D.S. Leach Consulting, Inc.

Touring the blogosphere . . . another virtual book tour under way

At the beginning of the week, we embarked on coordinating another blog book tour on behalf of our friends at WME Books and their author Sybil F. Stershic, who has written this wonderful book  Taking Care of the People Who Matter Most: A Guide to Employee-Customer Care, which lays out from the inside-out, how to build loyalty, increase employee satisfaction, and create a winning team of motivated workers who in turn motivate your customers.

Over this week and spanning into next week, the tour includes the following wonderful bloggers:

• On June 1st, Kevin Burns posted a review in Burns Blogs Attitude.
• On June 3rd, Lisa Rosendahl posted a review of Taking Care on her blog HR Thoughts, using these eleven words to sum it up: "The way your employees feel is the way your customers feel."
• On June 4th, Chris Bailey posted a review of Sybil's book on his blog Bailey Work/Play: The Alchemy of Soulful Work
• On June 5th, Toby Bloomberg of the Diva Marketing blog will be posting an interview with Sybil.
• On June 6th, Becky Carroll, the blogger behind Customers Rock! will be posting a review and the results of an interview with Sybil.
• On June 9th, Paul Hebert will be posting a review on the blog Incentive Intelligence.
• On June 10, 2008, Phil Gerbyshak will be posting an interview on the blog Slacker Manager.

By the way, you can check out the tour page by clicking on the widget that I built and installed in the lower left panel. 

This time the tour is much more confined than the one we did in December.  Seven bloggers over a bit more than a week.  It's going quite smoothly and there has been some wonderful content already.

Just what is a Virtual Book Tour? We're finding out . . .

Not every author wishes or is able to do an expensive book tour, driving or flying around the country promoting their book at appearances and signings at bookstores and elsewhere. Out of that fact was born the "virtual book tour" (also known as "blog book tour"), which has the author and his or her book traveling from blog to blog, writing a post here and being reviewed in another post there during a defined period of time.

Our company is helping our business associates WME Books with a virtual book tour (VBT) for a book published by WME in November. This is our first foray into the "virtual book tour" and it is a work in progress, but quite exciting as we work through the process and make it work for this particular author and book. Dr. Reid's book, Discovering Your Inner Samurai: The Entrepreneurial Woman's Journey to Business Success, is about reaching inside yourself to discover an inner samurai—a warrior that will guide you on your journey to entrepreneurial success. Primarily written for women entrepreneurs going through changes in their life (Susan calls them "accidental preh-hers"), the book is a mystical, informative and inspiring exploration of that concept.

The virtual book tour concept has been around for a few years and it is a great way to get an author's work in front of thousands of new potential readers and, hopefully, drivr sales of their book. By researching the book and its author, we have identified a number of bloggers who focus their writing on subjects that dovetail with that of Discovering Your Inner Samurai and asked them to participate. Soon, those who have joined the tour will be participating in one of several ways (although they are not the only ways that are possible), such as:

• Writing a review of the book and publishing it on their blog,
• Doing an interview of Dr. Reid via email or by phone and posting it in written form
• Doing a podcast interview of the author and posting it, or
• Inviting the author do a guest post on their blog about the book or its subject.

Over a number of days, we'll schedule their posts to appear and will link to them from multiple places to maximize the effect. In the left panel, you'll see a draft of a "badge" I developed for Dr. Reid's VBT. You'll see that on some of the other sites that WME maintains. Click on that and you find yourself on the VBT's page on the WME Books blog and follow the tour from there.