book. Then during the tour you can expect that participants post on their blog and/ or social media about the book. This creates visibility for your book. People can see these posts on blogs and social media and become more familiar with your book. You might even get some sales because of this, but often it can take multiple times for people to see a book before they decide to buy it.

A blog tour gives you the opportunity to get word of your book out in the world where other book lovers can hear about it. It also can give you the opportunity to connect with these bloggers or bookstagrammers. Visibility is very valuable for your book, if a reader doesn’t know about your book they can’t buy it. A potential reader usually has to hear about you/ your book multiple times before they decide to buy a book, so making sure people hear about your book is an essential part of marketing.

Additional results of blog tours depending on the tour

While visibility is the main thing to expect from a blog tour, depending on the actual tour there are some other results you can expect. It really depends on the blog tour which additional result you can expect besides visibility. Below I listed possible additional results you can might see if you do a blog tour. Make sure when booking a tour to check which of these you can expect or ask the tour company about to know for sure what you can expect.

Reviews. Many blog tours give bloggers the option to also sign up for a review, either during the tour or after it. Usually the participants who sign up get to decide whether they want to review it, so the amount of reviews is not the same as the total amount of participants. There are also some tours where all participants receive a free ecopy of the book that’s being toured, but with no expectation of reviews. In both of these scenarios you can expect the blog tour to provide you with some new reviews for your book. There are also some blog tours that only focus on reviews where all participants will review your and only those who agree to review can sign up for it, with these tours you can expect that all the participants will review your book. As for how many reviews you can expect from a blog tour, that depends on the tour, the tour company, the bloggers/ bookstagrammers they can reach as well as the book. Some companies give a guaranteed amount of reviews that you can expect, but most won’t.
Unique content posts. Some blog tours include posts like interviews, guest posts, top ten lists, characters interviews and more. I call these unique content posts as they are new or unique content you the author create for these posts. A blog tour can give you the opportunity to have these posts show up on blogs. Often the bloggers will provide the tour company with their preferred topic, which the tour company will pass along to the author. In other cases or depending on the author’s preference the author can pick the topics for these type of posts. Either way these type of posts are an opportunity to get more content and often in depth posts about you and your book out there and can be a great way to reach potential readers or make them more familiar with you and your books.
Bookstagram Pictures. Depending on the tour you might get some bookstagrammers join the tour. Bookstagram is pictures of books posted on Instagram, bookstagrammers are those who post these pictures. Tours might get a few bookstagrammers who join who can decide to post a photograph of their copy. There also are tours specifically aimed at bookstagrammers. Providing them with physical copies can help for this.
Giveaway benefits. In many cases you can decide to do a giveaway with your blog tour. With a giveaway people can enter the giveaway in different ways, like following the author on social media, joining their newsletter, tweeting about the book, adding the book to their to-read list on social media and more. What I mean with giveaway benefits in this case is the results of the giveaway in terms of new followers on social media, newsletter sign ups or adds of the book on Goodreads. This really varies from tour to tour or what you as the author decide to focus on for the giveaway. Giveaways can be a great way to create even more visibility during the tour or grow your follower base on social media/ vendor sites or get new newsletter sign ups. Often you can give me higher priority or points to the options you value the most to encourage people to do these options. For ideas on giveaway prizes, read my blog about giveaway prizes here.

What to expect from my blog tours?

While I can’t tell you what to expect from other tour companies and their tours, I thought it would be informative to list for each of my tours what to expect in terms of the benefits/ results I talked about above. Below I listed what to expect from each of my tours. For my tours the author can always decide whether to do the a giveaway or not, so that is optional. Only my review opportunities don’t have the add a giveaway option. For a book blitz or book blitz deluxe you can add pre-written unique content posts for an additional $20, that’s optional.