What Can a Virtual Book Tour Do for Indie Authors?

We’re in the first week of the virtual book tour for our client Andrew Segal’s latest, Book Four in the Tammy Pierre murder mystery series, The Clubhouse Slaughters, and the reviews are coming in hot! I thought it might be useful for you to see how this arrow in your book marketing quiver can work.

This tour is running on Instagram, where the #Bookstagram reviewers use a variety of styles, from an image accompanied by a text review, to embedding their review in an image, to a carousel with several images, to animated GIFs revealing the cover, to full-blown TikTok-style video reviews.

What a Book Tour Can Get You

Here’s an example of the last type that I think will give you an idea of the potential value from these tours (link to original for TinaMarie’s full written review):

How would a review like that for your book feel? How many of your followers on Instagram would you want to share it with?

More to the point, how could you use quotes from such a review on other social media and in your other marketing?

As I mentioned, we’re only in Week One of this tour, but here are some examples of quotes extracted from the first reviews as of this writing:

“This is one of the series I automatically sign up for. I really enjoy this series, perhaps even more so now that I have gotten to know Tammy a little more for every book I have read. … I really like the worldbuilding, the character building, and the style this book is written in. Please, do continue, Andrew.”
  — @lady_j_reads (Jeanette)

“… what can I say except WOW … what a read! … The pacing is absolutely incredible as it grabs you from the very first page. From the very first chapter I knew I was going to love this book! … I just cannot wait for the next one – I’m hooked!”
  — @jridsreads (Jordan)

“Wow, this book was incredible … I absolutely love the character Tammy and really liked seeing a different side of her character in this book with her softer sides of her personality coming across.”
  — @book.lover1486

“Tammy Pierre absolutely owned these pages. She’s fierce, and fights battles on every front, as well as juggling motherhood … If you crave crime thrillers that hit hard, move fast, and keeps you guessing, then this one is for you.”
  — @kizzasbooked

“I genuinely loved everything about Tammy Pierre — her strength, her heart, and the way she balances motherhood with the weight of the cases she takes on. She felt real and layered, and by the end, I knew I wanted more of her story. I’m absolutely planning to go back and read the rest of the series because Tammy is a character I’m not ready to let go of yet.”
  — @tinamarie_reads (from her written review)

Not a bad haul of testimonials, eh? And we have 24 more stops on this tour to go!

You can check out the Tammy Pierre series here.

So How Do You Run a Virtual Book Tour

Well, you could recruit reviewers yourself, set up the dates, and track all of the results yourself. Many of the reviewers we work with mention doing reviews in their profiles on Instagram and TikTok. You can search for them using terms and hashtags like #Bookstagram and #BookTok. You can also get help from your favorite AI tool using the prompt in my Fan Finder blog post.

The DIY approach is a lot of work, though, and we’ve found it more efficient to recommend that our clients hire folks who organize tours with their network of reviewers.

We work with Kelly Lacey’s Love Book Tours (LBT) as the organizer, with us handling the signup and client reporting. LBT works directly with indie authors, too, so if you’re not our client, we recommend checking out their pricing and range of packages for tours, cover reveals, launch day promos, and more.

Regardless of which route you decide to take, you should be ready to participate in the tour personally. Treat it like you would if you were traveling from city to city and engaging with readers at book signings, book club evenings, and talk show appearances. One way to get a feel for how virtual tours work and how to engage in the comments streams, sharing posts, and the like, would be to follow along on this one or others you can find by going to Andrew’s Instagram page (depending on when you’re reading this, you might need to scroll a bit, but you should find links to posts that show they are part of a tour).

Ready to go on tour with your book? Let us know how it goes!