I took a course a few years ago at a local university on book promotions, and the instructor swore that the blog tour was the most important publicity tool you will have. When I signed with a publisher for the last book, he was less than convinced about the correlation between running blog tours and successful book launches. Undaunted, I planned and ran my own month long blog tour for the release of my last novel, The Revenant: A YA Paranormal Thriller with Zombies with limited results. As a baseline comparison, I also hired a company to run a week long blog tour the following month, also with limited results.

In this series of posts, I plan to blog about the days leading up to the release and blog tour to help publicize  my new novel, I Was, Am, Will Be Alice. This time through I’ve scheduled my own again, trying to post as much material as I can to as many websites as I can over the course of a week, and compare that to my sales (something I couldn’t do last time as my publisher had control to all of the data).

I plan to be transparent in my posts, sharing with you how I went about the planning and execution of my tour as well as how it effects book sales, with the hope that I can help other authors to do the same.

I would be remiss if I did not share the document that gave me the idea to plan my own blog tour rather than pay someone to do it for me. Before I set out to go it on my own, I read A. Terry’s How to Promote Your Book with a Blog Tour, Volume 2 in Terry’s Book Marketing Survival Guide Series.

I won’t lie–planning a blog tour on your own takes a lot of work. You have to have good organizational and writing skills to do it. In addition, you must be willing to invest your time during the tour, sharing on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, Storify, etc. But in the end, it will all be worth it as it (should) help sell books, but it will also help you to network and make a whole bunch of new contacts to help build your writing community for the next time around.