F.A.Q for Authors

During a virtual book tour, the author visits a number of blogs to promote their books. These books are known as ‘book blogs’, and they focus primarily on books – hosting giveaways, reviewing books, hosting author interviews, cover reveals, book release day parties and basically, everything book-related.

As a virtual book tour organizer, we work as the “middle man” between the author and the bloggers. We set up the tour, get in touch with our tour hosts, set up a schedule, send out review copies and guest posts, send interview questions to the author and make sure the answers are sent to the right tour host. We coordinate giveaways and collect winners information at the end of the tour.

Take a look at our packages and decide which one works best for you. Once you’ve made up your mind, fill in this form to schedule a book tour. We will contact you through email. If we haven’t contacted you within 4 days, please fill in the form again – it probably got lost in our mailbox.

You can find them here.

We will get in touch with you through email. We will talk about what date to start the book tour, and ask a number of things from you. It would be handy if you have these ready to send as soon as possible.

1. A blurb for your book.
2. Book cover (front cover only suffices).
3. Author bio.
4. Author picture (this is optiona).
5. Links to your website, Facebook Fan Page, Twitter, and places where we can purchase your book.
6. Book Excerpts (we allow 1-3 different excerpts, 200-300 words each).
7. A .pdf copy of the book if you want people to review your book.

We always ask payment up-front. We only accept payment through PayPal, since we find that easiest to work with.

Once we’ve sent you an email, we will let you know our PayPal email address, or, if you prefer, we can send you a payment request.

We make a media kit specifically for the tour, with the book blurb, cover, author bio, picture, links and book excerpts. We use the book cover to make a tour banner with the title and dates for the tour on. Next, we put up a promotional post on our website for the tour.

We send out an email to our book tour hosts. The email will include basic information like the date for the tour, the blurb, what type of tour stops we’re looking for and the book genre. We will also attach the media kit, tour banner, book cover and author picture to the email, and include a link to the promotional post.

Tour hosts interested in hosting this specific tour will reply to our email, and then we’ll work out a schedule. We send review copies to people interested in reviewing the author’s book, collect interview questions from the people who want to host an author interview, and send out guest posts to the people interested in hosting a guest post.

We prefer .pdf format to send to our tour hosts, since most people have Acrobat Reader and if they don’t, it’s available for free download. If you have other eformats available as well (like .mobi or .epub) feel free to send us those as well, since some people prefer a copy for their Kindle or eReader.

There’s no requirement to send out paperback copies to reviewers.

There are reviews, author/character interviews, book excerpt posts, guest blog posts and giveaways. If you fill in the form to schedule a tour, you can add what type of tour stops you want and which ones you don’t want. We tend to recommend a healthy mix of tour stops to keep the tour divers and interesting.

A review is basically just that, a review of your book. We leave it up to our hosts how they want to write their reviews (with or without rating, with or without images in the review text) but we do ask all of them to include the book cover, title, author, genre, synopsis and promotional links. We also ask our tour hosts to add their reviews to B&N, Goodreads and Amazon.

For an author/character interview, the tour host typically comes up with the questions. For a character interview, it’s possible the tour hosts asks the author to come up with the questions themselves if they haven’t read the book yet. The tour host will send the questions to us and we will forward them to the author. Once the author has responded to the questions, we will send them back to the tour host.

A book excerpt post means that the tour host will post the book cover, title, author, genre, synopsis, promotional links, author bio, author picture (if included) and a book excerpt. If there are multiple excerpts available, tour hosts are free to choose which one they like best.

For a guest blog post, the author writes a blog post which will then be posted on the tour hosts’ blog. The guest post can have a wide variety of topics, as long as they’re writing related. Typical examples are: playlists suitable for the main characters of the book or the book itself, blogs about the author’s writing process or publishing process, where the author got their inspiration from, etc. We can help come up with topics for guest posts.

A lot of people don’t like writing guest posts, but we do feel they’re very important. They show the author’s writing skills, and may entice visitors to purchase the author’s book. However, if you don’t want to write a guest post, please mention it and we will be sure not to schedule any during the tour.

Giveaways can be for whatever the author wants to give away. Please go to the question “How do Giveaways work?” for more information.

The author chooses what he/she wants to give away during the tour. These can be eBook or paperback copies of the book, swag, and sometimes even, nothing at all. The author also chooses how many copies they want to give away, and whether the giveaways can be international, US only, US/CA only or something else.

We will then set up the required number of giveaways, make sure all tour hosts know what they can giveaway, etc. Typically giveaways will be set up using Rafflecopter, but we leave it up to the tour hosts to decide how to host the giveaways on their blog.

We do ask the tour hosts to include additional entries for following the author’s website, liking their fanpage on Facebook, following them on Twitter and tweeting about the giveaway. The author can choose other options for the additional entries as well, like becoming a fan of the author on Goodreads, adding the author’s book to the Goodreads TBR list, etc. A lot of this depends on what the author wants.

After the tour or giveaways has ended, we get in touch with the tour hosts and ask them to send us the winner’s information. The tour hosts get to choose the winners themselves – usually this happens through Random.org or Rafflecopter’s built-in random winner tool. We gather the information (name and email address) of the various winners and send them to the author. The author can choose to contact the winners themselves, or if they prefer, we can contact the winners as well.

Yes, this is possible. We typically host these on release day parties or during one-week tours. If the giveaway is spread over multiple blogs, we will host the giveaway ourselves using Rafflecopter, and send the code to all bloggers participating. We will choose the winners ourselves and send their credentials to the author.

All tours are promoted on the Enchanted Book Promotions Facebook Page and our Twitter account. We encourage tour hosts to promote the tour stop as well on the day they’re hosting.

We try to make sure this doesn’t happen, but unfortunately, it has happened in the past and will probably happen again sometime. As you can see on our Tour Packages page, there is a minimum and maximum number of tour stops during a tour. We try to achieve the maximum number of posts so that, even if a tour host ends up not posting, we do not get below the minimum quota. For instance, if we’re setting up a tour with 12-16 tour stops, and we have 16 stops scheduled, when one blogger doesn’t post, we’ll still have 15 stops, more than the minium required.

We try to prevent this from happening by sending out reminder emails to tour hosts and making sure everyone gets what they need well beforehand. The author can help with this by sending us the necessary guest posts at least one week before the post is due.

If a tour host contacts us saying something came up and they can’t review the book – time restraints, for example – while they were signed up for a review, we will try to reschedule it to a book excerpt post.

Like we said, this doesn’t happen often, and we try to make sure it happens as less as possible, but in case it does, we have a back up plan.

As soon as we started working on the tour – that means, creating a media kit, tour banner, contacting the tour hosts, uploading the promotional post and setting up the schedule – we can’t send any refunds.

We encourage all our bloggers to cross-post their reviews, but it’s not guaranteed. Most of our bloggers do cross-post, and the ones who don’t do this automatically, we will contact and ask to do so.

If you do not want your reviews cross-posted to any other website, please let us know before the tour starts.

We recommend you get in touch with us at least one month before you want to start the tour, especially if it’s a large tour (one month or two months). This gives bloggers enough time to schedule the tour post, and reviewers will also have enough time to review the book.

We accept all genres. We’ve successfully completed book tours for a wide array of fiction genres, ranging from humorous fiction to women’s fiction, horror, romance and historical fiction in the past. We’ve also hosted several tours for young adult, middle grade and children’s books. We also accept non-fiction and memoirs.

We target different lists of tour hosts for different genres, which allows us to make our tours more genre-specific.

We recommend authors to comment on all tour stops and actively tweet about the book tour, mention it on their blog and/or on Facebook.

If you want to host three book tours or more with us, we can give a 10% discount. This discount is only applicable for tours booked at the same time, and only for tours lasting one month or longer.

On a release day blitz, we celebrate the upcoming release of a book by hosting promo posts about the book on various blogs, and linking to where the book can be purchased. Most authors prefer to host a giveaway spread over all blogs participating on the release day party as well, but that’s entirely up to the author.

Please contact us through email and tell us what you’re looking for. We will send back a quote.

Alternatively, you may also take a look at our other publicist services.

Please note that we don’t control the reviewers. They are free to host honest reviews about the book, and give their honest opinion. Sometimes reviewers will contact us saying they didn’t like the book and whether the author still wants them to put up the review. In that case, we will contact you and ask your preferences.

It’s never enjoyable to receive a ‘bad’ review for your book, but unfortunately that is one of the things authors have to live with.

That aside, we do not allow reviews that target the author specifically. No personal attacks or wars. Up to now, we’ve never had to mention this to anyone – our tour hosts are wonderful people who are very nice and friendly, and although honest, would not resort to personal attacks – but in case this happens, we will take action.

For an example of what we mean, reviewers can say: “This book sucks. It should be burned at the stakes.” But they can’t say: “This author sucks. He/she should be burned at the stakes.”