Blog book tours?

[Christa M. Miller]

I'm familiar with the Girlfriends' Cyber Circuit, and I've been participating in the MotherTalk Blog Book Tours - but I'm not familiar with blog book tours among crime fiction authors. Why is that? Because we already have Sarah's Confessions? Or are grogs like Murderati, First Offenders, et al. enough? Should there be crime fiction blog tours?

[Jack Getze]

Sounds like fun to me, Christa. Maybe crime fiction writers think they're supposed to be loners...

[Sandra Ruttan]

I think what might work for one may not work for another, and it all depends on structure and content. For example, if I've read one person's blog on a book/author and the next day the same or similar stuff is on another blog I usually read, I'll likely skip it. I've seen a few things tried and it becomes repetitious and stale.

Personally, I like the spontaneous "I just read a book I loved" kind of post, one that's genuine and heartfelt and filled with sincere enthusiasm. I also think the blogging world is a closed environment to a certain degree. Only a fraction of readers are on the blogs and we have to get past the idea of promoting ourselves to other authors. Authors can do a lot of things themselves to raise their profile and provide fresh content to draw people to their site on an ongoing basis:

podcasts
interviews
offer to edit an ezine issue/write an article for an ezine/do an interview for an ezine
review for online review sites
set up live chats

etc.

All of which I personally find more interesting than the idea of blog tours, but that's just me.

[Donna Moore]

I have no idea what blog book tours are :o) But I only read a handful of blogs anyway, and prefer a forum such as crimespace.

[Christa M. Miller]

An author's new release goes "on tour" around a group of blogs. Bloggers can post just about anything - reviews, Q&A with the author, contests if they have a couple of ARCs on hand - it helps create buzz.

Sandra had a good point about authors promoting to other authors. That may be why I haven't seen book tours on crime fiction blogs after all. The ones I do for MotherTalk are probably aimed less at mom-lit authors than they are at moms themselves - women who come online to socialize with other moms, but not necessarily to talk writing. We're short on time and energy to figure out what to read next, so we depend on the bloggers we like to tell us. (Which is partly how I see some crime fiction blogs.) It's probably a niche, in other words. Thanks for mentioning that, Sandra.

[Donna Moore]

Ah, OK, I see - thanks Christa. Well, it might work for someone like me who only reads one or two blogs, and I always like to find new authors. However, those readers who read a lot of blogs might get sick and fed up of having the same thing mentioned over and over again on the various sites they visit. Sometimes you CAN have too much of a good thing :o) More than one Q&A would only work if you have different Qs and different As on each site. Reviews...well, if I haven't read a book then I might want one review to give me a flavour of it, but again, more than one is overkill (and for me, one person who knows me and says to me "Donna, you'll love this book" is more likely to make me buy a book than a review by someone I don't know. For reviews I generally go to Fantasybookspot to see if Brian's reviewed it (his reviews are wonderful), Eurocrime or reviewingtheevidence or a couple of others.

[Sandra Ruttan]

Anne Frasier's new book is dedicated to The Pimp Squad. A year ago, when the first book in the series came out she had a goal - I think it was 50 bloggers blogging about Pale Immortal. It wasn't the same as a blog tour, but it was a very interesting, original idea. Only she could tell you if she thinks it was successful or not, but I did participate and it was fun.