TBR and Beyond Tours is a new book tour company and with recent events with a different tour company, we feel the need to speak about some of the concerns being brought up.

A lot of you know us best from the Facebook group – TBR and Beyond Book Club, which has been running for almost four years.  It has almost 6k members and we’ve worked super hard to keep it an inclusive and safe space.  Our goal was always to boost marginalized and debut authors and I think we’ve never veered from that goal.  We had discussed starting a book tour company for a couple of years and when a large tour company recently left many authors without tour options last time, we stepped in to try and fill the gap the best we could.

Our tour company is run by mostly international bloggers (only one American), so we understand the need for ARCS not only in the US and we do everything in our power to make sure other countries are included. Physical arcs aren’t always possibly due to Covid and/or cost – particularly if the cost is coming from the author themselves.  We do provide e-arcs and/or physical arcs for every single book tour (other than cover reveals and book blitzes). If a physical arc is late, we make sure to get in touch with the publisher ASAP, as well as the tour hosts.  We normally secure e-arcs for everyone, just incase the physicals are late.

TBR Tours does not consider themselves an Ownvoices tour company; however, it is incredibly important to us to prioritize bloggers that identify with the representation in the any of the books we have tours for.  We currently have check boxes and a comment section for tour hosts to choose if they identify with any of the representations – it is never required though.

We do have a privacy plan on our site.  Privacy is incredibly important to us and it was one of the first things we thought about when starting up this tour company.  You can take a look at the details here: https://tbrandbeyondtours.com/privacy-policy/

As for our policy on negative reviews, we have always asked our tour hosts to contact us if their rating was going to be below 3 stars, so that we could look into other post possibilities. Tour hosts are asked to hold any negative reviews till after the tour ends.  Our book tours are meant to promote the book and we feel that below 3 star reviews would defeat this purpose.  We do not condone the tagging of any author in a negative review and this could result in the removal of the tour host from future tours.  We also support all our sister tour companies out there and think they are doing amazing things.  We do not see them as competition and love being able to lift each other up as much as possible.  We have had a very warm and welcoming experience with other tour companies and it’s been amazing and we can’t say enough amazing things about the community as a whole.

Even though we have five people on our team and we all have very specific tasks, we pride ourselves in all being hands on in every single aspect that goes on within the daily workings of the company.  Everyone has passwords to all accounts.  All emails are seen by everyone, no one is hands off in this company.  All team members also all know how to do every task in the company – that was one of the first things we made sure of.  Our team has been working together for at least 3 years and it’s very solid and healthy behind-the-scenes and that is key for us.

We just wanted to thank everyone that has been so amazing and supportive to us through our journey with TBR and Beyond – whether it’s with the book club, our blogs or the new tour company, you’ve been incredible.  We are so proud to be part of the book community and it’s why we work so very hard all the time.  We are a very new company, which means we will make mistakes, but we are very open and constantly making changes accordingly.  If you ever see something or have suggestions of something that we could be doing better, please reach out to us.  We are still learning what works and what doesn’t and that will be an on-going process while we get settled.

Thank you from all of us here at TBR and Beyond Tours