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.
