You've probably seen the huge uproar this week in the book community about another book tour host vanishing, leaving authors out of pocket. Sadly, it's not uncommon.
As it happens, I've been looking to hire an extra person for over a year now, and it's very, very difficult to find someone who is professional, reliable and effective.
If you're interested, this is how I'm going about it.
To avoid promo people who send out things late, and who make mistakes when sending out promo material
Tip #1 I ask good book bloggers who they like to work with.
To make sure the promo people work with my genre and market,
Tip #2 I look through their last ten tours/projects and see if it would work for me
To avoid promo people who can only gather a handful of blogs and facebook posts
Tip #3 I do a Google search for the promo post title, and see what comes up. Then I look at the author's Facebook page and see how far the post traveled. Good promo people use hashtags that make that job easier.
To ensure promo people can gather a decent amount of reviewers
Tip
#4 I go to the book pages (Amazon, Goodreads etc) of the last ten
tours, and see how many reviews they got over the tour period.
To see if the reviews and posts translate to sales
Tip #5 I look at Amazon rankings. That's great if the tour is ongoing, however, it can be tricky if a week or two have gone by. Very often, I contact a past customer and ask (privately and discreetly) if their experience was good and if they'd recommend their promo people.
Will it protect you completely? No. There are a lot of cons who prey on authors, and working online makes cheating rather easy. In addition, there are unscrupulous people who walk away in the middle of a job, who do a half arsed job because they're messing about with too many other responsibilities, and so on. Publishing is not an easy business and at some point most of us are bitten.
So good luck, and if you know someone who does effective promos for sweet romance set in the UK, do let me know.
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