All last week and this week we’ve been discussing marketing methods to get featured in the “Blog” category of the Outskirts Press app. We have established that the best way is to focus on being featured in one of these blog categories from our Outskirts Press blog:
Author Spotlights
Book Spotlights
Monthly Bestsellers
Virtual Book Tours
Award Winners
Book Fair Participants
So far we have already discussed Author and Book Spotlights, along with bestsellers. That leads us to Virtual Book Tours, and one of the guaranteed ways to get featured on our app.
A virtual book tour is similar to an actual book tour, although instead of physically traveling from bookstore to bookstore, or radio show to radio show, you and/or your book are making “appearances” in the blogosphere and on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. This saves time and money because it is much more efficient and cost-effective to “appear” on a blog, a website, or an internet radio talk show, than it is to load up the mini-van and drive from state to state. And, unlike a physical tour, which is over the minute you leave, a virtual book tour stays archived and available for Internet
searches forever.
In addition to all the other blog “appearances”, reviews, and author interviews that can result from a Virtual Book Tour, we also make sure to get each of our author’s virtual tours off to a great start by giving them a “tour stop” at one or more of our social community channels, whether it be a link from our Twitter account, a video uploaded to our YouTube Channel, or an interview on our blog.
Author interviews that appear on our blog as a result of their participating in a Virtual Book Tour through Outskirts Press also appear on our iPhone app. All our Virtual Book Tours also include a short video, which we upload to our YouTube channel for our authors. Since our YouTube Channel is also featured on our app, ordering a Virtual Book Tour usually means the author and book can be featured in two different areas of the app – in the “Blog” category and in the “Videos” category.
Our Virtual Book Tours are so popular, we help authors from other publishers facilitate virtual book tours, too, although those authors aren’t mentioned on our blog or in our app (let’s leave that up to THEIR publishers, shall we?) Oh, wait — their publishers don’t have an app, but those other publishers will take up to 50-80% of their authors’ royalties. No wonder their authors aren’t too motivated to market their books.
Anyhoo, to schedule your own Virtual Book Tour, regardless of whether you are an Outskirts Press author or not, click here.
President of Outskirts Press 