Pump up Your Book Tour! - and Giveaway!

It wasn't that long ago that I was introduced to Dorothy Thompson and her work at Pump Up Your Book! Some of you are aquainted with her but I'm sure this will be an introduction for some of you. She is fabulous to work with - very supportive. I want to congratulate Pump Up Your Book on five years! YAY!! And I am helping Dorothy celebrate by bringing you this interview and letting you know about the amazing giveaway she has going on. Welcome Dorothy Thompson:

Q - What is 'Pump Up Your Book' all about?


Hi Dana and thank you for hosting me for our 5th year anniversary! Pump Up Your Book is an innovative online book publicity company specializing in..you guessed it…virtual book tours. But it’s way more than that. We use virtual book tours as a vehicle to get the word out about our author’s books. It’s basically advertising with an SEO package. While we strive to advertise our author’s books on social networks, through our blog and through our blogger friends’ blogs, we also aim for those millions of people in the search engines who are looking for things related to our authors’ books (this is why tags are so important). When the average person searches for something, they usually find it in the first three pages of search. Our goal is to have our authors not only on all three pages and then some, but the first page and in the first spot preferably. The reason why we invest time into doing this is because after the tour is over, we still want the authors’ virtual book tour to pay off. As long as the blog host keeps the post up (which they do), the potential to sell your book increases over time. This gives the author leverage – a spot in the playing field and a very large spot. If the author continues to promote themselves through writing guest posts for bloggers or asking for interviews or reviews, the game continues to go on. We give them the boost they need.


Q - How long have you been promoting books?

Whew…I’ve been promoting books a long time. I started out experimenting with my own which led to using that information to start Pump Up Your Book and promote others. Dissatisfied with offline promotions, I turned to the Internet to find out all I could on how to promote a book in the most advantageous way. I started Pump Up Your Book in 2007, three years after my last book came out. This was way before Twitter and Facebook took off like it has today. There were other social networks which I used but today it’s like every time you have your back turned, another one pops up. There is no greater time than now to promote your books online. I can’t wait to see what it will be like years from now. Even tomorrow!


Q - How do you find your authors?

Well what I did (and it’s been a steady process) was promote Pump Up Your Book just like I did years ago to get my ebooks at the top of the search engines. We mainly find authors through Google, etc., but we also have a lot of referrals and returning authors. I even have blog hosts referring authors to us and that’s really a nice feeling.

Q - What are the most interesting or important things you have learned since you started?


My goodness, it would take a book to tell you all I’ve learned. Patience. Organizational skills. How to multi-task. The most important thing I learned is to focus on job at hand and don’t be lured into email. When I get up in the morning, I have learned to never check my email until after the promotions are done. I have done this and sometimes it’s 5 or 6 p.m. before all of the books are promoted and while that isn’t a terrible thing because promotions should be an ongoing thing all day long but it doesn’t leave a lot of time to work on upcoming tours. We don’t run tours on the weekend and that’s when I finally can direct my attention to the upcoming authors. During the week, it’s a 24/7 thing checking stops, emailing the bloggers the night before to make sure they have everything, handling emails from authors asking about tours, checking stats, checking to see how well the authors are doing in the search engines, updating the in house blogs and our website, loading the tour pages with new tours, loading the review pages so that book bloggers will know what books are available to review, the list goes on and on. If you lose your focus, you’ve lost the game.

Q - If there are other bloggers out there who might be interested in reviewing for you, how would they get involved?

First, it’s okay to query us but there are a few things they must know. The blog has to be updated frequently and have a full set of archives. This tells us that they are showing up well in the search engines. That’s the most important thing. Before we sign up a reviewer, we look at other reviews. If the reviews are only one or two sentences or sound like they never read the book, we can’t take that chance on them. If you are a new blogger, we suggest getting content up and keep it going until you have six months of content. I’ve had to turn a few down for that reason but the blogger is very understanding. The thing is, when authors pay someone to set up a tour for them, we have to give them quality stops. If your blog is over six months old and if you have a full set of archives which means you’ve been updating frequently and your main focus is books, we would love to hear from you. If you are a blogger who has a full set of archives and your blog is over six months old and you have worked hard on your blog but the focus is not on books and you have a particular book in mind to review, send us an email. If you go to our main site at www.pumpupyourbook.com, you’ll see the button in the right hand sidebar that says “review for us.” Click it and all our books that are still available for review will be listed. All you have to do at that point is fill out the form or email me at thewriterslife (at) gmail.com. We are always looking for new blog hosts!

Thank you so much for hosting me today, Dana, and thank you for being part of our 5 year celebration of online book publicity!

~ ~ ~ GIVEAWAY ~ ~ ~

Dorothy Thompson and Pump Up Your Book are giving away prizes at every stop throughout their month-long publicity tour and I am happy to let you know you can win a prize on this blog, too! Fill out the Rafflecopter form below to win this cool prize!


A Pump Up Your Book Bag w/paperback copy of Dorothy’s anthology of true soul mate stories, Romancing the Soul!

Sorry, only U.S. and Canada only.

a Rafflecopter giveaway


Check out Pump Up Your Book and enter for all the great stuff going on during the tour as well. Good luck!