What self-published author (including this one) doesn’t want to write more powerful and intriguing book descriptions?

With that in mind, I bought Brian Meek’s 2019 book, Mastering Amazon Descriptions: An Author’s Guide, to help both you and me.

Book descriptions are super important, so you really want to get yours right.

Will this book help you? Here’s what you need to know.

More powerful and intriguing book descriptions convert

Meeks, who writes both fiction and nonfiction, explains that a book description that resonates with readers will help you convert more “looks” to “buys.”

You see the value in that, of course, especially if you’re paying for advertising.

If you’re running Amazon ads, you’ll spend less to get people to buy when your description convinces them to do so. If you’re not advertising, you’re selling more books than you would with a lackluster description.

Instruction is brief

The first few chapters explain the importance of a compelling description.

The true “here’s how to write more powerful and intriguing book descriptions” instruction is just a few pages long, starting with Chapter 4 and concluding at the end of Chapter 7. There isn’t a lot there, but there doesn’t need to be.

What’s in those few chapters is helpful. I would have liked to have seen a formula or template to go with it, but you can use what’s there to create your own.

Sample book descriptions and re-writes

The bulk of Mastering Amazon Descriptions is 40 before-and-after book descriptions. Meeks shares the original description, a short critique, and his re-write. “Read them all,” he advises, rather than flipping through to find those in your genre.

I read maybe the first 10, all for fiction. Then I started skimming to find nonfiction examples.

I found one.

One.

One nonfiction book description out of 40.

That doesn’t mean that nonfiction authors can’t learn from the instruction and the descriptions for novels – they can.

But it does mean that Meeks should include that detail in this book’s description because it’s important. If I bought this as a nonfiction author rather than as someone working to help authors identify helpful resources, I would have been disappointed. (And maybe even annoyed.)

Table of contents doesn’t help

Why didn’t I just check the table of contents to find the nonfiction examples, you ask?

I did.

But the chapters are numbered without titles. Not much help there, ya know?

And without chapter titles in the table of contents, you can’t identify the padding – and there’s a lot of it – without continuing to turn the page as you move through the book.

More fluff than a Rice Krispies treat

Speaking of fluff … I take notes when reading books I plan to review on this site. Here’s what I wrote for a couple of chapters:

• Chapter 29: Bizarre
• Chapter 37: What the what?
• Chapter 44: Huh?

I realized by the end of Chapter 29 that it was originally either a long Facebook group post or a blog post written while Meeks was attending an authors’ conference. It has nothing to do with writing compelling book descriptions.

Here’s a sample from the chapter: “To those who are not here in Las Vegas this week, we shall miss you.” It concludes with another sentence referencing “tonight.”

I think you can understand my confusion.

Skip those chapters.

Still, the fluff is obvious, which makes this book quite skimmable, in fact. You’ll see quickly which chapters are padding and which are relevant.

Kindle price is $9.99

I paid $9.99 for the Kindle version. That seems high for a book with so much filler text, but if it helps me sell more books, it will pay for itself.

For that price, though, I expected more tools and less random content.

And I’ll admit that sometimes I felt like I was being pranked. For example, right up front, Meeks tells us to copy and paste text promoting his book – and with his Amazon Associates link no less – into a Facebook post to see how many more likes we get than we usually do.

I mean, have people actually done that – recommended his book before they’ve even read it just because the author told them to?

Some might see that as clever … others might decide it’s insulting to the reader.

Do I recommend it?

Did I get $10 worth of value from this book?

I did.

Will you?

It will help, especially if you write fiction. You’re likely to see at least one before and after for your genre. If you’re like me, examples help provide clarity.

It will help nonfiction authors, too, but because there’s only one nonfiction example – and examples are the bulk of the book – it’s less useful to them.

This isn’t the wildly enthusiastic review I was hoping to write (especially because I laughed out loud during the first few pages). But I did learn from the book, and for that, I’m grateful.

What book would you like me to review next? Please tell us in a comment.

This author was getting clicks on her Amazon ads, but those clicks to her book’s detail page weren’t converting to purchases. She thought her book description might be the problem, so she asked if anyone would be willing to review it.

There’s a lot I like about this, but what I like the most is that she was open to suggestions. That’s the sort of thinking that will turn her book marketing around.

Here are four other things you can do today to get – and stay on – the right path with your book marketing.

1. Get feedback on everything. (And pay attention to it.)

I love that the author mentioned above asked for feedback on her book description. You can continually improve your book’s Amazon page as you learn and grow.

Take what she’s done one big step further and get input earlier in the publishing process. You want to solicit feedback from your target audience on your:

• Manuscript with beta readers
• Cover design
• Book description

It’s important that you solicit input from your target audience.

Case in point: In a Facebook group I belong to, authors ask for opinions on cover design options. When I don’t read the genres involved, I don’t weigh in.

Why? Because I’m not in the target audience.

2. Stop promoting to everybody.

New authors often think that “everybody” will love their book. Those with experience know that’s not the case.

As fashion designer (and countless other people) Joseph Abboud said, “You can’t be all things to all people.”

I’ll bet you had someone in mind while you were writing your book. It might even have been yourself. Maybe you wrote the kind of book that you want to read.

You aren’t “everyone,” right? That means your ideal readers might very well be people just like you.

You will be far more effective with your book marketing if you invest the time to determine who will buy your book, then select the tactics that will help you reach those people.

3. Learn from the best-selling authors in your genre.

Make a list of the 10 top-selling authors in your genre, whether it’s sci-fi/fantasy, memoir, cozy mystery, or soups and stews cookbooks.

Study their websites, Amazon book pages, and social media profiles. Pay attention to these elements:

• Author branding: Do you see a uniform look on the website and social media headers and graphics?
• Website content: What are the tabs/menu options, and what information is on each?
• Social networks: Which ones are they using (that information will give you insights into where you’ll find your readers)? What content do they share and how do they do it?

Best-selling authors have figured it out. Take the time to learn from them.

4. Track your results.

You want to do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. You won’t know what is and isn’t working unless you’re watching for a connection between what you’ve done and whether it’s had an impact on sales.

This applies to all of your book marketing goals, not just book sales.

For example, let’s say that your goal for the next two months is to get more Instagram followers. Set a specific goal (how many is “more?”), then track what happens every time you do something that you believe should generate an increase. Laura Laing’s excellent guest post, “Social media data tracking for authors in four easy steps,” is a good how-to starting point.

When your specific goal is related to book sales and you’re self-published, implement one tactic at a time. Then check your KDP dashboard to see if that sold any books. If you’re not self-published, monitor your Amazon category rank in your book’s product details.

As you try new tactics, watch what happens when you do. If you don’t get the results you expected, determine if it’s because:

• You didn’t execute the tactic properly (see more on that in “3 social media mistakes authors must stop making now“)
• The tactic isn’t a good fit for your book or audience

Always keep learning

The author I mentioned above knew she needed to be open to outside input. She realized that this was an opportunity for her to learn how to do something better.

If you’ve been writing and publishing books for awhile, you know that what works and what doesn’t can change. Amazon is a great example of that — the rules and algorithms there seem to be ever-evolving.

That’s why it’s important to be open to learning from others who might be more successful or more knowledgeable. Just as importantly, though, you should learn from your own experiences. They’ll teach you a lot if you pay attention.

What’s one change you’ve made with your book marketing that has helped you move forward? 

Tip of the Month

I like to share a “Tip of the Month,” a free resource or tool for authors, on the last Wednesday of the month.

This month, it’s a free download for “700+ power words that will boost your conversions” from Optinmonster. Use the words on this list to help you craft:

• Book titles
• Blog post headlines
• Web site content
• Advertising text
• Email subject lines
• Social media posts

To get your copy, just click the cheat sheet title in the blue box under the first paragraph of text (see below), provide your name and email address, and download the PDF cheat sheet to your computer.

Sometimes, changing just one word can make all the difference.

Why?

Because the first book of this author’s that I read was profoundly disappointing. It was the length of a long magazine article and lacked depth, detail, and specifics.

Ugh.

I should have known better. There were several warning signs, including a do-it-yourself cover. The “product details” noted the (short) length. But the book’s excellent description hit all the right buttons — it promised the specifics I needed — so I took a chance.

Deliver what you promise

I would have overlooked many flaws if the book’s content had matched its description. All I asked of this book was to teach me something new.

But it didn’t.

Instead, the book was a shallow overview that left me feeling foolish for buying it.

Is this the reaction you want from your readers?

Do you want to give them the impression that you don’t really care about delivering on your book’s promises?

Probably not. I think you want to write a great book that readers will recommend to their friends.

To help make that happen, here’s a short list of what I see on Amazon that sends me back to the search bar for another option.

1. The book’s title is a mess.

Punctuation or spacing is missing. Words run together. A cover blurb is included in the title, even though it’s an endorsement, not part of the title.

For nonfiction, there’s no separation between the title and the subtitle. Almost as bad? There’s no subtitle.

2. It’s obvious you designed your own cover. (And that you’re not a designer.)

Nothing shouts “I don’t really care about my book” more than an obviously do-it-yourself cover.

If you don’t care enough about your book to make sure that the cover is appropriate for the category, why would I care enough to read it? You’re telling me that what’s between the covers will be amateurish, too.

(For tips on how to select the best cover, read “7 tried and true ways to make a book cover decision.”)

3. You aren’t letting me “look inside” the book on Amazon.

The “look inside” feature is the online equivalent of flipping through a book in a bricks-and-mortar bookstore. It gives the reader a preview of content and writing quality.

When you haven’t made it possible for me to peek inside the book, I start to wonder if there’s a reason why. That could mean that a preview might discourage people from buying.

That’s probably not the message you want to send.

4. Your book description is written and formatted like an advertisement.

Nothing shouts, “I’m an internet marketer trying to grab your dollars!” like a book description that looks and reads like a website sales page.

Hype might fool others, but it doesn’t fool me. I want thoughtful text that helps me see what I’ll learn from the book, not a huge, boldfaced font shouting at me.

Major publishers don’t use this approach. Minor publishers shouldn’t either. It’s insulting to the reader.

5. The book description is one long block of text with no paragraph returns.

This is a problem for two reasons. First, I can’t read text with no white space. My brain craves paragraph breaks!

Second, it tells me that you care so little about your book that you didn’t even review your sales page before it went live.

If you don’t care, why would I?

On the other hand … authors have been complaining that the system has messed with their descriptions. To be safe, go to your book’s page and make sure it looks the way you want it to.

6. You don’t have an author bio or the one you’re using isn’t relevant to the book.

Until recently, I was guilty of this. My bio just disappeared — poof! — from my Author Central account. One day it was there, the next, it wasn’t.

So, even if you’ve added your bio to your Author Central Author Page, check your book’s sales page to make sure it’s still there.

You’ll find a lot of helpful information online about how to write your author bio (including on this site), but the one thing that most self-published authors overlook is relevance. Novelists write that they’ve fulfilled a life’s dream by writing a book — not relevant — and nonfiction authors use a generic bio that doesn’t shine a spotlight on their best credentials for the topic.

Whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, I need you to connect your life (and personality) to this book so I understand why you’re the right author for it.

Help me love your self-published book

I want to read more self-published books. I really do. I loved Karen Inglis’s and Kim Norman’s. I’d love to discover fiction that’s as good as their nonfiction.

But what I’m seeing tells me that many authors don’t care much about quality.

Here’s what Apple founder Steve Jobs says about that.

“Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.” ~ Steve Jobs

When someone tells you that what counts is quantity — when they tell you that you need a lot of books in the pipeline to be successful — look at the quality of what you’ve already written first. If it’s not as good as you can make it, don’t move on until it is.

Quality still matters.

Convince me to read your self-published book. What’s the best thing about it? 

If you’re like most, you read the Amazon book description at the top of the page.

That’s because you’re looking for specific information. If you can’t find it, you go on to the next book in the search results.

3 common mistakes

That book description is the reader’s gateway to your book — it’s what convinces a reader that your book is the solution to their problem. And yet, so many authors and publishers slap up something quick and vague — using as few as two sentences sometimes — on the most valuable real estate on your Amazon’s sales page.

Is it time for you or your publisher to revisit your description to make sure it meets reader expectations? Here are three common mistakes you’ll want to look for in yours.

1. It doesn’t answer the question, “What is the book about?”

It seems obvious, but sometimes that question isn’t answered. Oh, the words are there, but they don’t say enough for a reader to make a decision. Sometimes, the author is too focused on appearing literary. In other cases, a nonfiction book is described in two sentences, but needs 10.

2. It doesn’t have enough information or what’s there isn’t helpful.

Sometimes it’s not clear if the book is fiction or a memoir. Some nonfiction book descriptions are misleading — they over-promise and the book under-delivers, so the reader is disappointed. Disappointment leads to negative reviews and bad word-of-mouth.

BookBub, the company that sells discounted books through targeted daily email newsletters, offers helpful information from its research in an article on its site, “How to improve your description copy to sell more ebooks.”

One key tip: Help readers recognize themselves in your description by using phrases such as, “Fans of cozy mysteries about cats with magical whiskers will love this book.”

With nonfiction, be clear, concrete, and specific. How many methods does the book offer for retiring before we’re 50, or how many illustrations are there in the “turn your trash into treasures” crafting book?  Use bullet points to detail what we’ll learn from reading it.

For both fiction and nonfiction, make sure you include the keywords that will help your book get discovered in a search.

3. It has so many spelling, grammar, or capitalization mistakes that the reader knows the book will be hard to read.

If reading the description makes book buyers wince, they will never make it through the book — and they know it. Errors in the book’s description indicate that the book will be full of them, too. If the writer can’t spell, can she write? Maybe, but mistakes are distracting and diminish the reader’s enjoyment.

What’s more, if the author doesn’t care enough to present a polished book description, will she care enough to make sure the facts in a nonfiction book are accurate?

There are so many books available. People don’t need to bother with books that signal upfront that the author didn’t care enough (or know how) to proofread the description. 

Fixing the problems

Fortunately, improving your book’s description isn’t hard. Try these ideas:

Study descriptions for books by mainstream publishers in your genre. The large, established publishers have this figured out. The best-sellers page for your category on Amazon is a good starting point, too. Click through on the books to read their descriptions and analyze the various elements. Are any of them missing from yours?

What about keywords? Did you incorporate them into your description so your book gets found there?

Here’s the description for one of my favorites, Gone Girl.

It gives you two key pieces of information quickly: You learn what the book’s about, and you know it’s well-written.

Add to cart. 

After you or your publisher have written yours, show it to a few people who know about your book. Ask them if the description is accurate, interesting, and compelling. Would it encourage them to buy the book? Do the same with a couple of people who aren’t familiar with the book, asking the same questions.

Pay an editor to proofread and polish your description. (And, if you haven’t done so, pay somebody to edit your book, too!)

Your book’s description on any online retail site should be working hard to sell the book for you. If it isn’t, fire it and get a new one.

Learn more about how to optimize your book’s Amazon page in the Build Book Buzz training program, “How to Sell More Books on Amazon.” Amazon sells 75 percent of the books purchased online, so you can’t afford to make mistakes there.

What catches your attention in an online book description? 

Your book’s description must be pithy, compelling, engaging, and accurate. It must draw readers in; it must say to them, “You will love this book.”

In addition to appearing on the inside jacket cover or the back of the book, the description is used by online web retailers such as Amazon or Barnes & Noble. You also draw from it as you write your book announcement press release. And if you pay to promote your book in one of the daily deal newsletters that include BookBub, Fussy Librarian, or Riffle Select (among many others),  you’ll pull from that description when you create your deal alert.

You know that your book description can make or break your book.

Know what resonates with readers

That’s why it’s important to know what words, phrases, and references resonate with readers.

To help authors with this, BookBub tested book description language to see what words and phrases help sell more books. I summarized its research findings in a recent Build Book Buzz newsletter; our friends at Where Writers Win recently shared that article as a guest post.

You’ll want to read my newsletter article, “6 Magic Phrases You Can Use to Sell More Books” because the information from BookBub’s research will help you decide what to include in your all-important book description, and what you might leave out.

Let’s give a big round of applause to BookBub for sharing its research with authors!

Was writing your book’s description a challenge for you? Why or why not?