There are a couple of ways to approach a successful book tour (either virtual or live).
Regardless of which approach you choose, the key is allowing ample time to effectively plan, implement, and evaluate your book tour results. It all starts with having a clear objective or goal for the tour.
Book Tour Planning Questions
As you plan your live/virtual book tour, here are a few planning questions to get you started:
- What is the purpose or objective of your book tour (e.g. promote your new book, sell books, do speaking engagements as part of your book tour, reach new audiences, media, etc).
- What is the outcome you are hoping to achieve from your tour?
- For more important questions to ask yourself, visit: https://raiseadream.com/the-5-questions-to-answer-to-make-your-speaking-or-book-tour-profitable/
Boosting Book Sales
If selling more books is one of your key goals for doing a tour, it is important to explore the different ways you can increase book sales. One such method, the obvious one, is to have more events. The caution here is that each event takes lots of time to plan, market, and implement (and more events doesn’t necessarily equal more book sales). Instead, be creative and think of the different ways you can sell more books without adding on more events.
One example is to do what is called a BOGO (Buy One Gift One). One easy way to do this is to select a charity, one that is your favorite or where your book’s message is a solid fit. At your book signings, provide a short presentation or Q&A session. Prior to selling your books, advise the audience you have selected a local charity to be the recipient of some of your books. Allow the charity 5 minutes or so to talk about their organization, how they will use/share the books that are donated through the event, and who will be impacted. Then, encourage everyone to buy 2 books. One that they keep for themselves and the second that goes into a basket for the chosen charity. This will essentially double the amount of books you would have originally sold and does some good in the world at the same time.
Another way to sell more books at events is to bundle them with your other books (if you have more than one) and sell them as a set. I have also seen some authors implement an “ambassador” program whereby you buy a box of ten books at a deeply discounted price to gift to others.
For more creative ways to sell more books, visit: https://raiseadream.com/17-savvy-strategies-to-sell-more-books-at-book-signings/
Other Tour Considerations
Other activities you will want to consider when planning your book tour are:
- What each stop along the tour will entail. Create a template of what each stop should look like and the types of activities that will occur at each stop. For example:
- 1 TV/radio media appearance
- 1 interview with local print media
- 1 book signing event, presentation at library, or author club, etc.
- Visit to local independent stores to inquire about having a small quantity of your books on hand.
These are a few ideas to get you started as you explore taking your book’s message on tour.
About Raise a Dream: Charmaine Hammond and Rebecca Kirstein helps authors, speakers, and entrepreneurs raise their dreams, launch their books, and make a bigger difference in the world through collaboration, partnership, and sponsorship. Charmaine is a 4-time best-selling author with five books and is authored in seven others. Learn how to turn collaborations into cash here: http://bit.ly/CollaborationsIntoCash
Charmaine is also a guest speaker in our teleseminar series, and will be speaking on How to Conduct Profitable Book Tours. Find out more here!
If you like this blog post, you’ll love our Author Toolkit for book marketing. It includes checklists, templates, worksheets and more. Check it out!
