Recently, we invited our community to take part in a survey. We want to hear feedback about our communication skills and platform. As well as this, we want to hear thoughts about book tours and brand campaigns we organised in 2023. Are our community satisfied with the books they had received? Were they happy with the incentives that were offered? Would they read a book if there was no promise of any incentive?

The survey was completed by 351 creators. They answered 15 questions. We will highlight the ones that will give valuable insights to anyone in the book community, specifically on the topic of incentives.

Question 1: What motivates you to register for a book tour (multiple answers allowed)

The community stated clearly that the blurb of the book is most important to them (90.6%), followed by the book cover (71.5%). We all know the saying ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’, but honestly, we do. At Bookinfluencers.com, we receive requests for new book tours daily. If the book cover is of poor quality, we deny the collaboration. Although tastes differ, one can recognize whether a book cover is of good quality.

The next two motivations scored almost evenly. ‘Hearing others talk about the book’ scored 38.2% and an incentivized tour scored 39.6%. Interestingly, 5.4% of people gave the same free-type answer of registering because they like the author. This blog post is a great example of this.

Let’s dive a bit further into that interesting topic of incentivized tours!

Question 2: Do you feel that book tours should be incentivized?

This topic split the responses. 57.9% of the respondents said ‘yes’, 41.1% of the respondents answered ‘no’. Most of the ‘yes’ responses said: ‘Book influencers should be treated the same as influencers in other industries’ (45.3%). A smaller group said: ‘I put in a lot of time and effort and feel like compensation is needed’ (13.4%). Of the people that answered ‘no’, most agreed with: ‘Receiving a book for free is enough for me’ (35.6%). Only a small group said: ‘Compensation leads to dishonest book recommendations’ (5.7%).

It’s difficult to get a book to the top of a creator’s TBR. Our experience after over 500 book tours is that only publishers and authors that publish a highly anticipated new release can get away with offering the book only. Offering incentives doesn’t mean you always have to have financial rewards (although we see that the community often highly appreciates these). PR boxes are a great way to incentivize too and make great content such as unboxing videos. We also had publishers offering an extra book from their imprint as a bonus. There are various ways to show your appreciation for a creator’s work and to acknowledge them as just as important as an influencer from any other industry.

Question 3: Would you register for a book tour of a book that doesn’t really interest you, just because the tour offers incentives?

Happily, the majority of the community, 92.3%, said ‘no’. This tells us that most creators won’t be bribed into reading and promoting books they aren’t interested in.

One of the respondents said: “It’s easy to feel pressured to not hurt authors. Only giving 4-5 stars or we don’t feel deserving of compensation”. This is interesting and shows that there’s another side to bribing. Incentivizing a book tour doesn’t mean that the publisher or author should expect 4 or 5 star reviews only. Of course, no one wants to see negative reviews as a result of a book tour. Our policy is that the bookstagrammer or booktoker should talk to the person in charge of the tour. They can then discuss with the campaign manager or author/publisher whether or not to post the review. However, we believe it would be unfair to not pay a creator when they have already spent time and energy on the book.

Does incentivizing help in getting people on board? Definitely! Ultimately, we all have more books to read than time to read them. One can hardly blame a creator for prioritizing an incentivized read over an unincentivized read if the books are equally appealing.