I'm the commenter who's been hammering Orangeberry over on the Bewares Board.
Reading through this thread, I can see that in the beginning there was some logic behind virtual author tours, and perhaps some novelty value as well. I can't fault cooperative arrangements between writers and bloggers who have some acquaintance in common.
What alarmed me about Orangeberry was that they'd set up 50+ fake book blogs to which they propagated identical content. That was why they could promise their clients a specific number of mentions and reviews on a tight schedule: "50 mentions in book blogs" was one lackluster piece of promo copy automatically propagated to 50 fake weblogs that no one reads.
I don't have time right now to do an in-depth analysis of every "virtual author tour" provider, but I've done a fair amount of looking around. My take on them at this moment is that they range from real, experienced, well-regarded book promotion operations, to perfunctory sites that were obviously built around online marketing scammer templates.
One description of VATs that greatly bothered me came from a site I won't name, except to say that the overall vibes weren't all that bad. The problem is that it's shot through with magical thinking.
Unlike a traditional book signing, which is generally used to increase sales, a virtual blog tour is about increasing online "buzz" about your book. Obviously, more buzz can equal more sales, but it's generally a process.
"Social media buzz" is not a magic nostrum. At the time that people are talking about your book, they're interested in your book, and they may go so far as to buy a copy. When the talk shifts to other topics, those people are no longer thinking about your book, and will be far less likely to buy a copy than when they were thinking about it.
Human attention doesn't accumulate indefinitely. Memory degrades over time. There is no delayed tertiary stage where blog readers suddenly feel moved to buy a book they've stopped talking and thinking about.
You often won't see sudden jumps in your sales, unless you manage to score a visit on an incredibly popular blog.
This is true, and it's at the heart of the problem. I discussed this in the Orangeberry thread and the Bewares Board's
Not-a-FAQ.
There are some top-notch blogs that really can increase your sales. (Sites I mentioned at random:
The Millions,
Neil Gaiman,
Smart Bitches Trashy Books, and
Boing Boing.) They have high traffic and a lot of credibility with their audiences. The next tier down -- still prominent, established blogs with solid traffic stats -- have noticeably less clout. Below that, it's nice if they liked your book, but don't expect to get a lot of sales out of it.
I work in conventional publishing in NYC, so I may have a different notion of the level of return on promotion that's worth pursuing. Nevertheless: the vast majority of the sites which providers identified as host sites for VATs were not going to do the authors much good at all; and none that I saw were the sort of top-of-the-line blogs that really can help turn a book into a commercial success. Some host sites appeared to have become so indiscriminate about hosting that they'd turned into solid ribbons of unbroken promo. That's deadly. No one's going to read it.
However, done consistently over time, all those incoming links increase your visibility online. And the more visibility you have online, the more likely you are to sell books!
Not so fast. If you're going to self-promote, you have to pay attention to orders of magnitude, click-through rates, and other technicalities.
An accumulation of inbound links over time will increase your visibility
on Google, which is good if someone's already looking for you, but not a lot of use if they aren't. And while it's true that more online visibility may translate into more sales, at lower levels of visibility and awareness that effect becomes extremely slight.
To repeat an earlier observation, human attention doesn't accumulate indefinitely, and memory degrades over time. Promotional strategies either sell books or they don't. If they don't, they may leave behind a faint residuum of consciousness of you or your book, but it's not enough to help. The single biggest reason anyone buys a book is that they read and enjoyed another work by the same author. Below the "actually bought a copy and read it" line, the force generated by decomposing social media buzz is usually too faint to be measured outside a laboratory.
My alternate suggestion is that you use your time and energy to write another book. A good book is a permanent advertisement for all your other work. If you want a reliable multiplier of force, that's the one to pick.