The New Era of Book Marketing

"We had been looking for more cost-
effective ways for getting our authors connected with readers, and this seemed to be a great fit," says Rachel Harrison Brown, marketing representative for Legacy Press. "Online marketing methods are excellent because customers can share a great find quickly and easily. And, as a company, it allows us to have a conversation with the reader, and that relationship is what has the most potential."

Through these conversations, she explains, publishers should give readers just enough information to leave them wanting to know more. "Social media is built on the concept of a tidbit," she says.

Legacy's blog tour for "The Christian Girl's Guide to Style" reached around 14,000 viewers—a far greater number of readers than a traditional tour could. "We could have an author on the road for six months and not reach that many people," Harrison Brown points out.

And that's not counting the number of times the blogs were passed on virally to readers' friends. It also helped, she says, that Kyle already had followers of her own on Twitter and Facebook.

Harrison Brown says she knows the blog tour was successful. "We saw a direct correlation in sales of the book to every time there was a blog out there," she says.

And an added bonus: The blog tour didn't require a big financial investment. "Most of the costs were in time," she explains, "Sherry's time and our marketing department's."

According to Harrison Brown, the blog tour's return on investment was more than 50-percent higher than Legacy would have expected with a more traditional book tour.

"There are two major factors that figure into the calculation—reduced spend and significantly larger reach," she says. "We could plan 10 times the number of blog tours for the cost of one traditional book tour, plus we can customize and target specific segments of our market through the blogs, to allow us to increase our estimated rate of return."