Anyone experienced authors willing to help a newbie

[Natasha Larry]

How do you go about organizing a blog book tour? Do you have to pay for them? And I was wondering if anyone here has experience making book trailers....I can't pay a lot, but I'm sure I can grand some kind of favor.

[Natasha Larry]

Wow. That's never going to happen, LoL.

[Natasha Larry]

Eh, it takes a lot to discourage me. I've been doing quite a bit of research, I was just a little lost about blog tours and book trailers.

[Marian Perera]

Okay, now I'm curious...

 

If you offered to do guest blogs for, say, twenty other bloggers and they accepted, and the guest blogs were posted consecutively so that each day you'd be "appearing" in a different place...

 

Would that be different from a blog tour?

[Natasha Larry]

I'm starting very early, to promote book and author. I have four people interested so far.

[Tami Jackson]

You can organize your own book tour rather easily by networking with other bloggers in the genre of the book you want to sell. I just posted my own author tour calendar ... most of the fantastic bloggers featured on it are people whom I met on Book Blogs. (You're on the tour yourself .. so you've seen what that author tour calendar looks like.) :-)


ONE WORD OF ADVICE: You've got to make sure your book went through some extensive editorial process before you simply present your work to people for review. NOBODY wants to read shoddy writing. I think that's my biggest pet peeve about reading any books (work that's difficult to read). I'm a new book author myself (have extensive experience in the short story markets but Ravena & The Resurrected is my first full length book). I went through great pains to have R&R professionally edited. While I'm willing to organize my own blog tour, I desperately do NOT want to waste anyone's time by asking them to read my book, before it's been edited.

Hope this helps. ALSO ... regarding YouTube (making a video) ... if you're super creative and have a mastery of PowerPoint you can post a video there by using services such as AuthorStream (it can convert an MS PowerPoint show into an MP3 file that you can upload for a video).

I'm just now starting to focus on that effort ... marketing "Ravena & The Resurrected" on YouTube. My goal is to make a number of short and entertaining videos (instead of making just one elaborate book trailer). Time will tell if that strategy works, or not. (I really hope and think it will.)

Good luck to you, luv.

[Ann Rodela]

Hello Natasha.  I am in the middle of writing my own book and I will make my own book trailer once I finish and polish my novel.  For audio you might compose it yourself with LMMS software which is free to download. It is a DAW which comes with its own instruments and exports to a .wav file.

http://lmms.sourceforge.net/

 

If you want to compress to an mp3 you might want to download Audacity and LAME for Audacity.

 

Now for the visuals.  You can tell your story through pictures, photos.  You can alter photos, paint from scrap, create animations with GIMP software which you can download for free.

http://www.gimp.org/

 

You can visit my blog. I described how I made my animations. Read comments for Book Review: Evolution of Fashion vs Dress Design. Click on word comments to reveal.

http://ravensartshack.blogspot.com/

 

Or you might view my first animation.  25 seconds.

 

I am still learning, but I look forward to sharing my knowledge as it grows. :)

[Natasha Larry]

cool! I will check it out!

[Tami Jackson]

I'm in the same boat ... am LEARNING how to create videos. Look for me on YouTube (search: "Vamchoir"). What I did is purchase the audio ... made artwork ... put it into a PowerPoint presentation and converted it to video via small fee ($10 for a number of uploads of different presentations) to AuthorStream.

 

*I seriously want to get MUCH better at doing this!

[Jodi Webb]

I organize Blog Tours through WOW-Women on Writing. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to promote that through Book Blogs but if you contact me I can tell you more. We're very affordable.

 

Jodi Webb

[Ann Rodela]

Another fun place to create visuals ans short music compositions is www.aviary.com
At the aviary you can create your music online and download as mp3. They have tutorials for making interesting visuals.
Happy creating! :)

[Gareth Wilson]

Hi Natasha,

One thing that you might want to try for a book trailer is using still photo's import them into Window's Live Movie Maker and add a voice over.  Its pretty simple to use and you can do all sorts of things with it.

 

If you haven't got the finances to pay for a blog tour, the best thing to do is approach individual blogs who review the same genre as your title and ask them if they'd like to participate.  Everything sounds scary when you start but with some solid thinking ways can be found to do things for minimum budget.

 

One book I'd suggest that you have a look at if you get the chance is the Everything Guide to Writing Childrens books.  They have some good advice for marketing yourself as well as making sure that you're doing everything above board.  You should be able to borrow it from a local library. 

 

Hope it helps.

[Nicola O.]

I'm sure that a good publicist might include a blog tour, but if you don't have access to one, I don't see how it costs anything other than time and review copies + postage.

 

There are appropriate places here where you can ask for interested bloggers to participate - many will accept e-copies of your book to keep your costs low. 

 

I would think that the key to a really successful tour would be good advance planning - you want the blog posts to appear right around the release date of your book so you need to get review copies out early enough to allow people to read and review them, which means you need to start soliciting bloggers before *that*.

 

I've seen a few tours that were extra clever, with scavenger hunts or big giveaways and such, but most are just a series of blog posts, which, let's face it, are pretty much free to the author.  If you've got a good, well-written book and you connect with a community of bloggers in your target audience, you're more than halfway there!