You may or may not have heard of a “Virtual Book Tour” and you may not even care.

But here is an explanation of what a virtual book tour is, why you should do it and how you should do it.

The Blog part of a Virtual Book Tour

A Virtual Book Tour really consists of anything that you can do online to promote you and your book. For example: Blog tour, online video interviews, podcasts, webinars, articles etc… but for now I am going to talk about blog tours. We will get to the others in future posts.

A blog tour is set up with the intention of introducing authors and their books to as many people as possible at or around the same time by utilizing bloggers who either review the book or interview the author about their book. The benefit of a virtual book tour for the author of course is exposure to people who already have an interest in books and want to read about the latest and greatest book. The benefit of a virtual book tour to the blogger, interviewer or reviewer is the great content that they are providing to their readers, which not only keeps them coming back but hopefully makes them want to share the bloggers post with others which in turn brings more readers to the blog.

Will a Virtual Book Tour lead to sales

Authors should pay attention to and look for opportunities to do a virtual book tour as often as possible. Why? Because what else could you do that could put you in front of potentially tens of thousands of potential readers all at nearly the same time for so little time and money? Think about it… if you have 10 to 20 bloggers participating in your virtual book tour that will either review your book or do an interview with you all in the same 30 day period that each have 500 to 5,000 readers then that turns into 5,000 to 100,000 readers that will learn about you and your book. How many of those will click on the amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com link that you have provided to your new best friend blogger? Probably quite a few. This not only sells books for you but it also increases your ranking on the sites but it also increases your search engine ranking.

And remember that most if not all of these bloggers will have Twitter, Facebook and other social networking platforms that they participate where they will most likely notify all of their followers there that they have just posted something about your book on their blog.  The desired result of your virtual blog tour is to create a lot of buzz about your book in a relatively tight time frame.

Steps to take to set up a Virtual Blog Tour

The first thing you need to do is start finding bloggers who may have an interest in working with you on your virtual book tour. You will want to not only search for bloggers that blog about books, you will want to find as many of them that like your particular genre. This will intensify your potential since their readers are most likely interested in your genre as well.

Next you will want to have all of the informatin that bloggers will need for your virtual book tour ready and available to them via email. This should include the following items:

• A brief introduction to your book
• A jpeg or other type of file of the cover of your book
• The same for a picture of you
• An electronic copy of your book or a hard copy if they prefer
• An established time frame for your virtual book tour – usually 2 to 4 weeks in length
• Sample interview questions for the bloggers who want to interview the author as part of the virtual book tour
• Links to your amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com or other sales page for the book
• 2-3 articles that the blogger can use as a guest post from the author – include your embeded links in the word document.
• Give away copies of the book for your new virtual book tour friend to give away to their readers as part of a contest or other promotion

Of course there are many other things you should be doing other than a virtual book tour to promote yourself and your book and you should definitely be doing several of them. A virtual book tour is one of the places I would start first.

If you are an author or publisher and think you might be interested in participating in a virtual book tour then you should visit http://submissions.authorblogtours.com to see how they can help you with your virtual book tour.