Will a Blog Book Tour Sell Books?

Authors often ask if a blog book tour will sell books. How will they know?

The short answer: you won't. In all fairness, how will you know if your live tour and any other promotion is selling your books? Yes, if you are present at a book signing and fans buy, you'll know about those immediate sales. You could set up the same scenario by buying some books at cost from your publisher, and being the sales point for your blog book tour. Then you'd know.

Still, the tangential sales won't be reflected. Maybe the reader will return to the bookstore after payday. Maybe the blog book tour stops were intriguing enough that a reader adds the title to their amazon.com wishlist. How will you know? Especially since your royalty check won't arrive many months down the road. You likely won't see amazon.com sales reflected for 18 months. So it's almost impossible to relate any of your promotions, online and live, to your cash flow when it finally arrives.

The bottom line: every bit of promotion you do raises your name profile and that's really the goal.

Next we'll talk about other statistics worth tracking to gauge success.