With the publishing world constantly evolving, authors are on the hunt for fresh approaches to boost their visibility and engage their fan base. This leads to a constant quest to elevate their author game. In today’s episode, Juliet Clark spills the tea on why podcast tours might just be the secret weapon authors need. Buckle up for a deep dive into successful podcast tours and get ready to transform your author platform from good to great!

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Book Buzz Boss: Elevate Your Author Game With Strategic Podcast Interviews

Welcome to the show. We’re going to talk about a very important topic that every author, every book, everybody, even writers before your book is out, should be considering, taking a look at, and budgeting for. Before we get started, I want to remind you about our sponsor for the show, LIFEWAVE. If you’re someone who’s very holistic, tired of medicine all the time, but maybe getting a little bit older, aging, and tired of the pain, LIFEWAVE has a patch for you.

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The Rise Of Podcast Tours

We are going to talk about blog tours, podcast tours, and why podcast tours are overtaking blog tours as the big thing the authors do. In the past, blog tours have been a big thing. If you don’t know what a blog tour is, you find someone with a blog that is in a similar category as your book and ask them if you can write a 500 to 1,000-word article. This has been a really effective way to get the word out about your book up until about a few years ago. It has slowly transitioned into podcast tours instead.

Podcast tours are harder to get booked, and here’s the main reason why. With a blog tour, I can have a blog on my website and pretty much no money and no expenses. It doesn’t matter who writes it. I don’t have any out-of-pocket for those. I don’t have to ask anybody on a blog tour to pay because there’s really nothing out of my pocket, although a lot of people do pay for blog tours. Somebody’s having you on to plug your book, and more than likely, you are paying for that.

Why Podcasts Are Better

Podcast tours are a much better alternative. One of the main reasons is you get to be on. You’re live or you’re recorded and people get to see your personality. It’s usually a 20 to 45-minute interview. They get to see whether they like you. Do they like the way you present the material? Do they like the material you’re presenting? There are a lot of factors there. Especially if you’re someone who really has had media training, that podcast tour can be amazing.

One of the big mistakes that people make on podcast tours, authors who are untrained in media, is they go on and blab about their book. Most of the time, it’s about sound bites and your expertise. You don’t want to push your book. You want to talk about your expertise as well. As I’ve mentioned many times, you probably aren’t going to make ROI back on your book or what you sunk into your book. Where you will get it back is in those high-ticket items. You want to be able to come across soundbites and expertise and be able to promote your book at the same time.

I’m going to give you a great example. A couple of years ago, I recommended one of my clients to a very big podcast that’s out there. The host came back to me afterward and said, “You need to recommend that your client go to media training.” I was like, “Why?” It turned out that every time the podcaster asked a question about the book, the author said, “You’ll have to buy the book and read it.” That is not what we want to hear. You are there because you’re an expert in something and you’ve written a book about it. You do want people to buy the book, but you don’t want to be, “Buy the book.” I know you’ve seen those people on social media.

One of the other benefits of the podcast versus the blog tour is not only are you live, but with that blog tour, you have about 500 to 1,000 words to articulate what you want to say. It’s hard to get a personality shining through. There’s no interaction. There’s no question. There’s no pushback. That’s the most interesting part of being a podcaster. It is that you get to ask people questions about it. You get to really dive deep. That’s something I know my magazine contributors complain about all the time. They’re like, “I had to write that in 500 words and it was hard to explain.” The podcast tour gives you an opportunity to be able to articulate, draw out, and share more of your expertise.

There are other benefits of a podcast. One of the things we do here is if I’m on another person’s podcast, I will ask permission because they always want you to promote, “Can I run the video through Opus? Can I pick up clips?” You can use your podcast tour to create really amazing clips of the video or audio to be able to sell your books as well. You can take this 45-minute interview and chop it up into 10 or 15 promotional spots not only for the podcaster who has had you on but for you and your book as well. It’s amazing.

Elevating Author Game: The podcast tour gives you an opportunity to be able to articulate, draw out, and share more of your expertise.

Finding The Right Podcast Tour Producer

For a podcast tour, there are two ways to go here. We haven’t promoted them much in the past. We do now because we’ve got somebody who is a great provider. Our provider on the podcast tours is Simon & Schuster’s former publicity team. We know that they’re reading the book. We know they’re placing our people into places where people will be interested in their books.

I’ve encountered podcast tours in the past where nobody reads the book. They ask the author the keywords, “What are the key points? What does your speaker sheet say?” and then they go and get you on any old podcast. That’s not what we want. I did a podcast tour many years ago and they put me on a brand new podcast with no established listeners. They got maybe 7 or 8. I paid money to that tour producer to put me on shows where people would be interested in what I had to say. You really have to thoroughly vet and ask questions of the podcast tour organizer.

Here are other things to consider. If you order soon enough and you know when your book release date is, so four months in advance of your book release, the podcast tour producer can get you out and get you in presale and get you exposure. I’m recording this in mid-April for mid-June 2024. If you don’t book early and you say, “My book is coming out in three weeks. Let’s get me booked,” you’re going to have a hard time pushing that book into presale. That’s the best time to get it up to a bestseller status.

Elevating Author Game: If you don’t book early, you will have a hard time pushing that book into pre-sale.

You really need to plan for this. You need to budget, and you need to thoroughly vet the podcast tour producer. When we talk to ours, we always take the book that we have and go to the tour producer before we even commit to taking it to our author. We say, “Where can you place a book like this? Can you place a book like this?” We’ve had a lot of success with that because they’ll come back and say, “We have podcasts in X, Y, and Z areas. We think they’d be a good fit. Go ahead and pitch this. We’ll start working on getting them out there and book them.” That’s what should happen.

We send them that book. It doesn’t have to be in the final format. It can still even be rough. We’ve sent books that are in the process of editing because our tour producers read that book. If I hand them a speaker sheet and say, “This is what the book is about,” they’re going to go through and make sure that that speaker sheet that probably the author has created matches what they think the book is about. That’s really important.

Remember. They’re using their vast connections to get you onto the podcast that fits you. Our podcast tour producers also, if you buy the bigger packages to get you on TV, are able to get you in magazines. Sometimes, they’re even able to get you as a speaker at conferences. It really depends on what your goals are and how you’re going to handle this.

The challenges with that if you try to do it yourself are enormous because you don’t have contacts. I use PitchDB when I go in and book my own podcasts. Rarely do I do that. More often than not, people will come to me and say, “We’d love to have you as a guest.” When I do have to pitch, I use PitchDB. The downside of using something like that and trying to do it yourself is that you have to promote yourself. A lot of times, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can make some big mistakes. It’s like cold calling. It’s uncomfortable. You have to explain to the podcaster why you would be a good fit. That can be hard sometimes, especially if you haven’t done your homework and listened to the podcast.

The second mistake is when we try to do it ourselves, we always think, “I’m going to go out and get myself on John Lee Dumas or one of these other big ones.” A lot of those charge, and you’d be amazed at how much those people charge. You could buy an entire twenty-city tour and have money left over for what some of those people charge. The truth is, at the end of the day, you’re probably not going to get what you want from that money and that one audience you’re in front of.

When we sell a twenty-city tour, believe me. You’re not going to each of those cities. What you are doing is you’re appearing on Zoom most of the time, StreamYard, or one of those types, but you’re in 20 different cities, so you have exposure to 20 different audiences. They may not be as big as that one person’s, but you may spark some interest in 1 of those 20 audiences or all of those 20 audiences depending on what your topic is. I would highly recommend looking into the podcast tours. The person that we have doing them is a former Simon & Schuster Booker, so he has lots of contacts. The feedback we’ve gotten on this book marketing tool so far has been tremendous.

The last thing is, what are you going to pay for something like this? Typically, our twenty-city tours, if you do them a la carte, run about $4,000. If you want the bigger packages that are usually multiple cities and magazines, and they do it over 6 to 9 months so you’re spread out with your publicity, something like that is about $10,000.

You’re probably thinking one question here, “Why don’t I hire somebody who does publicity?” Publicity is very expensive. If it’s not targeted, you could spend $30,000 to $40,000 and not get a whole lot. You could go to somebody in publicity who will write an article for you and pitch it. Typically, that is $6,000 or $7,000 too. One of our vendors does it for $7,500. This is the most economical way to get your publicity out there with your book.

Let me tell you another side of this. Most people do all the publicity before the book comes out. They’re building their platform. They get to that best-seller list and then it stops. They never sell a book again. The downside of that is when you’re over on Amazon, most people don’t go past that second page. If you’ve dropped $3,000 in a particular category, nobody’s ever going to find you. This keeps the steady stream of books selling and you up in the ranking because book sales are part of it.

Another part of this is you can get on and ask for reviews. Maybe give a gift, like, “If you go out and buy my book, provide the receipt, and have written a review, I will send you a free gift.” That’s a great way to get reviews. Once your book is released, usually, it’s a combination of purchases and reviews. That’s how it works with the algorithm. You want to make sure that you are still top of mind after that book is released and you’re consistently selling books.

If you want to know more about our book tours and what we’re doing with our former Simon & Schuster partners, reach out to me at Juliet@SuperbrandPublishing.com and let us know that you’re interested. We’ll set up a call and see if your book is a good fit for our people. Thanks for tuning in, and have a beautiful day.

Important Links

• The Foolish Couple – Superbrand
• Juliet@SuperbrandPublishing