How to Pump Up Your Book Promotion with Virtual Book Tours

I haven't quite officially announced this publicly yet, but I am gearing up to become your host for Pump Up Your Book Promotion Virtual Book Tours, a new company which I'm about to launch in April. Some of you who are reading this blog have been down the virtual book tour route, whether you paid someone to do this for you or you did it yourself. My last guest, Glenda Watson Hyatt, successfully pulled off 40 stops in 40 days on her virtual book tour for her book, I Can Do It Myself, so it can be done if you're the kind of person who likes doing things yourself, have the time and means to do it, and love saving money.

Since I'm almost rather new at it (I say new because even though I have successfully pulled off my own virtual book tour for my book, A Complete Guide to Promoting & Selling Your Self-Published eBook *see cute little cover in the right hand sidebar*), as far as doing it for other authors, I think it's going to be rather fun.

One day I was in the market for someone to do this for me, but when I checked out their prices, I went, "Wowzers, what do they think I am? Rich?" That's when I decided to do it alone. I'm frugal, I guess you could say, and have this attitude that I'd rather learn how to do it myself to save some greenbacks and I did.

That was last November and it didn't occur to me until about a month ago that there are authors who would rather pay to have someone handle their tour, and that's when Pump Up Your Book Promotion Virtual Tours was born.

However, this isn't a plug for my tour company, so let's get on with the show.

Since I decided to embark on this journey to set up tours for others, I've been doing a lot of research into it *which basically means spying on who else was on tours or doing tours...lol* to see if there was anything I had left out, and I came upon this book trailer by Gabriella Goddard, author of Gulp!, an exciting new self-help book published by Penguin UK.

If you're on dial-up like me, turn your speakers off and let it download, and go back to it when it's finished downloading because I found this to be an excellent, not to mention ingenious, way to introduce your own virtual book tour.

At the end of the book trailer, you will see an address, which I promptly visited. I'm taking this tour took place last September, but it never the less shows you where she went on her own virtual book tour, which was rather enlightening. I'm not sure if she did it herself or Penguin helped, but she had some pretty impressive stops.

If you are setting up your own tour, you need to keep a record of each stop on your own blog, so that visitors can travel to the different stops and see (or hear) what you have to say about your book. This is great book promotion in the finest virtual sense.

Now, here's the trailer. I love this woman. She's funny, engaging and I just love how she used this book trailer to entice people to her website (you can see I went straight there afterwards).

It's all part of the new age of promotion and gives us all ideas on what to do, how to do it and have fun in the meantime!



Tags: How to Pump UP Your Blog to Sell More Books, online book promotion, author publicity, book promotion, book promotion tips, virtual book tour, Pump Up Your Book Promotion Virtual Book Tours, Gabriella Goddard