Are you ignoring this crucial item?

Second only to the cover, your book's blurb (description) is one of the biggest factors in your sales. Here's Part 1 of a video I created for my How to Market Your Book course - it shares WHY your blurb is so important and HOW to easily create an awesome blurb. 

Want to watch Part 2 of this video? Enroll in the How to Market Your Course today and dive into over 30 video lessons on building your brand and increasing sales! Start here!

Full Transcript:

I want to tell you a quick story. And that's about my very first book called Blindfolded Innocence. I self-published Blindfold Innocence, and on day one had a staggering three sales. My sales slowly grew to about 15 or 20 sales per day, where they just kind of stayed for about a month. Didn't do much ,didn't grow; I had reviews slowly, trickling but not much activity happened. Then I made one single change. I rewrote my blurb. And what we call blurb is the description that's on your sales page, on all the vendors. And it's also what's on the back copy of your book of your paperback. I changed my blur and overnight my sales skyrocketed. I went from 20-ish sales per day to a hundred and then to 300, and then to 3000. I was selling 3000 copies a day, 10 days after I changed my blurb. And that was literally the only change.

I didn't change my price. I didn't change my cover. I did not change a single thing except my blurb. And that showed me, instantly I realized how many people had been clicking on my book, raving, the book's description or the blurb, and then deciding not to buy the book. And just by changing that blurb, I was able to catch those sales, and literally that difference created my entire career. I could have very easily been happy with those 20 sales, gotten distracted, done something else with my life. Instead, I've written 14 books, I'm an international bestseller all because I changed my blurb, that book exploded and gave me the confidence to write more and more and more. So blurb is a very, very important, I would almost say it's the most important thing.

The cover is crucially important. I think the covers the most important thing to get readers to look at your book, but once they look at your book, the blurb is going to be what convinces them to actually buy it. And just think about when you walk through a bookstore, a cover might catch your eye, you pick it up, you look at it, but then what do you do? You turn around, turn the book around and you read the back cover copy. And that is what's going to make you go ehh and stick it back on the shelf or yes, I'm going to buy this book, take it with me and devour it tonight. So again, very important, so let's find out and let's talk about how to write an awesome blurb. It is super easy and I'm going to tell you how to do it right now.

Using the blurb equation. So the blurb equation is very simple and it needs to short. I say that there are exceptions. Sometimes you just can't summarize everything in... Game of Thrones, the book that led to that, I'm pretty sure it's how they link the blurb. If you have a fantasy novel, you might need a longer blurb. If you're writing historical fiction, you might need a longer blurb. You might not though, okay. And if you can keep it shorter, you have a better chance of capturing the reader's attention. So if your blurb is more than five paragraphs, more than four full paragraphs, it's too long, my opinion. Unless you have a novel that warrants it, keep it short. And I have a couple of books here, and most of them are three paragraphs. Each one is two or three sentences long, so that's what we're going to focus on and that can be your goal this exercise right now.

Here's the blurb equation. First, you need to introduce; introduce your characters or introduce your situation. By situation I mean, if a pivotal part of your story... Devil in the White City, if you've read that book, it's a historical fiction novel that is set at the time of the World's Fair in the Chicago World's Fair, so that is like a huge part of the novel. The entire novel revolves from the World's Fair. So that first introductory paragraph, and this is either going to be typically one to two paragraphs long, and each paragraph needs to be two to three, two to four, maybe two to three sentences, two to four sentences long. So if you have a book like that and or again, your whole book revolves around a pivotal timeframe, event or situation, then use that info for them.

If your book is character driven, use the introduction on your character. If your book is a romance novel, it's going to be character driven 99% of the time. So you can do a paragraph for each character, or you can do one paragraph that summarizes both characters. So in a romance, the intro is typically going to introduce characters. If you're in a mystery, or a suspense or a thriller, it might introduce the fact that a serial killer is attacking town XYZ, so far, eight people have died and they don't have any leads. You know, that's your intro, and that is going to be the first one to two paragraphs of your blur.

Then a hint at what your book is about, what the climax is, and what the conflict is. Why are they reading about this? You don't just say, you know, there is a carnival that comes to town every year that brings strangers into the town of Welmont. Okay, that was your introduction. Great. We can picture it; a carnival coming into town. So what, like why do we care about this carnival? What does the carnival have to do with the story? Like, give us more information. That is the second part of that. Or you have two people in your romance novel, the hero and the heroine. Now that we know about them, are they going to meet, do they ever know who the other person is? Like, what's the rest of the story? So that is the second part. You are going to hint at what is to come.

Don't give away the whole plot. Please don't give away the whole plot, but give this paragraph to give a hint at what the core conflict of your book is, and then end it with a cliffy. End it with a line that leaves the reader dying to know what's going to happen. You know, little did they know the biggest mystery was yet to come. Use something like that. Use a last line that really hooks them in. A lot of people like to use their last line to allude to why they chose the title. That's not my thing. I'm not crazy about that. If an example of that, like this book was Hollywood Dirt. An example of that would be if I said "By the end of it, the dirt in this town raked up Hollywood, or on our country, in our country town, dirt was bound to come up one way or another," something like that.

I'm doing a terrible job because, you know, or in my book Trophy Wife, they would end it with saying "Maybe I shouldn't have become a trophy wife." I don't know, a lot of authors like to tie in their title somehow in the end. Again, that's not my thing, but if that just appeals to you, then by all means some readers, you know, a lot of readers like it too. So you could do that, but I like to leave them on a cliffhanger type sentence that really hooks the reader. So, that's the blurb equation. Intro hint is to the climax of the conflict of your story and end on a cliffy. Now, let's talk about what to do and not to do with your blurb.