A blog tour is like a book tour, except that going from place to place live, you either get interviewed by email and it's posted on the blog, or you write a guest blog entry, which I would have offered to do, except that I've been so tired mentally that I couldn't think of anything brilliant to say. (You may have noticed -- with relief or otherwise -- the recent paucity of entries on my blog here.) I'm also devoting my remaining brain cells to other projects.
Like ... the book trailer.
It's the same as a movie trailer (sort of) except that it's promoting a book. But then you have no film clips from the book, like you would with a film, so you have to invent something. If you go for doing something live, you could film yourself talking about the book*, or you could make a mini-movie acting out scenes from the book.
We did that for The Hidden Stars with mixed results. We knew nothing of what we were doing, and learned along the way. Unfortunately, by the time we had learned some of it, our actors were burnt out, and the light for filming outdoors with a green screen just wasn't there in November. There were some ... unfortunate ... choices. You can still see the good and the bad of it on YouTube.
Or you can do something more abstract with stills, or pictures of clouds moving across the sky, or animated images, or a combination, which you would combine with music and titles. We're going for stills with music and titles, but you will have to wait and see what kind of pictures we are going to be doing (because I'm not sure yet whether this approach will turn out the way that I want it to, or be a total disaster and have to be changed).
*For an example of an author explaining how he was inspired to write his book, you can visit Stephen Palmer's amazon site:
Stephen's Trailer
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