The Wording of Your Book Description
By this point you should be thinking, “This is a lot of things to learn and a lot of work to do in order to write a book description! Where’s the polished version that will impress everyone? Why didn’t I just start on that?”
Here’s the secret of the written word, though:
When you write, 80% of the work is in laying the groundwork of what you write:
- Being exposed to lots of examples of what you’re writing.
- Doing your research for your current project.
- Understanding what people want to read and why.
- Imagining the effect you want to have on other people (or yourself, if you mostly write for yourself).
- Either outlining the structure or having an internalized pattern of structure to follow as you write.
- Having a mental toolbox of writing tricks, tips, and best practices.
All of this happens before you put your words down on the page.
Writing book descriptions and all other marketing copy is no different: most of the work happens before you write something that looks like a real book description.
But now you are at the point where it’s time to write the real book description and turn your messy sentences into something a little more magical—at least, from a reader’s point of view.
(Remember: when you’re the magician, the effect of the magic trick doesn’t always seem like magic to you. But that’s because you know how it works.)
Point of View
You’ve written all the structural elements of your book description and you know what order they go in.
What’s the next step?
To pick the right point of view and get into character.
Usually, your point of view character for the book description should be the main point of view character for the book.
Before you start writing, however, double-check your comps. Are the book descriptions written in first-person point of view or third person? Are they written from a narrator’s point of view? You may want to use that point of view instead, for example, if the book is first-person point of view but the description is in third. Another common change is from third-person to an omniscient narrator.
Once you have a point of view picked out, rewrite your current draft in that point of view in present tense. This is a somewhat-arbitrary convention used in most marketing and promotional materials, but it also helps make the description feel more immediate.
Now, using the same information you used earlier and in the same structure, write with as much emotion as possible.
Go back to the emotion that your book delivers for the reader and write with that emotion. If a book delivers the feeling of falling in love, make sure to write the book description while focusing on that feeling. If a book delivers the feeling of being objective and rational, focus on those feelings (they are feelings!). If a book delivers the feeling of excitement and escape, or overcoming odds, or investigating painful secrets, get yourself into a creative frame of mind and focus on those feelings as you write.
With book descriptions, it is better to go over the top than to be too bland. Don’t be afraid to write in cliches or be cheesy; book descriptions are not high art.
Book descriptions are a huge dose of emotion laid over a logical structure that reassures the reader that they will get what they want.
If you’re used to dealing with more subtle emotions, it can seem excessive to try to pack so much into just a few paragraphs, but do it!
When you are done writing this draft, you should have a book description that mostly works on readers.
Keep in mind that the description may not work very well on you! But you should be able to feel an echo of your main emotion when you read the description.
Editing Your Description
Now it is time to edit your description, the less the better. If you end up editing more than a quarter of your description, go back and redo the draft from scratch, again going back to your story’s main emotion.
When you are editing, don’t worry about the sentences “sounding right.” That is the least important part of any type of editing!
More important is putting yourself in the reader’s place and asking, “If I knew nothing about my story, would I understand this? Or would it just be confusing?”
This includes books in a series; you want to be clear enough that you can make new readers interested enough in Book 2 to go back and read the first book.
Look at each term in the book. Other than the main character’s name, each element needs to be defined, either as a person in relation to the other characters (“Lorinne, Bob’s mom”) or as a place or thing (“Booktopia, deadliest of planets”). The definition needs to be next to the name; you can’t do “Bob’s mom” in one sentence and “Lorinne” in the sentence afterward. And each name must be used exactly the same way each time. It it’s “Bob’s mom” in one place, it can’t be “his mother” in another.
Your readers have ten thousand other things they could be doing besides reading your book. Make them worry about your characters’ problems, not about whether or not they can understand who did what.
The next thing to edit is the flow, a term which here means the movement of the reader logically from one sentence to the next one. You should already be making sure one sentence leads logically to the next in your writing!
But do check your book description specifically for a few things:
- Each element of the description should be in time order unless it’s more dramatic to reveal something out of order.
- Don’t jump back and forth between times, characters, or locations without a phrase to alert the reader, like “Meanwhile, back at the ranch…”
Now it’s time to spell check the description and test it on someone who hasn’t read your book but likes that genre.
- If they demand the book = success!
- If they don’t demand the book but are clearly able to identify why not = success!
If the reader doesn’t want to read the book, what you want to hear is:
- “This sounds good but I’m reading something else right now and I don’t want to slow down your book release.” (Or another external reason.)
- “I hate books written in first-person POV.”
- “I hate the whole ‘lone wolf” thing.”
- “I dislike like the narrator/main character just from the description.”
When a reader is able to be clear about why they don’t want to read the book, it means you have given the reader enough information to judge whether they would like the book or not.
Getting a clear answer of why a reader does not want to read the book does not mean you should rewrite your book description!
Rewrite the description only if the reader says they’re confused.
If a reader isn’t going to love your book, you want them to leave your book alone and not give you a disappointed book review. You want the people who buy your book to be exactly the right people, so algorithms recommend your book to more of exactly the right people, who leave enthusiastic reviews.
As you write additional book descriptions, the process should get easier–partly because you’ve been keeping an eye out for good comps, you know who your main character is, you know what your overall story is about, and so on.
Then it just becomes a process of finding the right words, and you already know how to struggle with that!
(Next week: conclusion! And I already have one book description sample worked on.)