Planning a blog tour? Read this first!

Sandra Parshall

Remember the writing life before blogs? It’s hard to recall those dim, distant days when we wrote in isolation, without a million online distractions at our fingertips, and the term “web log” – shortened to blog – wasn’t part of our everyday vocabulary.

For better or worse, here we are in 2012, when every writer is expected to have a blog and “blog tours” are all the rage. If authors can’t or won’t do full-blown, rigidly organized blog tours when their new books come out, they feel the pressure to at least do a respectable number of guest blogs. That means contacting bloggers – most of them other writers – and inviting yourself into their space, their online homes.

In the case of well-known authors with major publishers, the chore of scheduling is often handled by in-house publicists. Other writers have started hiring publicists, at their own expense, to arrange blog tours for them. Some of the publicists, to put it gently, seem unfamiliar with how blogs work and who the blog owners are. And that can cause frustration on both sides. This has happened to us a few times lately at Poe’s Deadly Daughters, and we’d like to offer some tips to authors who may want to visit us. All of this applies to individuals arranging their own guest blogs as well as to those employing a publicist.

First, please remember that writers with blogs are writers first of all, just like you, and they’re busy with their own work. They fit blog duties into their few free moments. Never forget that the blog host is doing you a favor, not the other way around.

Can you imagine Eddie on a blog tour?

If you have a publicist arranging a blog tour for you, please pass this on: Don’t request a guest spot on very short notice, then proceed to be inflexible about it. Many bloggers – and the Deadly Daughters are among them – schedule guests weeks or even months in advance. Sorry, but we are not going to reschedule someone who arranged his/her guest blog months ago just to accommodate somebody who asked at the last minute.

Some publicists are savvy about the way blogs operate, but others are clueless. An author should find out which type of publicist she has working for her, and make sure that person isn’t ticking off the very bloggers who

would love to have the writer as a guest.

Even when the date is arranged by a publicist, the author herself should discuss the blog directly with the host and send the material directly when it’s ready. That goes for bestselling authors as well as lesser-knowns. Few things are more insulting to a blog host than being kept at arm’s length by a publicist, as if she or he is not worthy to communicate directly with the author. Again: the blog host is doing the author a favor, not the other way around, regardless of how famous the writer is. 

When you commit to a date, get the guest blog in on time – and that doesn’t mean late the night before it’s due to run. Your host needs ample time to get a guest blog ready to publish, especially when the guest’s typos and spelling errors have to be corrected and the author’s photo and book cover have to be sized and positioned with the text. If the host asks for the material a week ahead, or three days ahead, make a note of that deadline and be sure you meet it.

Don’t offer material that has already appeared, word for word, elsewhere. As fellow writers, we understand how difficult it is to come up with something fresh for every stop on a 15-blog or 30-blog “tour” – but our sympathy does not extend to letting you use our blog to recycle tired material. If you can’t write something new for every stop... well, to put it bluntly, that’s your problem, not ours. Perhaps you should scale back the length of your blog tour.

If your guest appearance takes the form of an interview, please recognize that an interview is extra work for the host and it’s up to you to make it worthwhile. Be reasonably expansive in your answers. Don’t answer every question with a yes, a no, or a single short sentence. Don’t use canned answers that you’ve copied and pasted from your website.

While we realize that your guest blog’s purpose is to interest people in your new book, we won’t use a post that is a relentless hard sell or little more than a summary of the plot with review quotes added. If you have a funny or intriguing story about what inspired you to write the book, tell us about it. If something unexpected turned up in your research and forced you to alter the plot, write about that. Choose a particular aspect of the story and write about your interest in it, or tell us how your kids or spouse contributed to the plot.

Unless you’re at a loved one’s bedside in the ICU or in Timbuktu without internet access, you should visit the blog on the day your contribution runs and respond to comments. It’s the least you can do for people who take the time to read what you’ve written.

Any questions or comments?

The Reviews Are Not In

Dave Rosenthal is the Sunday editor and an assistant managing editor at The Baltimore Sun and helps write the Sun’s book blog, Read Street.

Darlene Ryan was kind enough to invite me to be a guest blogger at PDD, most likely because of my Poe connections (or maybe because we're both Boston Red Sox fans). Living in Baltimore -- where Poe lived and is buried -- I've become familiar with the genius who has inspired so many other mystery and horror writers. And his name frequently pops up on The Baltimore Sun's book blog, Read Street, which I help write.

The Sun wasn't around when Poe was born, but it had been in business for more than a decade before his death in 1849. The paper has survived a Civil War and a couple of World Wars, a Depression and many recessions. But in some ways, the Sun and other U.S. newspapers face their greatest challenge today. Financial pressures, triggered by a decline in young readers and the growth of online competitors, have forced newspapers to shrink -- and that, in turn, has meant big changes in the way books are written about.

At the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Hartford Courant, full-time book editors have left and were not replaced. The Los Angeles Times eliminated its book review section and folded coverage into the lifestyle section. Other papers, including the Sun, have trimmed book coverage; we cut back from two pages to one each Sunday.

Some newspapers have started book blogs to supplement print coverage. But in a true nature-abhors-a-vacuum trend, dozens (if not hundreds) of independent blogs have sprung up. They're personal and funny and enlightening, like a conversation with a neighbor -- a counterbalance to traditional newspaper book reviews that have tended toward stuffiness. More and more seem to appear each day, fueled by publishers and authors eager to find new outlets to generate buzz.

Becca Rowan, creator of the Bookstack blog, told me in an email, "if the trend keeps up at this rate, I can see blogging supplanting the role of newspaper reviews, with the exception perhaps of the 'gold standard' reviewers like the Times and the Guardian. ,,, And though I grew up as a huge newspaper junkie, I rarely read the print versions of papers or book review pages." (She does profess to like Read Street, for which I'm grateful.)

So what happens now? I don't expect the financial pressures on U.S. newspapers to ease anytime soon, so book sections and pages likely will continue to decline. More newspapers may try blogs, which offer great advantages such as video, reader interaction and experimentation – like the U.S. map we created at Read Street of favorite bookstores. But even that will be difficult as staffs shrink, and lifestyle reporters focus on movies and pop music. And that will open the door for more and more bloggers -- and more and more independent voices.

Joshua Henkin, the author of Matrimony, may be one of the authors most attuned to -- and supportive of -- book bloggers. But he's dismayed by the decline in newspaper review sections. In an email exchange, he wrote: "The rise of book blogs is a good thing, it seems to me, but the concomitant decline of book sections in newspapers certainly isn't. It gets harder and harder for new writers to be discovered when the page space for book reviews keeps shrinking. ... So for a certain kind of book of literary fiction, book reviews are indispensable, and to the extent that book review sections are, in fact, being dispensed with, it's a loss for literary culture."