How to Book Your Own Blog Tour, Part 5: Wrapping Up the Tour

Previous post - Part 4: Kicking Off the Tour

Today is the final day of my week-long series on how to book your own blog tour. Here's what we're talking about:

1. Planning Your Tour
2. Recruiting Bloggers
3. Keeping Yourself Organized
4. Kicking Off the Tour
5. Wrapping Up the Tour (This post!)

This is your host, Samantha, and I'm using the following examples as we talk through how to book your own tour:

My July 2015 blog tour ran for two weeks and had eight stops. 

My October 14, 2015 cover reveal ran for one day and had fourteen participants.
So far, we've talked about planning your tour, how and where to find potential bloggers, how to keep organized as you recruit, and how to successfully kick off the tour. And now your tour is underway. What do you do?

Share on Social Media

This should go without saying, but I mean, so should the fact that no one wants to listen to the Beatles, but they still play them on Oldies stations. (No? I'm the only one that doesn't like them? OK, fine.)

Share your bloggers' posts throughout the week and beyond. They're sharing their social media sphere of influence, and you're sharing yours. Re-tweet them, say thank you on Twitter (or FaceBook or whatever--sorry, my Twitter bias is showing), and generally give the impression that, golly gee, you're grateful for their time and energy. Which you should be, by the way, but if you're not, that's between you and your deity of choice.

In addition, as I linked to above, make a page on your website that showcases all your posts. People might someday stumble onto your website with a burning curiosity about you and what you have to say, and voila! There's a place where they can read some of the stuff you spent blood, sweat, and tears on!

Don't Forget Your Giveaways

Did you do a giveaway? Don't forget to send off the loot when the window closes. Rafflecopter reminds you and does the pick automatically, so it's super easy.

I also suggest poking holes in the boxes if you want the pet lemurs to survive the trip.

And One Final Request

When your tour draws to a close, I suggest a thank you email to everyone who participated. Yes, in addition to the social media thanks. People like to know they're appreciated. I mean, don't send a crazy, "YOU HAVE MY UNDYING LOVE AND DEVOTION" email every day for the next year, but a final wrap-up won't go amiss.

And now's the time to spring that request I sprung on you at the beginning of my blog series: the newsletter.

I have three newsletters. One for fans, one for bloggers, and one for book reviewers. Since the second and third are many times one and the same type of person, I debated whether or not to merge them into one list. However, I've found that while there is cross-over in the subscribers, it's not 100%. So I keep them separate.

When I send out my tour wrap-up email, I say something like:

Thanks for being a part of my blog tour! 

If you enjoyed working with me and want to be notified in the future when I'm booking another tour, cover reveal, or blitz, please sign up for my book blogger list (on the left side of the page). If you're a reviewer and want to be notified of when new ARCs are available, please sign up for my book reviewer list (on the right side of the same page).

And people do it. And they've participate in more than one of my events. It also takes the pressure off the spreadsheet I had you create a couple days ago as being the landing zone for future participants. It takes the awkwardness out of it, too. If they don't want to participate, they can hit the "unsubscribe" button without having to email you and demand to know why you're sending them emails.

(Yes, if you're a blogger or reviewer, you can sign up for my list, even if it's just to spy on me and see how I really do my upcoming blitz.)

Final Wrap-Up

Thank you so much for sticking with me to the end of this series. I certainly hope that you learned something you can apply. If you have questions, post 'em below or find me and the rest of the Operation Awesome gang on Twitter.

If you liked this series and want more tidbits from us on reading and writing, you can sign up to get future blog posts delivered to your inbox. It's in the sidebar over there --->

I hope to see you around again!

***

S. L. Saboviec grew up in a small town in Iowa but became an expat for her Canadian husband, whom she met in the Massive Multi-player Online Role-Playing Game Star Wars: Galaxies (before the NGE, of course). She holds a B.S. in Physics, which qualifies her to B.S. about physics and occasionally do some math for the sci-fi stories she concocts. Her dark, thought-provoking science fiction & fantasy contains flawed, relatable characters and themes that challenge the status quo.

Her short fiction ("I Am NOT Little Red Riding Hood") has appeared in the webzine Grievous Angel. Her debut novel, Guarding Angel, received an honorable mention in the 23rd Annual Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Awards: "... A fascinating story of a particularly loving guardian angel. Overall, the writing is emotionally grounded, character-focused, and technically superior..." The sequel, Reaping Angel, is available now.

You can call her Samantha.

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