Book blog tours, Y U NO LIKE SA?

I'm not really sure what it is about South Africans and book blog tours. And I'm not just talking YA authors (although off the top of my head, I can think of more than 10 SA YA writers) - I'm talking about authors in general of fiction, non-fiction, and whatever other genres fit in somewhere in between that. Personally, I think they are a jam and wonder why authors aren't jumping over each other to do more. I suppose with such a small trade publishing industry, there are few authors being published at all hence few interested in doing this kind of promotion thing. There are probably few publishers of non-education, non-university texts too (although I'm not against an ECO1001 textbook blog tour, btw).

I suppose there are time constraints because most SA writers cannot afford to have writing be their day job and must rely on their jobs as journos and copywriters and ad agency zombies (I'm colourfully filling in the gaps of my own knowledge of the industry here). You can't really be blogging all about time when there are clients and bosses to be impressed.

On the other hand, there are so many authors turning to self-publishing these days (if the buzz is anything to go by) and enough who are writing for independent trade houses and not getting their 15 minutes and could be using blogs as a platform to find a little spotlight.

There are a couple of book blogs in SA - some of them actually pretty good. There are quite a few bloggers who love talking to authors, interviewing them and sharing a variety of locally generated reading content. Maybe soem of them are doing this blog tour thing - albeit on a very mini scale. So why aren't these two forces of awesome - bloggers and authors - uniting for SA book blog tours? Heck, why aren't SA authors doing book tours full stop?

While I understand and accept that it's expensive and time-consuming, I still think that it's so worth it to take your books to as wide an audience as possible and that there are ways to visit schools and libraries and get other entities (including government and those schools) to foot the bill.

Somebody enlighten me, for reals: What is it with South Africans and book blog tours?

More on how to run a blog tour by Beth Barany