3 Ways You Can Make A Virtual Book Tour Coordinator's Day

If you don't want virtual book tour (VBT) coordinators to look like this--

there are a few ways you can help.

1. Don't wait until the day before, or even worse, the day of your scheduled review to inform her that you didn't receive the book. In addition to being a VBT coordinator, I'm also a blogger (This is quite obvious, isn't it?) and book reviewer. I maintain a paper calendar that lists all scheduled dates at my blogs. I go through my TBR pile on a weekly basis to be sure I have all the books I need to review. If not, I zip off an email to the publicist.
2. Be sure not to overcommit yourself. I'm guilty of this one, but I'm getting much better. There are so many great books out there available for review; but if you take on too much, you'll start missing deadlines and risk alienating the publicists who supply you with books. See what stressed VBT coordinators look like. It's not pretty, is it?
3. Return your to-do items on time. It takes several weeks to coordinate a VBT. That time is a careful balancing act of getting requests from bloggers, emailing those requests to authors, getting completed to-do items back from authors, and making sure to send them along to bloggers in a timely fashion. When someone messes with the timeline, bad things happen. It makes me break out in hives.

Virtual book tours are so much fun when they run smoothly. I'm sure I've looked like that woman in the picture above from time to time, but overall, promoting great books has to be one of the best jobs in the world. Working as a team, authors, bloggers, publicists, and VBT coordinators can do amazing things to create an online buzz for books.


Cheryl Malandrinos is a freelance writer and editor. A regular contributor for Writer2Writer, her articles focus on increasing productivity through time management and organization. A founding member of Musing Our Children, Ms. Malandrinos is also Editor in Chief of the group’s quarterly newsletter, Pages & Pens.


Cheryl is a Tour Coordinator for Pump Up Your Book, a book reviewer, and blogger. Little Shepherd is her first children’s book. Ms. Malandrinos lives in Western Massachusetts with her husband and two young daughters. She also has a son who is married.


You can visit Cheryl online at http://ccmalandrinos.com/ or the Little Shepherd blog at http://littleshepherdchildrensbook.blogspot.com/.