Virtual Book Tour: Day #4
Today the VBT scoots down the east coast and pulls up at Heath Row’s Media Diet. Mary Roach will be blogging there today about web sites, publications and general media of interest to those fascinated with the deceased.
In linky news, The Virtual Book Tour has been mentioned at Harrumph, Shift.com’s weblog, Bookslut and is #28 on Popdex last I looked.
As with anything, the VBT is not without its detractors. Jessa Crispin of Bookslut has a valid point when she indicates that the tour has been a bit slow to get off the ground and the a series of blurbs across a series of blogs does not a revolution make.
I agree. Here’s why the tour has been the way it has thus far. First, Mary Roach was out of town our first three days tending to real world tour responsibilities. We’re hoping that things pick up now that she’s back home. Second, every blogger commits to as much as they can based on their available free time. No one is getting paid here and if a tour site is too busy to do anything other than post an excerpt, then that’s what they can do. Finally, we’re all beginniners here. This is at best a rough draft of a new, barely-proven project. I’m hoping our mistakes for the first tour will be our improvements for the second.
One more thing…There’s a mistaken notion floating around that the VBT is somehow acting as hired guns for Mary and W.W. Norton, her publisher. My guess is that this is an idea borne of lack of clairty on my part and a subsequent misundestanding.
1) The sites of the VBT receive no funds from publishers or me, only copies of the touring book.
2) Every blog is treated as an autonomous unit, with complete editorial control. So if any site on this tour hated Stiff, they had free reign to say so.
3) Touring books are selected by me, based on what I think will be an enjoyable read for the owners of the tour sites, and agreed to by them. I’m certainly not interested in wasting their time with lousy books and my intent behind the tour is to promote quality contemporary literature, the kind not often featured in the weblog community. To me, that contains much more intrinsic and collaberative value than trashing something for its own sake, just to show what an independent thinker I am.
We all love books here, good ones especially. The point of the tour is to bring good books to light. That’s all.
Tomorrow, the tour heads into Oakland, for a stop at Brain Dump.