GoodWordEditing.com - Latest Comments in Anatomy of a Blog Tour - Startling Stats from Mary DeMuth’s 6 Week Tour

Re: Anatomy of a Blog Tour - Startling Stats from Mary DeMuth’s 6 Week Tour

Marcus — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 17:47:59 -0000

Yvonne and Tom, you all made my day. Thanks!

Re: Anatomy of a Blog Tour - Startling Stats from Mary DeMuth’s 6 Week Tour

Tom Collins — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:27:14 -0000

Hi, and add my thanks for this wonderfully open and thoughtful assessment of your book tour. I work with Yvonne DiVita at WME Books and as she noted, we've been working at conducting blog book tours, too. We fall into all three of your categories, btw, as publishers, writers, and readers ... and bloggers, to boot!

In reading through your post and all the comments, I think there are at least two additional nuggets in Tina's #6, where she wrote, "I have to say I agree with LL, that I often skip over blog tour posts unless it’s short enough for me to skim or catches my eye with something meaningful to me (usually aligned with why I visit that blog anyway). "

1. It seems to me her critical insight is that, in choosing blogs for a book tour, finding blogs (and bloggers) whose content and interests are "aligned" with the particular book may be far more valuable than page rank, number of comments, or even traffic.

Questions we should ask: Does word of mouth build better from small numbers of truly interested people, or from mass market approaches? Are we more likely to get original posts from bloggers who regularly write about topics related to the book? Are those blogs' readers more likely to come already "aligned" with the subject matter?

2. Tina's mention of something that "catches my eye" is also important. One thing you may have done, but I didn't see mentioned in your description of the tour, was anything about providing a cover image thumbnail and linking html code to the bloggers to help them give visual appeal to their post. Same for a sized and web optimized photo of the author, sample page(s), and any other visual material we might have.

Like the canned interview snippets, everything we can do to make it easy for the blogger seems worth the effort.

Once again, all of us involved in independent publishing owe you a big THANK YOU for sharing your experience and initiating this discussion.

Tom

Re: Anatomy of a Blog Tour - Startling Stats from Mary DeMuth’s 6 Week Tour

Yvonne DiVita — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 11:50:16 -0000

WOW! This is the BEST review of a blogging book tour I have ever seen! WE have done several and our results pretty much match up with what you've demonstrated here.

There is a lot to learn...so, I don't discount blogging book tours, but we need to make sure our authors have their eyes wide open when they participate: the tour MAY NOT sell ANY books (at least not immediately).

However, our authors did receive more traffic to their blogs and websites, and even connections to people they would never have met otherwise - people who are valuable for them to know. This is for non-fiction, business books.

I am going to share this with everyone I know. You have done such a great service to authors and publishers. What a treasure this post is!

Re: Anatomy of a Blog Tour - Startling Stats from Mary DeMuth’s 6 Week Tour

Cara Putman — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 23:39:28 -0000

PS Having the canned interview also turned me into a two day tour participant. It was also very easy from a participant perspective to post with all the info Tina had easily available. Okay, I'm done now :-)

Re: Anatomy of a Blog Tour - Startling Stats from Mary DeMuth’s 6 Week Tour

Cara Putman — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 23:37:35 -0000

I've been reading the on-going comment discussion with interest. As a participant in the tour, I wanted to add one comment on the interview. I posted a review, and then posted the interview, pretty much verbatium. Reasons? 1) I'd had an original interview with Mary earlier in the year and didn't want to overwhelm her. 2) I think Tina put a deadline (understandably) on sending personal interviews through her. Due to life, I missed that deadline. And since there was a canned interview I went with that.

I don't know how many of the folks on my blog participated in the blog tour and saw the same interview over and over. I just know I didn't receive any comments on it. Instead, I've had people say they're now using the book in small group settings, etc. Sales outside the website. And I know I wouldn't have read the book without the tour and deadline. And because of that, it's at the top of recommendations I make when people ask my opinion on good parenting books. So there is also that hidden viral marketing piece that simply can't be measured. But then I LOVE to talk about books. :-)

Re: Anatomy of a Blog Tour - Startling Stats from Mary DeMuth’s 6 Week Tour

Bonnie Calhoun — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 23:27:05 -0000

Spaghettipie...it is a Director's dream to have each and every blog in a tour carrying original content.

Unfortunately it's not practical. The loss of "power of individuality" is called mass marketing...LOL

The majority of the people who want to participate are willing to add a few sentences of their own but in most cases are actually apprehensive about adding their own opinions to a post.

We at CFBA approach our blog tours as mass market advertising. Just like when you see an ad for a consumer product, you repeatedly see the same advertisement month after month, everywhere you go. Well we cover as many corners of the internet as we can with our "advertisement" for the book of the week.

Right now that's the best we can do! Spread the word and make a particular title a household word for the week in as many places as possible.

When we can formulate a better option that a hundred people at a time will participate in readily, I will add that to our repertiore!

Oh Marcus...one other thing that I thought about with Mary's tour. I didn't get to see her landing page, or the page that she was actually doing the selling from. But if the browser address bar did not say https: I can understand why her sales were lacking.

A lot of hosting sites proclaim their safety with encryption, but if the site owner has not invested in a SSL Encryption license, I will not give out my personal information...not even when it's someone I know!

Re: Anatomy of a Blog Tour - Startling Stats from Mary DeMuth’s 6 Week Tour

spaghettipie — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 23:06:33 -0000

Dee - I totally agree about the original content part (and that was one of the "complaints" I talked about in my summary), but how to prevent that is difficult. I encouraged people to write original posts in reminder emails, on the website and any other way I could, and yet still the majority of people used the interview verbatim. So a ton of people used it, meaning it feels like we needed to have it, but a ton of people used it, meaning in some ways the tour lost some of the "power of individuality."

Re: Anatomy of a Blog Tour - Startling Stats from Mary DeMuth’s 6 Week Tour

Dee Stewart — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 15:54:15 -0000

Marcus, I agree about the length of an entry being dependent on the style of the blog. I write for The Master's Artist alongside Mary. Most of those entries fall in the same camp. 750-1K words. Many of us use the ADD More typepad feature to entice them to read the entire entry. However Blogger doesn't have the feature--i could be wrong-- yet, so I chop my posts up at Christian Fiction Blog.

However, today I have a long interview on there, mainly because I DiGGed that entry :)

Re: Anatomy of a Blog Tour - Startling Stats from Mary DeMuth’s 6 Week Tour

Bonnie Calhoun — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 10:22:44 -0000

Yes, Marcus, the Wiki post is reliable. I read the same data from "within" Google. LOL...No, we Blog*Stars don't get our hands in cement, but we do get to sign a Non-disclosure agreement with Google :-)

But I do love being a Blog*Star!

And on note about the media mailing of books. "Anything" that is added to the book or the package changes it to first-class mail! LOL...the Post Office has no sense of humor about "free gifts"!

Re: Anatomy of a Blog Tour - Startling Stats from Mary DeMuth’s 6 Week Tour

Marcus — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 08:15:03 -0000

Bonnie, fascinating post. I've read about Google's algorithm before in the New York Times, but I love the Wikipedia post. Is it reliable? ; ) Being a google blog star sounds cool! Did you get to press your hands down in concrete somewhere?

Regardless of potential pagerank leakage, I'll continue to link to people I love willy nilly. (I'll link to them willy nilly and love them willy nilly.)

Also, I'm pretty sure that RLPs mailout gimmicks are more like the "free gifts" you get when you subscribe to Time Magazine or order a large amount from Book of the Month Club. They aren't really personal notes from him to friends. They are added value.

Carl, you never know how these things are going to work out. That's the main reason I get so nervous about people who make promises.

RLP, your book mailing idea is brilliant. I already have a copy and I wanted to get another one just to see what you'd do. You should make a video of the fulfillment process like you did last Christmas.

Heather, you are very welcome! It's always good to hear from you.

Dee, so you figure book sales on a tour will be 10% - 20% of the number of participating bloggers? I like the simplicity of that. I agree about original content. It's so hard to get that. You make a press release and too many people end up just copying stuff verbatim. But I think that is more a problem of education than anything else.

Interesting theory on blogging being a power of individuality and voice. That's the sort of thing I'd love to talk to you about more sometime. The 250 words is generally true for certain kinds of readers. But I don't think all readers are alike. RLPs and MarkDRobert's posts are regularly 750-1000 words and they have tons of readers.

Re: Anatomy of a Blog Tour - Startling Stats from Mary DeMuth’s 6 Week Tour

LaShaunda — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 00:10:58 -0000

I believe the tour was a major success. She had 80 blogs sign up and 50 something actually blogged. She might not sold a ton of books, but she was introduced to 50 blogs and their readers. For example I featured her on two blogs. Neither had comments, but they had visitors. Which meant someone was introduced to her. Maybe they didn't buy a book that day but when they're strolling the book store, that book will stand out and hopefully they'll buy a book.

That's what bookselling is mainly about, word of mouth. People like to hear about new books, which is why I participate in blog tours. Its my way of giving back to the book reader. If they buy a book that's even better.

I learned a lot from this tour and I'm very thankful for Mary sharing her results. One thing I did learn is that you have to make the tour on your site unique. If everyone posts the same thing, it does get boring.

Thanks Mary, Tina and Mark, hopefully we can work together again.

LaShaunda - SORMAG Editor
See Ya On The Net -Blog

Re: Anatomy of a Blog Tour - Startling Stats from Mary DeMuth’s 6 Week Tour

Bonnie Calhoun — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 19:19:44 -0000

A note for "real live preacher". When you send out books you can do it at media mail prices, which usually range $2.00 and below.

When you add a note, and/or "silly little gift" it automatically becomes first class mail and can range from $5.00 up for a hard cover, or thick book!

Costs can wind up being prohibitive at those rates, better to send the person a personal email. LOL...that way you are also building your email mailing list!

Re: Anatomy of a Blog Tour - Startling Stats from Mary DeMuth’s 6 Week Tour

Dee Stewart — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 13:44:28 -0000

Hi, Mark. Hi, Mary, Tina and Bonnie.
On blog tours & marketing...

Your numbers are pretty good. Out of 85 potential bloggers,50+ blogged. That is pretty good. 11 books were sold from that. 25% . That's normal market numbers, actually a little above. 20% is what I expect and tell my clients who want to use a blog tour as a sales tool.

Suggestions:

1. I agree with Bonnie that Mary should have kept the page up and added all her books. Amazon has worked hard at creating more widgets and products for websites to use to sell books.

2. Encourage your bloggers to be original in their content for the tour. I also belong to the Christian Fiction Blog Alliance and I host the Gospel Fiction Blog Alliance. One thing that will make me leave a blog faster than eggs cooking on hot asphalt is seeing a generic blog entry. When I come to a blog I want original content, else I would go to Mary's site or Amazon directly.

The power of blogging is individuality and voice. As a problogger I encourage participants to use the blog tour as a theme building tool. Build a story around the book, and if they can't do that, then do a list or speedlink. Blog readers read a post up to 250 words anything more than that becomes an eye sore.

Re: Anatomy of a Blog Tour - Startling Stats from Mary DeMuth’s 6 Week Tour

Heather Goodman — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 13:10:10 -0000

Thanks, Marcus, Tina, and Mary, for being willing to share all of this. Very helpful. And thank you, commenters, for the extra info.

Re: Anatomy of a Blog Tour - Startling Stats from Mary DeMuth’s 6 Week Tour

real live preacher — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 10:59:03 -0000

Marcus,

I recently wrote on my blog that I was going to write personal notes inside books purchased through the blog, and even include silly little gifts. It's part of an effort to see the relationships in blogging and to take them seriously. To try to avoid the impersonal nature of book sales and marketing.

The most successful thing I've ever done, in terms of sales.

Re: Anatomy of a Blog Tour - Startling Stats from Mary DeMuth’s 6 Week Tour

Carl Holmes — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 10:49:09 -0000

I have done one blog tour. I did the teaser and then the full review... I got nada. Not one response. I know people like LL are lurking on my blog and respond occasionally. RLP does as well, but no one posted. It is cool. I got a free copy of a great book and helped a friend in the process, that was what was great.

Re: Anatomy of a Blog Tour - Startling Stats from Mary DeMuth’s 6 Week Tour

Bonnie Calhoun — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 10:32:12 -0000

LOL...I agree with you on all counts Marcus!

Here is a post I did on PageRank. I work for Google on the Blogger Help Group as a Blog*Star (Google certified expert at Blogger):

http://howcanidothat.blogspot.com/2007/03/what-...

There are several links in the post to follow to the PageRank algorithm. It is also notable that lately all PageRanks are cycling down. Even John Chow's PageRank is now at a PageRank of 5, LOL...and he gets close to 100,000 hits a day!

This will be a great marketing industry for Christian fiction when we get the whole thing figured out! The more working on it, the better.

Oh...and about Technorati...LOL...they have 35 guys and gals servicing about 5 million blog accounts. Some weeks the Book page doesn't work, and they've been working on the algorithm to keep spammers from stacking it...but they're trying!

Some day we may get a better stat keeper...That's something to think about!

Re: Anatomy of a Blog Tour - Startling Stats from Mary DeMuth’s 6 Week Tour

Marcus — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 09:29:47 -0000

Bonnie, one more thing. The thing about your blog tours that is so great is that you create a permanent social media press release at your site. More and more, I'm thinking that's the real benefit of a blog tour. The tour itself becomes a publicity stunt to point people to the social media press release.

Now, if we can just make those press releases more viral...

Re: Anatomy of a Blog Tour - Startling Stats from Mary DeMuth’s 6 Week Tour

Marcus — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 09:25:40 -0000

Bonnie,

Thanks for your comments. I have a lot of admiration for your work.

About PageRank... In some past studies I've done, PageRank indeed proved to be an indication of the potential traffic a blog receives. (I was surprised.) As you point out, it is only one indicator. For Mary's tour, we used RankWhere to measure the rank of the participating blogs. And as I said in the post, the correlation to traffic referrals was only 0.316. About the same as comments this time.

(I've never heard that outgoing links "leak" PageRank. Where did you hear that?)

About Amazon.com... We didn't link to Amazon because we wanted to measure what people did when they clicked through to the book or the site itself. Here's what we found about click throughs in general:

* They spent an average of 4 minutes, 24 seconds on Mary's site.
* They viewed 1.5 pages of Mary's site.
* 70% bounced. (Which seems to contradict the first stat.)
* 56% were new to Mary's site. (That's 403 people who came to the site for the first time as a direct result of this tour.)
* 178 people clicked through to the direct buy link directly. Before they clicked, they wouldn't have known whether it was going to Amazon or what (mostly likely).

The publishers I've spoken to view Amazon statistics with skepticism. But even if Amazon sold a million books during the blog tour, there's no way to say those books were sold as a result of this tour and not some other marketing event. I wanted to gather as much real, verifiable data as possible.

About Technorati... I hate to say this, but I don't pay any attention to Technorati Popular Books. Becky and I have talked about it before for the CSFF blog tour. I don't think the stat has much meaning, so I haven't studied it. Mainly, I'm skeptical that you can't easily navigate to the page from Technorati.com anymore. I figure if they don't trust the stat enough to make it available, it's not worth using. Perhaps I should take a closer look at that.

About direct marketing... Terry Whalin rocks. I work with a guy that I call a direct marketing guru. He's a consultant to many of the CBA publishers, and he's been a leader in direct marketing for over 20 years. He and I talked about direct marketing as a long haul proposition, but for Mary we couldn't figure out a way to extend the blog tour itself beyond 6 weeks. Even that may have been too long. At best, blog tours should be one piece of a much larger marketing plan.

I agree completely about the continued effectiveness of links from blog tours. And I agree that Mary should repost the direct buy page. That's a great idea for her to list her other books.

About the million bucks... I take your meaning. Thanks. But to be literal, one of my goals is to figure out as much as possible how much something like this is really worth. So far, I'm still not sure. I think we're on a good track, but I think the structure of most blog tours could be tweaked.

Re: Anatomy of a Blog Tour - Startling Stats from Mary DeMuth’s 6 Week Tour

Marcus — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 08:40:52 -0000

Pattie, we watched the number of comments too. There were a total of 312 comments. That has 0.33 direct correlation with traffic referrals 0.33. The last study I did of blog tours suggested that comments had a very low correlation with the click through rate. This one suggests otherwise.

Of course, I could just as easily use comments to measure "buzz." But the publishers I've met with are more interested in bottom line sales. They are tired of buzz promises that don't generate any revenue in the form of book sales.

It all comes back to my decision to try to apply direct marketing wisdom to organized events in the blogosphere.

Re: Anatomy of a Blog Tour - Startling Stats from Mary DeMuth’s 6 Week Tour

Bonnie Calhoun — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 23:13:53 -0000

You did a lot of data gathering in your experiment and I applaud your tenacity.

A few things that you should take into consideration:

Page Rank is not always indicitive of your progress. PageRank is acquired by an algorithm of direct permanent links into your page and the "quality" of those links. For example if you have 50 people linking to your page and they all have a PageRank of one or two, you will actually have a lower PageRank than if you have 15 people with a page rank of nine linking to you. Also outgoing links on your page actually "leak" PageRank. So PageRank isn't all that important to a tour.

Next, you didn't supply the Amazon statistics for sales during that period, so you could have possibly sold many more books that you didn't have figures for.

Also I would ask what link did you use for the book for the tour? Did you use the Amazon product link, or did you use the book direct link? The reason I asked this is because you also didn't include the ranking that you achieved on the Technorati Popular Book Page. That page is viewed by close to a hundred thousand people a day, and uses the direct book link to rank the popularity of books being discussed on the internet.

And lastly direct sales marketing is a marathon event rather that the sprint. The agent, Terry Whalin dedicates most of his Writing Life blog to teaching direct marketing. It takes a lot longer than a blog tour to get positive results to direct marketing. But it is a great beginning. Mary should leave her landing page up and expand it to all of her books not just one.

Like you said, many people would rather buy from Amazon than from a personal site. but you created a book buzz, got peole involved, and collected stats on a lot of page views. That kind of advertising is worth a million bucks in the industry! Cudos

-Bonnie Calhoun, Dir. of Christian Fiction Blog Alliance

Re: Anatomy of a Blog Tour - Startling Stats from Mary DeMuth’s 6 Week Tour

Pattie — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 22:13:35 -0000

I posted the tour on both of my blogs, and neither has a large # of commenters....HOWEVER, you never know who reads and then remembers later to purchase the book.

I'm also one of those who said a downside was not receiving a copy of the book. I'll be honest: this was the first blog tour I'd ever been asked to participate in, WITHOUT being given a book. I guess I'd been spoiled before, huh? :-) That didn't stop me from purchasing two copies, though: one locally and one through Mary's site.

Re: Anatomy of a Blog Tour - Startling Stats from Mary DeMuth’s 6 Week Tour

Marcus — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 22:10:35 -0000

Karen, passing the book on is a great idea. My wife is a MOPS organizer, so I'm thinking she should share it with everyone at their next MOPS meeting.

Re: Anatomy of a Blog Tour - Startling Stats from Mary DeMuth’s 6 Week Tour

Marcus — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 22:07:10 -0000

L.L., can't I be just a little bit of a schmuck? I've always wanted to be... Information, Inspiration, and Friendship. Those are good reasons to read and blog.

Mary, we love you! I will say this. For all my talk of failure, I think your tour was the most successful I've seen. We just tried to take it a step further into direct sales. Eh. So it didn't work. I don't think we lost credibility with anyone. We said what we were trying to do. Now we've shared that it didn't work particularly well. Back to the drawing board. I always liked to draw anyway.

Mary Connealy, thanks for stopping by! You're right, of course. Mary's got a lot of exposure from this tour. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that the book really is that good.

Jennifer, great to see you here! You are absolutely right. I was just hoping we could measure word of mouth in 6 weeks. I'm not sure how to measure it over a longer period... at least, not with just one title. Your comment is very encouraging, thanks!

Mel, in retrospect asking for the direct buy was a gutsier move than I realized. The main point was to see if we could measure how the buzz translated into sales. But then a lot of traditional book marketing doesn't measure the direct relationships between a particular strategy and the sales. It's a tricky business.

spaghettipie/Tina, you did most of the hard work on the tour. And Mary did the really hard work of writing an excellent book. Thanks for the thoughts about my last few posts on CSFF. I was just trying to have fun writing them. I figure if they aren't fun for me, they won't be fun for any readers.

Tracy, Mary's tour was as successful as any blog tour I've seen so far. It just wasn't successful regarding specific, measurable sales. Name recognition is what books are about. I think Mary may be reaching the tipping point in that regard.

rcloenen-ruiz, I agree completely. In fact, Marketing Experiments ran a test comparing social media campaigns with google ads. The social media campaign took longer to build, but continued to drive traffic several months after they stopped engaging the blogosphere. Whereas the traffic from google shut off the moment they stopped running ads. Your comment about name recognition for the author and the book is spot on. But how do you measure that?

Jason, good to see you, friend! It is liberating to know we can just post once. In fact, we should post just once. Then we can spend the other days commenting.

Gina, the total number was closer to 70 before I took out anomalies. I'll be happy to do whatever I can to help you out in the future!

Cara, I think the key to helping the authors is to be completely transparent and honest about your reviews. Too often, bloggers sugarcoat everything on the tour and mess up the credibility of the entire process. We need to remember that all press is good press. And hey, what's your new book? Be sure to share a link!

Re: Anatomy of a Blog Tour - Startling Stats from Mary DeMuth’s 6 Week Tour

Karen — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 21:51:57 -0000

I, too, am a believer in name recognition and word of mouth. Instead of giving my review copy away on my blog, I passed it on to a young woman who is daughterly to us. She and her husband have four kids, and she is very active in her church and her children's activities. If she liked the book (I can't imagine her not), her recommendation will pass through a whole community of moms.