Book Review: Virtual Book Tour Magic by Dana Lynn Smith

POSTED ON Dec 5, 2011

Joel Friedlander

Written by Joel Friedlander

Home > Blog > Marketing, Self-Publishing, Social Media > Book Review: Virtual Book Tour Magic by Dana Lynn Smith

Ed: We have a winner! Melissa K. Norris, novelist (@MelissaKNorris) is the lucky winner, in a random drawing, of a free copy of Dana Lynn Smith’s Virtual Book Tour Magic. Congratulations, Melissa!

Last week I had the chance to experience a book tour first hand, as the first host on the tour Dana Lynn Smith put together for her latest book, Virtual Book Tour Magic.

Yes, this is an oddly inflected idea, that Dana, who writes about book tours, is taking her own book tour in support of book tours, and I’m reviewing her book on book tours as part of the tour.

Dizzy yet?

What I Found Out About Book Tours

In organizing the tour for her book, Dana impressed me because:

  • She obviously had a clear goal she was pursuing
  • All the communication I received from her was clear and to the point
  • Dana sent me her guest post about 10 days before it was due to run :)
  • She also sent me some copy to use in social media promotion
  • And she supplied carefully-constructed tweets complete with hashtags to promote the blog post on Twitter
  • Dana also hung around on the day her blog post went live, interacting with the many readers who were interested in virtual book tours
  • She also sent me a reminder the day before, just in case

What I learned was that you have to be very organized to get all the amazing benefits of a virtual book tour. Taken together, all the techniques and tactics that can be used in one of these tours can really have a major impact on sales, Amazon ranking and interest in your other books.

You Should Read the Book

Virtual Book Tour MagicWhich all lead me to the book the whole exercise is meant to be promoting: Virtual Book Tour Magic. It’s a PDF edition Dana sells from her website, and here’s what I found interesting:

Everything I learned by watching Dana run her tour? It’s all explained, step by step, in the book.

I can’t believe there’s anything you would need or want to know about virtual book tours that’s not covered in this complete, easy to follow, practical guide to running your own virtual book tour.

Dana supplies information on every aspect of putting together a tour, and there are lots of links to other resources throughout the PDF. She includes case studies so you can see exactly how these strategies play out in the real world, too.

One of the things I really liked was her “Daily Tour Routine” checklist with 11 specific tasks to execute each day of your tour.

But the book is very comprehensive. The author covers topics like:

  • How to plan your virtual book tour
  • How to research and recruit the best tour hosts
  • Communicating with tour hosts
  • Creating killer content for your book tour
  • Using contests, giveaways and offers on your tour
  • Pitfalls and how to avoid them
  • Hiring virtual book tour organizers

I Recommend It

Whenever I think about doing something new, I get stopped by not knowing where to start, or how to find the time to do the research it seems it’s going to take to figure out this new situation.

That’s the beauty of Virtual Book Tour Magic. Dana has saved us all that time and research and, from her experience, put together a concise and practical guide to this great promotional strategy.

Joel Friedlander

Written by
Joel Friedlander

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