Writing Awesome Book Titles

I have always been fascinated in reading books and interesting magazine articles.  But what really catches a reader to go and continue reading base on the article or book title description.  Just a little bit of work will give you a great description that piques a reader’s interest.  It’s always a good thing when you can pitch your story well. But so many authors settle for lame title descriptions, making their books or article a hard sell. You may have even looked at your description and thought it could be better, but you haven’t known how or where to start.

I want to just share in this blog what I think would best be an attractive and awesome title description.

Research… Lots of research

I’m a big fan of doing research the way successful titles are doing things. The process of writing a title description is no exception. You can learn a lot by spending time looking at the descriptions of other titles and what better way to start than at the biggest online book seller, Amazon.  Here you will find great titles and best seller books.

We may start finding a book’s category in the Top List section of the Kindle store and click the category link to see that Top List. Look at the list for the Top 100 Paid books in that category and choose some books to research. I’d recommend checking out at least the top ten titles on the first page, then maybe two or three that look interesting on the remaining four pages of results. That means you’ll be looking at around twenty to thirty books.

Take a moment to read through the descriptions of these books. Take note of what elements you see. Look at what displays as the description before the Read more link — often called “above the fold.” This may be the only text the reader sees, so it’s very important to make sure your key description points are included in this section.

You’ll want to do the exercise for yourself with your own categories. Different genres will often have different strategies that work to sell books. But to give you an example, here’s a list of some of the things I saw when I did this exercise with books in the Science Fiction Adventure category.

Bold teaser text with an eye-grabbing tagline. A vague statement like “humanity might not survive” doesn’t say much about the story details, but it sets the mood draws the reader’s eye to the description area.

Simple formatting, but a very compelling description in brief paragraphs.

A sentence near the top of the description that offers an interesting idea. Varying list will probably look a little bit different due to different genre conventions, but some of the elements should be similar. With the list, you can get started crafting a description that fills these parameters, which makes the job less daunting. Instead of approaching the task with the goal of, “I’m going to make a great book title description,” you can say, “I need a tagline, a compelling summary, and an interesting idea.” It’s much more manageable to take it one piece at a time.

Let’s take a moment to look at two keys that are important for any title description:  An intriguing summary and an attention-grabbing tagline.

Attention-Grabber

Many book descriptions use a bolded tagline that’s designed to stand out. It catches the reader’s eye and directs their attention to rest of the description. Get someone reading the tagline, and their eyes will often continue to the description on autopilot.

There are two ways to make an attention-grabber: Pull a quote from your book, or write a really great tagline.

Book Quote

Have you ever opened a novel and found a short paragraph from the book on the first page? That’s the idea here. Find an iconic, amazing section from your book, put it in bold or italics, and you’re done. Since every book is unique, I can’t tell you what to pick, but I can tell you that you may get some good suggestions by asking your readers what part of the book stood out to them visually or emotionally.

Tagline

A tagline is just one sentence. It’s typically something vague that sets a mood or tone for the description that follows. Again, I can’t tell you what would make a good tagline for your book, but if you’ve done your research into similar titles in your categories, you should already have a wealth of inspiration.

Make It Look Awesome

Now that you have an incredible description, you might want to think about making it even better by applying some basic formatting.   There you have it! You are now equipped to create an incredible title description for your book. It’s completely worth the couple of hours you might spend doing research and crafting your description. You’ll stand out from the crowd of inept descriptions and make your book look like a great buy for someone’s book shelf.

Content Marketing in my eyeview

Rather than bore your customers with ads, inspire them with content.

People on the Web search for relevant information – content marketing provides it

In today’s digital world, people are inundated with advertisements. As a result, businesses struggle to get their corporate message noticed by consumers. In 2011, a study conducted by the Custom Content Council showed that more than 70 percent of users preferred to get their information from articles rather than from corporate advertisements. Now, to reach their target audience, an increasing number of businesses are relying on a promising new strategy: content marketing.

What is content marketing?

The purpose of online research is to find relevant information and high-quality content. That means that text, imagery and video content have to provide information that is relevant and interesting to people searching for information on the Internet. Content marketing is the practice of creating and distributing content that is entertaining, informative and helpful to potential customers. Good content then directs those customers back to your brand website, where you can capture leads and sell products. Successful content marketing creates positive associations to your brand – without the hassle of product marketing.

Good content endures

Having captured potential customers’ interest, your biggest priority is to continually reinforce the connection between them and your company. Content marketing has an especially long-lasting effect as high-quality content entices users to continue reading, clicking and exploring. A website that has been properly outfitted with good content can potentially generate traffic over the course of months or even years. In addition, Google rewards websites that feature good content with improved rankings in search results.

Content marketing in practice

Looking at this graph, it is clear that the popularity of the search term “content marketing” has risen steeply since 2011.

Because of this increase, many large companies, including giants such as Red Bull and IKEA, have placed their bets on marketing with content. According to a recent survey conducted by the renowned “Content Marketing Institute”, B2B companies in the United States invest, on average, about 30 percent of their marketing budget in content marketing. In addition, an increasing number of smaller and mid-sized companies are taking advantage of opportunities the Web provides for efficient content marketing. Communication channels today are more diverse than ever, meaning there are almost no limits to a publication’s potential reach. Also, it has never been cheaper for a business to publish its own content. For that reason, many companies maintain their own blogs; publish white papers, e-books and infographics; or produce videos to demonstrate their expertise.

The content generated by businesses is as diverse as the types of publication used to circulate it. Web shops offer professional product or purchase advice; members of upper management comment on current developments within the company on the corporate blog; and brand-name product manufacturers publish e-books providing tips on the best way to use the company’s products.

What can content marketing do?

Many marketing decision makers have come to recognize the benefits and efficiency of a good content marketing strategy. According to a study by PR agency Waggener Edstrom Communications, 61 percent of marketers polled noticed increased sales figures after implementing a content marketing strategy. Content marketing also helps businesses to achieve a number of other corporate objectives, including:

Lead generation: If customers are impressed by the content provided, there is a high probability that they will be willing to leave their contact details – whether out of an interest in the product or simply a desire to get to more content.

Increased reach and name recognition: Often, high-quality content that addresses current or controversial topics is disseminated via social networks. By taking advantage of this trend, a company can increase its prominence and reach.

Image development: Releasing high-quality publications on a regular basis allows businesses to establish themselves as thought leaders, which strengthens the corporate brand.

Customer development : Content that offers useful information connects the customer to the company for the long term. By consistently offering good content, companies generate interest in their website and entice users to return.

Checklist for successful Content Marketing:

Checklist for successful Content Marketing: What interests your target audience? From the perspective of content marketing, only content that is truly relevant to a given target audience can contribute to your company achieving its goals.

High-quality content: Well-written, appealing content demonstrates the business’s competence. And it should go without saying that the text be error-free, structured and reader-friendly.

Unique Content: Unique content improves search engine rankings. On the other hand, sites with copied content or content that is of no real use to users is relegated to the back pages.

SEO: Successful online content is not just unique, well-written and focused on a specific target group, it is also search engine optimized with keywords, headlines, clear structure and useful links.

Do you lack the resources to produce high-quality content at scale?

According to the Content Marketing Institute, the biggest challenges facing companies trying to break into content marketing are insufficient time and a lack of opportunities to produce enough content…high-quality, customized content – the foundation of every good content marketing strategy.