Are blog tours allowed ?
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I just heard from a fellow blogger that we aren’t allowed to participate in blog tours anymore. Is this true?
I can’t find anything about it in the wordpress policy but I’d like to know. So I can move to another blogsite.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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What are “blog tours?”
If they involve any sort of compensation for posting about products, then that would be a violation of TOS here on WordPress.com. -
Is a blog tour by chance the same as a blog carnival? http://www.problogger.net/archives/2012/02/03/how-to-create-and-host-a-blog-carnival/
If so, I’ve not heard anything about them being disallowed (so long as no one is receiving compensation as Tess mentioned) but I’ll defer to a more seasoned volunteer or staff member for a more solid yay or nay.
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Blog tours are for promoting books and authors. Most of the time by reviewing books too but I don’t get anything in return for it.
I just found this filed under the types of blogs:
Book tour blogs: Blogs that consist of scraped, pre-written content, as opposed to original book reviews, for the purpose of promoting books and driving traffic to other promotional and giveaway sites.This is not what my blog is about but I do participate in some. Is there a loop hole or should I start transferring to blogger?
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Lizthefair, that sounds close the same as a blog tour. Why is that allowed when blog tours are not?
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Real reviews are allowed. Pasting copy sent to you from PRs and so on is not allowed.
If that is what your blog tour does, it is not allowed. Please define what you actually DO.
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What I do, Raincoaster is looking up book and author information about those books that look interesting to me, like this:
Most are of my own incentive no PR comes in play. The pics I do take from other sources (with permission) but what blog doesn’t.
Apart from that I have on my blog memes, reviews and just random thoughts.
Actually now other questions arise as well. What about the book blitzes, Cover reveals?
When is a blog considered a blog tour blog? I’d really like to know before I wake up one day and find out that my blog is deleted because I violated one of the rules.
And I just want to say that by adding this “blog tour rule” wordpress wil lose a lot of users. And will stop fun bloggers like me from the blogging world. As I just don’t have the means to transfer to self hosted. It will take the fun out of it.
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Wait.
You look up author and book? What do you do once you have the information? Do you write a review? Do you write an original blog post? Are there conditions on what you can or cannot write about the book? What’s in it for you?
The rule is not “added.” They have been deleting blogs that participate in these kinds of promotional games for the eight years I’ve been here.
If you just blog original material, without participating in PR efforts, you can blog here forever.
I have flagged this for a staff ruling, but they will need the answers to those questions I have asked.
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I just posted a link to what I do with the info.
Nothing is in it for me. It’s a means for me to keep track of what I want to read, what looks like fun. I don’t blog for anything but fun.
And if I read a book, I can say whatever I want about it because it’s a book I bought.
But like I said that’s only a fraction of the content. Mostly I just blog in memes.
What promotional games? Aren’t reviews promotional either??
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From my understanding, the post you linked to bookaholicnl might be considered spammy because other blogs would be posting the same thing. Those posts would be duplicated materials.
If you were to write a book review, have an author (or character) interview, or something that ONLY exists on your blog, you would be okay since it’s original material.
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It’s something I put together myself for my own blog, so I take offense in that.
But okay. I can’t highlight enough that I’m only doing it for fun.
Well I guess this is the end of my blogging days. Will look if I can find another way to blog the same way. But I doubt. Thanks for commenting everyone.
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@bookaholicnl I would wait for the staff ruling if I were you before you hang up your blogging hat. My sense is WP.com is much more focused on making sure blogs adhere to the sprit of the rules than their letter. That having been said, we are creeping toward the “discussing ToS issues in a public forum” line, so I’ll leave it at that.
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Wait for the staff ruling.
My own opinion is that if ANY of that post was written by you, you should tell us exactly what. It looks entirely PR driven, with a big copy paste written for the author it’s promoting. Why would posting a press release be fun? Writing your own blog is fun.
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Well it was my intention to make it look professional.
But it’s not a press release as the book has been released for a while and I created the whole post, there wasn’t anything organized for it. Nor is my post posted on any other blog.
I wanted to put the author and her books in the spotlight because it was connected to her winning my facebook contest to be put in the spotlight.
As for why that’s fun? Because everything book related is fun to me. Discovering new authors, new book releases. Posting about it gives me a strange sense of connecting with them. I don’t expect you to understand.
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We do expect all of our users to create original content on their sites and to comply with copyright laws. However, fair-use excerpts of content published elsewhere, particularly in the context of a review, is generally considered to be acceptable both from copyright standards and our Terms of Service.
If the bloggers are posting their own, or a guest blogger’s, content to their own blog, that’s fine. If there are a number of bloggers all posting the exact same pre-written content to their blogs, however, that may be considered spam or advertising.
Please refer to our Terms of Service for further information:
http://en.wordpress.com/tos/ -
So that would mean that Cover reveals are safe, as only a select amount of bloggers get to post about them. So are the book blitzes and such with exclusive content as excerpts.
But what about the occasional blog tours and those with reviews and excerpts?
May I ask if you could please look at my blog and tell me which posts aren’t acceptable, so I can make them acceptable. I would hate to lose this blog and start a new one elsewhere.
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We cannot make a blanket statement that all blog tours (or other content) are acceptable, as we consider each blog individually.
Please review our Terms of Service and if you have any content on your blog that is in violation of those rules, please remove it. This may include content that is reposted from other sources for the purposes of SEO/back links and that could be construed as advertising.
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Does this clarify what book blog tours are about? They are a copy and paste book promotions of content provided by Marketing Associate/Publicists that are backed with giveaways. They are NOT blogging. They are not actual independent blog reviews at all.
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@bookaholicnl it doesn’t look like your content is original, and it appears to all be promotional material designed to drive traffic elsewhere. You may wish to review the TOS.
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Blogs that violate our advertising policy or fall into one of the following categories are not allowed on WordPress.com:
Automated blogs: Blogs that are generated by computers, including randomly generated blogs, blogs that re-publish press releases, marketing material, search engine results, link dumps or any other mass-produced content.
http://wordpress.com/types-of-blogs/
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