Book ideas that sell: description
Your book description is shown on the landing page for your book. Think Amazon or Barnes & Noble websites. If a reader finds your book on the site and starts to read the description, what you wrote will close the sale or drive the reader away. That's why your books description is so crucial to the sales process.
Many authors, especially inexperienced ones, will use the book's synopsis as the description. This guarantees the reader will leave without buying the book. In fact, the reader will only look at a few lines before clicking to another page or site. Why? Every synopsis ever written is boring. A synopsis has its uses, but marketing isn’t one of them and that's what the book description is: a marketing tool. A very important marketing tool.
For fiction, the description should attempt to get the visitor interested in the main character and that character’s problem. You want the visitor to say to herself, “Oh! I wonder how the character will get out of this mess!” Once you get the visitor thinking like that, you’re close to getting a sale.
With a non-fiction book, the goal is to convince the visitor that your book will solve a problem the visitor has. After all, if a visitor landed on your book page, she must have at least a passing interest in the problem. So now the visitor reads your introduction (i.e. your blurb) and then the description convinces her that your book will indeed solve her problem. That ain’t easy! You can use this six-step formula to create your non-fiction book description:
1: Book blurb (include a promise)
2: Book benefits (at least two)
3: Build your authority (why are you an expert on the book’s subject)
4: Describe the contents
5: Repeat the promise a second time
6: Forceful call to action
This formula was stolen from an excellent article written by Kevin Kruse. Alas, Kruse’s web site has disappeared.