Now that you've identified where you'd like to appear on your blog tour, the next step is creating your excerpt. The excerpt is an online document providing a description of the book, a passage from the text, cover artwork, and an author photo and biography. Your excerpt can resemble a traditional paper book flier but include more detail.
Your excerpt serves three purposes:
To convince the blogger to host your appearance.
To promote your appearance to the blog's readers.
To prepare the blog audience to discuss issues and ideas raised in your book.
Essential information like the author name and book title should be embedded and visible on the photos of the cover art and author photo. That way, if a Webmaster accidentally leaves out part of your text--or it's deleted at some point--readers will still have enough information to buy your book. If possible, combine all the elements of your excerpt into a single document to ensure it's displayed properly and nothing is omitted.
A typical excerpt includes these elements:
A brief setup to the book, describing its topic, audience and perspective.
Title, author name and retail price.
Blurbs and testimonials.
Credentials of nonfiction authors.
A short excerpt from the book.
Affiliate links to buy the book at online retailers.
Author photo.
Other bibliographic information such as ISBN, binding, page count and publisher.
Try to cap your excerpt at 2,000 to 3,000 words. Some readers won't persist in scrolling down two screens of continuous content. However, interested readers often print longer excerpts, so you should include a message encouraging printing at the top of long excerpts.