Orangeberry Book Tours

Oof, I'm getting it in the neck for not updating my blog since 2006. But then I'm not, you know, selling book marketing services involving it.

The other thing you would note from my defunct blog is that it consists of original writing and attempts at jokes, rather than, say, an endless stream of paid content.

aliceshortcake said:

Whoah! Have a look at this:

http://www.qualityreadsuk.com/2013/09/youre-fake-too-chillax-that-means.html

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And Jane Smith goes by her actual name. How dare she?!

When people doubt my name, or make jokes about it, they're making fun of my race and heritage. It's offensive.

Oh my word. Does she think her clients can't read? I didn't say the QRUKBC site was fake; I said Orangeberry/QRUKBC's string of tour-hosting "book blogs" and the list of personal names associated with them are fake. Which they are.
I think she read my paragraph about how actual online communities behave, and is trying to create the impression that the hoked-up QRUKBC frankenbloggers have too been doing all that; they've just done it via surface mail.

That's not how it works. When you have communities that start out mixing surface mail with e-mail and online conversation, either the two streams of communication drift apart because their speed-of-exchange rates are too different, or the surface mail components are surrounded by a penumbra of electronic communication. ("I sent it out on Wednesday." "Oooh, I can't wait to see it.") And of course, no community of real bloggers would all post identical content, which was the objection in the first place.

This is my favorite bit:
No ear for tone: none, zip, zero. She also managed to misspell two out of our three names while looking at them, misrepresent our activity patterns on AW, and miss the point yet again, which is that we all generate different content.

She ends with an embedded Taylor Swift video link. I guess she thinks charging authors for worthless services you've sold them under false pretenses is something nice people do, but pointing that out makes you a meanie.

They aren't very good at internet sleuthing if they can't find Jim's contact information and extensive online presence. (Not to mention all the splendid books he and Debra have written.)

Whether it's a real book club filled with late adopters, or fake content, doesn't matter to me now. Too much drama handled badly. Plus, given the apparent demographics of the group, I do not think their reading list would help me reach my target markets.

Now about all the charges leveled at AW? The stuff from Writers Weekly I have no clue about. I'll be happy to put on my researcher hat and go look. I've been on AW for three years, and I've seen enough posts from the mentioned individuals to deduce they are separate people. They all have verifiable professional footprints, for anyone with basic search skills.

For the OT, I am invoking Filigree's Rule, with a slight difference: some authors deserve some book clubs, and vice versa. If authors get hits off Orangeberry tours, more power to 'em. If they get jacked by a slick operator, not my problem.

I've met both Hapi and Jim in real life, and I can vouch they are different people. That AliceShortCake, though. I'm not so sure about her.

I can confirm that I am a 100% real human being of the female persuasion living in Yorkshire.

Eliza and Bob Richardson also seem to be real:

Eliza & Bob Richardson are the founding members of the Quality Reads UK Book Club which was founded in 1990. In the span of 23 years, their book club has grown from a simple home venture to large network of readers and book reviewers.
http://www.orangeberrybooktours.com/expo/speaker/bob-eliza-richardson-quality-reads-uk/

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They reported a case of plagiarism on Goodreads in February: http://www.qualityreadsuk.com/2013/02/vanity-does-not-suit-you-my-dear-author.html

If only they'd taken a closer look at Orangeberry before hooking up with them.

HapiSofi said:

But hey! Now I know that gas comes from farmers. I need to go pick me up some of those.

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Pretty sure she was referring to ethanol.

(But that doesn't explain the insanely defensive rant about farmers when no one had said anything remotely dismissive or disparaging about farmers. Was that intended as the response to a thread on a different forum?)

eqb said:

They aren't very good at internet sleuthing if they can't find Jim's contact information and extensive online presence. (Not to mention all the splendid books he and Debra have written.)

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Spelling my name wrong is almost guaranteed to keep them from finding 'em, though.

I suppose clicking the link on your AW Contact page is beyond them.

HapiSofi said:

And one more thing: there aren't fifty book-related blogs out there that are worth your advertising dollar. (Always check the click-through rates.)

.

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Thanks for this excellent advice. But what are click-through rates, and how do you check them?

Start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click-through_rate

You can also check the global and local rank of internet sites at www.alexa.com, which can tell you how relatively popular and well-visited a particular site is. But caveat emptor: Alexa cannot easily tell you which sites have been gamed by SEO tricks.

http://www.alexa.com/search?q=http://blog.orangeberrypromo.com/&r=home_home&p=bigtop
shows Orangeberry's current Alexa ranking as of this posting time. It's moderately respectable on the surface, but I wonder how much of that visibility comes from spam, blasted-in-bulk content, and other SEO gambits.

Filigree said:

You can also check the global and local rank of internet sites at www.alexa.com, which can tell you how relatively popular and well-visited a particular site is. But caveat emptor: Alexa cannot easily tell you which sites have been gamed by SEO tricks.

http://www.alexa.com/search?q=http://blog.orangeberrypromo.com/&r=home_home&p=bigtop
shows Orangeberry's current Alexa ranking as of this posting time. It's moderately respectable on the surface, but I wonder how much of that visibility comes from spam, blasted-in-bulk content, and other SEO gambits.

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Thanks. Only now I'm tempted to check my own blog's ranking, just as I finally kicked the Amazon ranking habit. [sigh]

Is A Virtual Book Tour Worth It?

My publisher [Dream of Things] also set up a mini tour that occurred in the second week of October with Orangeberry Book Tours that cost $29.99. The Orangeberry tour went like clockwork, however I was disappointed in that they only asked for one blog post and one Q&A, and their host bloggers kept reposting the same stuff over and over. I would have been happy to write another post or two so the material would not have been repeated.

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I never even commented on Orangeberry's veracity and am somehow on their list of people who don't exist?

Nice.

veinglory said:

I never even commented on Orangeberry's veracity and am somehow on their list of people who don't exist?

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Well, yeah. Duh.

I am thinking about a blog tour and it is amazing what you discovered. I looked at each site and one is more phony than the other. If I do choose a company I know what to look for now. Thanks

Steve

Old Hack said:

When people doubt my name, or make jokes about it, they're making fun of my race and heritage. It's offensive.

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With respect, Old Hack, when a surname is so unusual it's used by just one person, and then only in material disseminated by themselves - tweets, comments, interviews etc - I think it's reasonable to assume that it isn't a real surname. And pointing out that both Pandora and Poikilos have Greek meanings isn't making a joke, it's stating a fact.

veinglory said:

I never even commented on Orangeberry's veracity and am somehow on their list of people who don't exist?

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For the nice folks from the Virtual Book Tour company:

Here you go: Veinglory

Inkblot19 said:

I am thinking about a blog tour and it is amazing what you discovered. I looked at each site and one is more phony than the other. If I do choose a company I know what to look for now. Thanks

Steve

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There are some legit blog tour organizers. I'm not sure they actually sell books, but I have seen them build readership.

Were I doing a blog tour, I'd go with people I knew. I'd set it up with members on AW or other sites where I'm part of the community.

The problem I see with a lot of blog tours and authors doing marketing for themselves, is that they lose track of their audience.

Many of the blog tour derived book reviews are not about why a reader would maybe want to read/buy the book but what the author likes about his or her own book.

If you are a writer who wants readers, or wants to convert blog readers to book buyers your audience is your readers.

Not the other people in the tour so much. But readers.

It could be they're a real book club with actual members, who were persuaded it'd be great to let someone start blogs in their names. And for a free extra bonus, that someone would help them out by posting content for them. It'd be easy enough to pull on a group of people who don't know how the internet works. It reminds me rather of the electricity (and similar) scams people pull, where they target older people in the hopes they won't know how to look up the company on the internet.

But that doesn't make a difference to the authors signing up with Orangeberry. Either way, it means there's a bunch of book blogs with identical content that no one really reads.

I think that many of them are real, but just clueless.

Part of the problem is that the sites have a lot of identical text. That means that Google and real people are not going to take the reviews seriously. They look like the Web version of junk mail advertising. The reviewers need to look at some of the better known review sites for a genre they love, or a recent book they loved.

The reviewers all sound different. They all react to different aspects of the same book. Sometimes it's as if any two people are not even reading the same book.

Many of the blogs from the group are posting identical text that's found elsewhere; often it's meant to be the back cover copy. That makes the blogs look insincere, like advertising. Sometimes though the review is essentially boilerplate.

Take this post:

http://thereadingcat.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-hunters-and-queen-element-series.html

Take a phrase from it:

"an often reserved, yet occasionally outspoken young woman"

Now Google that phrase.

The identical review is on 9 blogs plus Amazon.

So it looks like a fake review. It's more of a summary than a review; the summary is part of the copy provided by the author. A reviewer needs to review the book, and respond to it. Not just describe it, but indicate what the reviewer thought about the book.

Be real. Read the books. Say what you really think. Think about people who haven't read the book and whether or not they might like the book.

What works in the book? What surprised you? What made you laugh? What made you think or cry? What annoyed you?

Look at the top reviewers on sites like Good Reads:

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/108424.Patrick_Rothfuss

http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2745288?sort=review&view=reviews

http://cuddlebuggery.com/

http://www.npr.org/series/book-reviews/

Melissa Douthit aside, no normal person cares or wants reviewers' personal information, but the fact that identical reviews are on multiple blogs is hurting the reviewers.

The fact that they are often less than carefully written is also a problem.

Apologies to Old Hack, who was referring to Orangeberry's comments about her real name.

This is what comes of trying to engage with the internet when two kittens are fighting to the death on your lap.