Self Publishing On Amazon Requires A Book Description With Three Key Ingredients by Lance Fallbrook Perhaps an odd mixture of vanity and fatigue conspires when we finish our book. We writers tend to become rather insistent that the work speaks for itself. And who could blame us. We did put one heck of a lot of work into it. It ought to speak for itself. Our book can only speak for itself, though, once someone reads it. And reading it requires buying it. You see where this is going. Elsewhere I've provided some other valuable tips about how to
optimize the author tools for self publishing on Amazon, toward this end. As important as are all those tips, the most important and most challenging is doing a good job on your book description. After someone invests money, even a modest sum, in the purchase of your book, it is likely - unless they just hate it - that they'll give you at least 20 pages or so to convince them to keep reading. Your book description requires no initial investment and so it's a lot easier for them to simply click away. You have about 20-30 seconds to win them over, before they go looking for greener literary pastures. Failing to capture their attention will have them clicking away and a potential book sale lost. So, the question is, what does your book description need to do to keep prospective readers interested? And, how do you do it? Basically, you have about three sentences to impress such prospective readers in three important ways: tell, entice and show. 1. Tell them. Yes, you do want to give a sense of what the book is (not to be confused with a plot summary): fiction or non-fiction; mystery, romance or thriller; sci-fi, period piece, contemporary; maybe, first or third person narrative; possibly some evocative comparison (e.g., in the tradition of Stephen King; Hemingwayesque; Toni Morrison-like). Second: Entice them with the benefit they will achieve from reading the book. Arguably non-fiction writers might have an easier time with this one. Though, it is not necessarily true that most non-fiction self-published authors actually take this advantage. Clearly though any non-fiction aspires to fill a need of some sort. At the very least it aims to increase topic-specific knowledge (though it usually aspires to more than just that). Be clear what the benefit of your non-fiction book is to your prospective reader and be sure to communicate it. What will they do more easily or more efficiently once they're read your book? For fiction, it can be a bit trickier. I suggest emphasizing the conflicts confronting your characters. Try to tap into the potential reader's own experience of such conflict: they may want to better understand it, relive it, or simply live it vicariously. The more vivid and impacting you can make it in a few short sentences the more likely it is to resonate with them. Third: Show them what reading your book is like. Maybe the most difficult of the three, this can be the clincher. Think of the book description as a mini test drive of your book. If your promise is to explain some technical skill, such as website building or home micro brewing, show off your gifts for explanatory clarity. Use clear, easy to follow language to explain some technical detail, so they'll feel confident of being able to follow and learn from your book. Give them confidence that you can make it all easy to understand. For fiction writers, can you convey (not name, but show) the genre and style of your book in the description of it. You could start with a throwaway first sentence that evokes the tone. For instance, were your book an atmospheric cloak and dagger spy novel, you might begin with a description of the anxiety of sheltering in a doorway on a rain drenched cobblestone street, awaiting a dubious contact who, for all you know, may have sold you out already. Or, if your novel tells a story of urban city drama, you could evoke the kind of desperate situation which the limited options of life on the street may present to your protagonist. Again, this is a tease, but if you do it well, it's also an audition. Here then is the challenge of writing a great book description for self publishing on Amazon: tell what the book is, entice with the benefits it provides, and illustrate the style and tone found between the covers. Make no doubt: a tall task lies before you. It is though precisely because of how difficult it is that authors who do it well harvest great rewards. If you have three to five times more rewrites of your book description than you did of the actual book, don't be surprised or discouraged. It's a real skill and takes a lot of work. And obviously there's no guarantee it will provoke the Amazon browser to buy your book. You can't make anybody buy what they don't want. That thought doesn't mean that, should prospective readers be open to what you're offering, you can't convince them that what you're offering is their best chance of getting what they're after. It's there, with that prospective reader, that you have the opportunity to close a sale and potential for a return reader, who will trust you all the more next time. It all starts, though, with not having them pass you over as inadequately interesting from the start. So, sorry, but finishing the book wasn't the completion of your writing requirements. Sharpen up that pencil. Self publishing authors who want to keep up on the hottest news and tips need to follow the
Self Publishing on Amazon site. Lance Fallbrook is a frequent commentator on writers and writing. See his provocative piece on
famous American authors -- the dead list!
