Book Tour–Site Lets Authors Control Book Promotion

These days, new ways are always being devised to let authors control their own fates when it comes to book promotion and to help readers find authors and books they love. Prior to the days of the Internet, authors were at the mercy of newspapers and magazines to get the word out about their upcoming book tour dates. Sometimes they got lucky, sometimes they didn’t. Then the Internet came along and authors could list tour dates on their sites, but fans had to navigate to each author’s site if they were interested.

Now there’s something even better. At Book Tour, authors can create a page that showcases their books and upcoming tour stops. And readers can search the database by author name, book title or location and get a list of book events in their area. And it’s all free! Free to list your books and tour stops and free to search the directory.

Authors can also upload photos of themselves and a short bio as well their book titles with photos of the book jackets and then link to the books on Amazon, Barnes and Noble.com and other online bookstores. For readers, when you visit the home page, it will also automatically list authors currently on book tour near you. For example, for me today it showed that Felicia Pride, author of all things pop culture, is touring in Washington, DC, Maryland and Northern Virginia between now and April. Lisa Scottoline and other authors will also be in my area over the next several weeks.

There are a few quirky things about Book Tour. Like when I entered Baltimore under “places,” 61 venues were found, such as the Baltimore Book Festival, but for most of them it indicated that there were “no upcoming events.” Since only five venues are listed per page, you end up scrolling through a lot of pages to find random events in your area and it can get tiresome. Visitors searching for random events in their areas would be better served if Book Tour removed the venues with no upcoming events from the resulting list or listed more venues per page so you don’t have to do so much scrolling.

Other than that little peeve–and it’s minor compared to the good stuff–it’s a great website. It appears to be a little newish and right now seems devoid of ads, but I wonder how long that will hold true as more authors list their books.

Hopefully Book Tour will get better with time. I’m always in favor of anything that gives authors more control when it comes to promoting their work and gives the fans more information and options, and Book Tour does that. I’ll definitely be using it to list my stops next time I go out on book tour.

Book Tour