This page is a blog dedicated to book marketing posts and articles.
Book marketing ideas that sell: blurbs
The purpose of the book blurb is to grab the attention of a potential reader. Once you have her attention by means of a great pitch line as the opening sentence, you need to follow that up with a few more sentences that tell her what’s different about your book and what’s in it for her.
Many new authors consider a book blurb to be a short synopsis. This is a mistake. Book blurbs and a short synopsis are two different animals, and they have very different purposes.
Here are descriptions for each of the three elements involved in a book blurb. Keep the blurb to fewer than a hundred words if possible and no longer than a hundred-fifty words.
Pitch Line: This is the first statement and it is the hook to grab the reader’s attention. Its purpose is to persuade the reader to keep reading the other two statements. It should be simple, one or two sentences at most, and it must make a clear statement about your book.
What’s in it for the buyer? This is a statement that explains what the reader (i.e. a book buyer) will get in exchange for money. This must be explicit. Tell the reader what benefit he’ll get from buying the book. Think of this statement in this way: if your book is surrounded by hundreds of similar-sized books on a shelf in a bookstore or on a web page, what would persuade the buyer to choose your book instead of one of the others?
What’s different about this book? With all the books published every month, what makes your book stand out from the others?
The secret to creating an effective blurb is to keep rewriting and condensing it until it expresses the ideas with a minimum of words.
For example, this is the book blurb for my novel Falstaff’s Big Gamble.
This blurb is less than 60 words
For my non-fiction book, How to Self-publish and Market a Book, I developed this blurb.
The blurb has a total of 57 words.
While not explicitly stated, the blurb must include a promise to the reader. In the example just shown, I promise the reader that I will show them how to publish and market a book.
An attention-grabbing blurb is an important part of your marketing kit. Adding keywords to the blurb makes it even more powerful.
As an example, here is the blurb for my novel The King Who Disappeared before I generated the keywords: A long time ago, Bohan was a king. But that was before the sleep spell. Now that he’s awake again, it’s time for revenge.
The keywords I used are: fantasy adventure, fantasy quest, fantasy humor, fantasy comedy.
Using these keywords, I modified the book blurb to: A long time ago, at the beginning of this fantasy adventure, Bohan was a king. But that was before the sleep spell. Now that he’s awake again, it’s time for a quest to get revenge. Fantasy humor doesn’t get better than this.
This increased the word count from 24 words to 42, still fewer than a hundred.
Embedding keywords into your marketing content makes search engines giddy with happiness and they react positively to the experience.
If your blurb is short, you can use it as a tweet. Or a blog post if it’s too long for Twitter.
This article is based on material from my book Self-publish a book in 10 steps.
Reserved for the next blog post
Book marketing mantra and equation
Book Marketing Mantras
Copy these mantras to sticky notes and paste them near your computer screen.
No one buys a book they never heard of.
Marketing first: Royalties second
No Marketing = No royalties
Book Marketing Equation
You may be surprised to learn that successful book marketing can be mathematically represented by an equation. It doesn’t make the marketing easier, but it does simplify the concept. The equation looks like this:
SBM = ((QBP+ ∑R + Esub(lp) + ∑(A + P)+ EsubM + ∑SM))L
where
QBP means Quality Book Package∑
∑r is the summation of all book reviews
Esub(lp) stands for the effectiveness of book’s Landing Page
P is for Promotions
A is for Ads
(A + P) means the summation of all results for ads and promotions
EsubM is for email
∑SM means the accumulation of all your social media effectiveness
L stands for the Luck Factor (note: Luck can be a negative number)
This equation is one of the more useless pieces of information you’ll ever come across but it rather nicely illustrates the complexity of the situation. Simply put, book marketing is a complex project involving a lot of disparate moving parts. Once you accumulate all these components in the equation and mix in a bit of luck, you’re on your way to a successful marketing campaign.
Prioritize your book marketing tactics
The book marketing possibilities are endless.
What if you can’t work on all the marketing tasks you’ve read about? After all, life has a way of butting into one’s writing and publishing work. Obviously, not all marketing tasks are created equal, so the question comes down to this: What marketing tasks should you concentrate on? This article provides such list and it’s based on my years of experience
If you have limited time and or money to spend on marketing, make sure you do the following:
- Identify the customers for the book and where they can be found online
- Start a webpage
- Develop a set of keywords
- Write a book blurb
- Join Goodreads and Bookbub
- Request book reviews in a few of the groups on the Goodreads site
- Join LinkedIn
- Request book reviews in a few of the groups on the LinkedIn site
- Write a short synopsis
(Note: a book blurb and a short synopsis are not the same thing: they are two very different animals. See this article to learn more: https://hanque99.medium.com/book-blurbs-a-marketing-opportunity-46d6586ee44b)
A neat thing about this list is that, with the exception of the webpage, all these tasks are free. All they require is the investment of your time.
Here is another question. If you have a limited marketing budget which marketing tasks should be on the bottom of the list?
- Commission a trailer
- Do a blog tour
- Hire a promotion company
These three tactics are expensive and, with a limited budget, other, cheaper tactics will be more cost-effective.
This material is extracted from my book How to Self-publish and Market a Book.
