Our book tours are all about creating a buzz – around authors, books, and reviewers. Before, during and beyond the tour, we’re always working on social media to bring our authors and reviewers to the attention of readers. Here are examples of our publicity materials. We’re always thinking up new ways of stirring up that buzz – and if authors or reviewers have new ideas for this, we’ll do our best to bring these to life.
Banners
As soon as a tour is agreed, we liaise with the author to develop a banner; this showcases the book and serves as an icon for the coming tour. We use the banner when recruiting reviewers and in many of our social media posts.
Pre Tour
From the point when we agree the tour with the author, accellerating up to the week before the tour, we flag up the tour on Facebook and put out twitter and instagram posts about the upcoming tour, scheduling posts at different times of the day to capture different international audiences.
During and beyond the tour
As reviews come in, we publicize each one at least six times on twitter, facebook and instagram, with engaging “teasers” from the review, and scheduling posts to go out at different times of the day to capture different international audiences. Both reviewers and authors generally add to the promotion by retweeting each of these posts, as do members of the Blackthorn Book Tours team.
Our posts flag both the book and the reviewer. Tweets include the reviewer’s status, from “Debut reviewer” for those joining a Blackthorn Book Tour for the first time to “Ace Reviewer” for our most longstanding contributors.
After the tour
We try to recruit more reviewers than slots on the tour, to allow for any who drop out or post late. We continue to promote any latecoming reviews or follow-ups and continue to retweet to extend the life of the tour.
After the tour, we choose a “Tour Guide’s pick” – the review that most impressed members of our own team, and we highlight this in our final tour feedback to the author:
Keep on keeping up!
Blackthorn Book Tours works hard to keep on the leading edge. If you have new ideas about how we can use our tours to bring great books and great reviewers to the attention of readers, we are always interested. Contact us any time via this website or at editors@blackthornbooktours.com.
