Do It Myself Blog – Glenda Watson Hyatt

Motivational Speaker

40 Blogs in 40 (Business) Days

Filed under: Virtual Book Tour — by at 12:14 am on Thursday, January 18, 2007

Forget lugging around heavy boxes of books, waiting for delayed flights and enduring jet lag to do a book tour. Do it virtually! A virtual book tour enables an author to visit blogs and chat rooms anywhere in the world from the comforts of home! And the number of readers reached can be mind-boggling.

Given the wicked winter weather Vancouver has been receiving, a virtual book tour makes perfect sense for me (not that I could leave home if I really wanted to, with all this snow and ice). Next Monday, I am kicking off my virtual book tour “40 Blogs in 40 (Business) Days” to promote my autobiography I’ll Do It Myself.

The plan is to visit forty blogs or ezines in the forty business days between Monday, January 22nd, and Friday, March 16th. Appearances on blogs may take the form of Q&A interviews, articles, questions from readers, book reviews, podcasts or other creative formats. Topics might include discussing my book I’ll Do It Myself, self-publishing, living with a disability, working from home and online, web accessibility, my love of animals, and countless other topics bloggers may come up with.

Benefits to Host Bloggers

As readers follow me on my virtual tour, traffic to participating blogs should increase. There is also a great opportunity for cross-promotion by announcing my other tour appearances on one’s own blog.

At the end of the tour, I will create an ebook of the entire virtual book tour, hyperlinking to each participating blog, further increasing exposure for each blog. I will also include ways bloggers promoted the tour and any noteworthy results.

Sample Questions

Below are some questions that host bloggers may use as a starting point when interviewing me. As they know their readers’ interests best, I’m hoping bloggers will add their own questions or solicit questions from their readers.

  • When did you first realize that you wanted to share the story of your life with others?
  • Why is it important to you that others benefit from what you have experienced in your life?
  • Are there any central messages in your book? What were your personal challenges in writing this book?
  • What or who has given you encouragement to write your book?
  • Why did you self-publish?
  • What has all the work you’ve done on your book taught you?
  • How can we follow your virtual book tour?

In researching how to conduct virtual book tours, I discovered a small number — perhaps three to five — of interview questions is best as it prevents me from answering all the good questions on one blog and it keeps readers in the tour, which keeps the momentum going. Advice that will be kept in mind, although not necessarily followed. However, I do ask that bloggers email me their questions three or four business days prior to their date so that my left thumb has plenty of time to type out responses.

Current Itinerary

Monday, January 22 – Thinking Home Business (Australia)

Tuesday, January 23 – eSight Careers Network (New York)

Wednesday, January 24 – Web Page Mistakes (Surrey)

Thursday, January 25 – Solo Entrepreneurs

Friday, February 16 – Special mystery blogger!

Thursday, February 22 – Spiritually Speaking

If you are a blogger interested in hosting an appearance, please email me.

Join Me on Tour

Each day during the tour I will be posting a blog entry with a link to that day’s appearance. Be sure not to miss an appearance by signing up to receive blog updates right in your email box – form is in the upper right corner of this webpage. How cool is that!

If you enjoyed this post, consider buying me a chai tea latte. Thanks kindly.

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