Virtual Vice – a Virtual Book Tour by Jason M. Kays

Cheryl Malandrinos, ring master extraordinaire with Pump up Your Book Promotion (PUYB), shepherded me through a fairly intensive two month book tour concluding this week.

In the process, I learned a good deal about virtual book tours, and poor Cheryl learned more than she cared to about drug trafficking, Ponzi schemes, organized crime and prostitution – all of which are elements in my new gritty crime novel, Virtual Vice. An accomplished writer herself, Cheryl’s work focuses on daily life in the genteel Victorian Era. I imagine shifting cognitive gears from high tea to high times proved a slight genre shock. She doubled up on smelling salts and was a good sport about wading about in the muck.

There were a total of twenty-eight tour “stops” – interviews, book excerpts and guest essays featured on literary websites. Three of these stops were two day affairs. Ms. Malandrinos did an exceptional job of keeping both months populated with PR events. There was considerable preparatory and advance work required by both author and tour guide to make this a successful publicity campaign. The real work begins after publication of a guest essay in promoting the article through SEO techniques in order to encourage syndication. Cheryl is a recognized expert in time management. Her skills in this area were greatly appreciated by this author in keeping things running smoothly. Her performance was similarly exemplary in getting questionnaires and assignments to me well in advance of submittal deadlines. I never felt up against the wall in meeting timelines. She also did a good job detailing expectations of the various sites Pump Up partner with, so that I was able to tailor the writing to a given site’s tone and demographic.


With any first time author, branding one’s name is as important as getting the book’s title out there. Ms. Malandrinos was effective in accomplishing both tasks. My name and the book’s title now come up more frequently and with a higher Google page rank when an online search is performed for one or both.

While my publicist worked hard to ensure my tour blogs were indexed on search engines, I stress to authors not to forget that this is a collaborative effort. Each author must work as diligently as their publicist in getting the word out there: whether that be republishing articles on your own website to keep content fresh, or making sure you ping and index each and every new host-site blog post during the tour. SEO work (search engine optimization) is a science unto itself. I’m a neophyte in this area, but took the time to research and grasp the fundamentals so I might better the odds of article syndication and higher ranking on major search engines: that’s the name of the game in publishing these essays.

The only bump in the proverbial road was a critic who went off half-cocked and posted a review panning the book on my Amazon product page. No reviewer should be subject to prior restraint in expressing himself, but when retained by a PR firm – and PUYB is a PR firm – there should be an express, written understanding between agency and critic that any and all reviews are subject to the client’s approval before publication on the book’s product page. Any approach other than that and the dynamic with the PR firm is reduced to a high stakes game of craps . . . with the author stuck with any loss. If the critic chooses to publish a negative review on his personal blog, that is his prerogative, but to publish a negative review on a primary portal for book sales when the tour’s intent is to drive traffic to that very page – you take my point. Both Ms. Malandrinos and Ms. Thompson acted swiftly to petition for a retraction, but were unsuccessful in securing one.

I raise this issue not to assail PUYB, because overall they did a terrific job and should be commended. I raise the issue so that prior to retaining a PR firm – any PR firm – authors know to insist upon clarity and a clause in their service agreement addressing when, where and whether a review is posted, or they may find a good portion of their publicity campaign undermined. If a critic has any credibility, a good review cannot be guaranteed. But for a publicity firm to retain its credibility, the author must be an active partner in the vetting and strategic placement of all solicited reviews. Marketing a book is a business, not a college lit assignment; as such, the client is paying for advocacy, not objectivity. If PUYB makes that one revision in its architecture, I would unreservedly recommend them to fellow authors.

Jason M. Kays is an intellectual property attorney with fifteen years experience in both information technology and entertainment law. Kays is an accomplished jazz trumpet player and his passion has always been music, technology, and convergence of the two in today's digital age. This is his first novel. You can find Jason online at http://virtualvice.net/.