In February and March, book publicist Cheryl Malandrinos was featured in interviews here on Page One along with her partner Dorothy Thompson in All About Virtual Book Tours). They were so forthcoming with informative and helpful details about virtual book tours that their interview ran in two parts.

Today you can join Cheryl Malandrinos for a virtual book tour workshop as she discusses blog tours and answers questions from callers on Blog Talk Radio. She will be the guest of Dennis Griffin, today April 18, at 11 a.m. Pacific/2 p.m. Eastern time. The show will be archived on the site shortly after its completion and can be played back or downloaded. The number to call in is 646-478-0982.

So join Cheryl if you can. The show is bound to full of useful information about virtual book tours, and you get to ask an expert questions.

When Lee McDonald– director of marketing and events at Karibu Books–contacted me shortly after Karibu closed to let me know that she and Charlotte Reid (also of Karibu Books) would be taking on clients to help them with marketing, publicity, events and scheduling, I knew that I had to get the word out. If you’ve worked with Karibu, you know Lee McDonald and the excellent work she did for the bookstore and the many authors who appeared there over the years. No matter what the book market was doing, I could always count on a big crowd showing up–sometimes numbering in the hundreds–whenever I appeared for a book signing at Karibu. This woman knows her book marketing stuff.

For Connie Briscoe Presents, Lee shares what it takes to succeed in the book marketing and publicity business and what’s next for her after the closing of Karibu Books.

Connie Briscoe: How long did you work as director of marketing and events for Karibu?

Lee McDonald: I started Karibu in 2001. I dabbled in all areas of the business–sales, buying, warehouse, et cetera–and became the director of marketing and events sometime in 2002.

CB: Before we get into your new venture, can you tell us a bit about why Karibu closed?

Lee McDonald: Well, I don’t really want to speak on the behalf of either of the owners but I will say that there were differences in the vision and growth of Karibu, therefore the business suffered.

CB: Do you think it will ever reopen, and if so, when?

Lee McDonald: Connie, you know, that is a question I continually get! I do not know, but knowing the drive and passion that Karibu was built from, it would not surprise me to see a Karibu reappear in the future.

CB: Good. We’ve all got our fingers crossed. You handled book marketing and events for Karibu. For someone who might be interested in pursuing that kind of work, what kind of training and experience did you have?

Lee McDonald: Interestingly enough, my background is in hospitality/human resource and hotel management. With that said, I think if you have a background in selling, servicing and interacting with people that you can market and/or brand a product. The ability to effectively communicate with lots of people is very important. Many of the contacts you make will be about building relationships, so complete professionalism and timely follow up are also important. Lastly, of course, is results. You must have the numbers to compliment the relationships. I serviced approximately 600 events each year while working to market and brand Karibu as a household name, and with the help of the team we sold lots of books!

CB: Indeed you did. Tell us about this new venture you’re planning.

Lee McDonald: After the closure of Karibu, I started my own marketing and event consulting company, The Renaissance Group, LLC. My partner Charlotte Reid and I will service individuals and small business clients, including national and self-published authors. We will also service some of the literary events that are held each year. Currently, we are working with Harrine Freeman author of How to Get out of Debt, Dr. Leslie Browder, a life coach who is working on a new book, and Floyd Seymour a fitness expert who owns his own gym. And we’re working on programming for the Baltimore Book Festival 2008. We have some other pending clients and projects, so stay tuned for those. Lastly, we anticipate starting a newsletter, The Renaissance Review, very soon.

This week, we continue the two part series about virtual book tours with Dorothy Thompson and Cheryl C. Malandrinos of Pump Up Your Book Promotion, a company that sets up virtual book tours for authors. Part 1 of “All About Virtual Book Tours” appeared a few weeks ago and it was one of this sites most popular posts. And it’s no wonder. Pump Up Your Book Promotion has a client list that includes New York Times bestselling authors, self-published authors, screenwriters and others.

So here as promised, “All About Virtual Book Tours,” Part 2–

Connie Briscoe: How much traffic do the sites that you select for an author’s book tour normally get on average?

Dorothy Thompson: What we do when we approach a blogger is to make sure several things are in place. Is the blog updated frequently? If it is, there is a good chance they are established in the search engines. If I see a full set of archives dating back to 2005, that’s a plus. Understanding how blogs work in regards to the search engines helps me find the best stops I can for my clients.

Cheryl Malandrinos: There isn’t really an average amount of traffic because each tour is individualized to meet the needs of the client. At times, clients will suggest blogs that they want to have as part of their tours. These aren’t always the highest traveled blogs, but they might belong to a friend or be a perfect genre or topic match, so we use them. We always search for the best blogs to host our clients and have found many wonderful places for them to visit.

CB: What types of books seem to do best on a virtual book tour?

Cheryl Malandrinos: My client list has included authors from a variety of genres: science-fiction, paranormal romance, Christian fiction, time travel romance, young adult fiction, historical fiction, and memoir. I haven’t had a client come back to me and say, “I didn’t sell any books.” But from my client list the two that reported the most significant sales to me were time travel romance and historical fiction.

Dorothy Thompson: To be honest, the books that do better on virtual book tours are the ones that have 100% participation. In other words, the authors are putting themselves into the tour by promoting in all the venues they have, to coincide with all the venues we have. Together they become a powerful marketing campaign.

But I do want to mention something about subject matter. What I do when I start setting up a tour is look over the author’s application carefully. What’s the hook? What is it about this author that I can use to bring to everyone’s attention? While it might look like all we do is set up authors on blogs and websites, we’ve actually got a game plan for each author.

I have an author touring right now whose book is about Sept. 11 but not only is it fictional, it’s written from the terrorists’ point of view. The way I understand it is this author was turned down by New York publishers because of the subject material. I started reading the book and was amazed at not only the writing, but also how drawn I was into the book because I was seeing the “other side’s” point of view. I said, “That’s it. That’s my hook.”

Continue reading →

This week we have Dorothy Thompson and Cheryl C. Malandrinos of Pump Up Your Book Promotion, a company that sets up virtual book tours for authors. The concept of virtual book tours–or a blog tour as some call them–is relatively new and just beginning to take shape. Sometimes they mean one thing, other times something else. I think what has been developed by Dorothy and her group is one of the most interesting takes on this new way of promoting books.

For several months now I have been a member of a Yahoo e-mail group for writers started by Dorothy and I don’t think you’ll ever find anyone who is more enthusiastic about promoting authors and books. I’ve watched as she started and developed Pump Up Your Book Promotion into something quite impressive, with a client list that has included screenwriters, New York Times bestselling authors, self-published authors and others.

I had initially planned to have only Cheryl Malandrinos here today. Dorothy Thompson, the founder of Pump Up Your Book Promotion, was in the midst of moving. At the last minute I also heard from Dorothy, and the two of them are so forthcoming that I realized I’ve got a ton of information here and I decided to divide the interview into two parts.

Here for you now is Part 1 of “All About Virtual Book Tours.” I’ll run Part 2 in two to three weeks.

Connie Briscoe: When and why did you decide to start organizing virtual book tours for authors?

Dorothy Thompson: Hi Connie and thanks for having us. I started Pump Up Your Book Promotion in April 2007. We’re approaching our first anniversary in another couple of months, and I’m quite excited at how successful it has become. We started out with one tour coordinator–moi–and now there are five of us: Cheryl Malandrinos, Rebecca Camerena, Jean Lauzier, our newest addition, Jaime McDougall and myself.

Why did I start Pump Up? I had self-published an ebook called The Complete Guide to Selling and Promoting Your Self-Published eBook because I had found a formula that greatly increased web visibility. One of my past clients phoned me and asked if I could do to her book what I had discussed in the ebook. What she basically was asking was, “Could you be my publicist?” I wasn’t a publicist. I was an author who wasn’t published traditionally and if I wanted my book to sell, I had to find ways to do it. As my book wasn’t in the bookstores at that time, I had to focus on the Internet.

I agreed to do this for her and the rest is history. It was incredible and I found that virtual book tours were the perfect solution to bricks and mortar book tours, but the key is getting that high visibility during your tour which basically involves a lot of networking prior to setting up your tour, which I had already established. I stress networking to all my new clients and the time to start networking is before your book comes off the printing press.

Cheryl Malandrinos: I hosted Dorothy’s clients for months before joining the staff of Pump Up Your Book Promotion in October 2007. As for the reason, that’s easy-I love promoting good books.

CB: Tell us a little about what a virtual book tour is at Pump Up Your Book Promotion.

Cheryl Malandrinos: A virtual book tour is when an author travels around the blogosphere for a set amount of time–with our clients it’s a month. The author promotes her book by giving interviews, getting book reviews, and providing guest articles. Pump Up Your Book Promotion handles finding the blog hosts and acts as a liaison between the blog host and the author.

Dorothy Thompson: That’s the simple answer. The harder answer is that it takes an incredible amount of work on the author’s part to make it successful. You just don’t sit back and watch it in action. You become very involved as it’s progressing throughout the month or however amount of time you set one up for. I am finding that the authors who are out there plugging their virtual book tour on a daily basis are having greater results than the ones who aren’t.

CB: Can you give us more detail about what exactly the author is expected to do? Continue reading →

Tomorrow (1/23) we begin an exciting new feature here on Page One–guest bloggers. About once a week a guest will be featured in a question and answer interview or an article. Guests will include authors, editors, publicists, agents–anyone who deals with books. The focus will be on how authors write and promote their work.

Tomorrow: Francis Ray, one of the most prolific romance authors around, has written 20 novels and contributed to a dozen anthologies. And she’s still going strong, with another novel–Not Even If You Begged–due out this week. In this interview with me, Ray tells us how she does it and how events in her life have influenced her writing.