Reaching an Audience with Blog Tours

Personally I LOVE blog tours. I love hosting, planning, promoting, the whole nine yards. Here’s why I love it:

• I learn about new authors, usually indies.
• Discover new books.
• I love interviewing authors and finding out about their journey and motivations. Some authors have the most interesting personal stories… while some have written about their interesting lives in their memoirs, I learn about most of them through their bios or guest posts.
• I love a good book trailer or soundtrack. It amazes me how creative some of the trailers are. My good friend and fellow blogger/book lover Jovon Tucker quickly created a trailer for my first book. The amazing thing was, she did it just based on the synopsis.
• I’m a sucker for characters. I love a good character interview.

These are things I love about the actual tour itself. I have a whole different set of love for planning and putting it all together.

I’ll touch on the points above and why they are important to include in your blog tour. The whole purpose of a blog tour is to gain exposure, right? So you want to have as many ways as possible to reach an audience.

What I am going to say next is blasphemy to marketers, but I’ll say it anyway. There is no such thing as the perfect audience. Your perfect group of readers cannot be lumped into one profile. Here’s why.

People like different things at different stages in their lives. For example, when I was like 10 or 12 years old I started reading Mills & Boon. Do I read romance now? It’s not really my genre of choice. As an adult, I went through a phase where I read only self-helps and nothing else. Now, my taste have really expanded, I love thrillers, mysteries, drama, memoirs. My bookshelf, like a lot of people I know, is very eclectic.

Books are like music, in that some people don’t just stick to one genre. Hence the reason why I stick to my belief that trying to profile your audience is BS.

That said, how do you find your audience? One way is through guest posts.