Book marketing challenge 3: the KDP book description
When you upload and publish a book on KDP, you have to submit a book description. This is the blurb that appears beneath the cover picture.
It’s the first thing someone sees after the title, so it’s way more relevant than the back-of-the-book blurb I was agonising over last time. It’s one of the key opportunities to persuade a potential buyer to stump up some cash, and you have considerably more space available than there is on the back of your book.
This is how I tackled my description for The Best Nuisance I Can Be – and the key thing to realise here is that I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing:
- I started off with a one-sentence extract from the text. It’s different from the one on the back of the book, which is further evidence on my dithering.
- I used a modified version of the back-of-book synopsis, ending with a question that I hope will interest a small number of humans.
- I tried to figure out who my potential readers might be, and what might appeal to them.
- I wrote sections related to those characteristics, suggesting that my book might scratch their particular reading itches.
I covered the extract in my previous post, the synopsis was relatively straightforward, so let’s focus on (3) and (4)
Who is likely to read my book?
I have to be realistic about who’s going to get anything out of my book. Let’s start with age. My book is an adaptation of my 1980s diaries, when I was in my early twenties. And, as you may have noticed, the attitudes and language of a young man forty years ago deviate significantly from those of today. I think it’s reasonable to assume that it would offend a significant proportion of young people.
More than that, there’s large parts of it that the under-40s won’t get. The 1980s TV backdrop of Terry Wogan, Little and Large, Geoff Capes, Keith Chegwin and so on won’t mean anything to them. In a section where my dad asks me about wireless reception, they won’t understand that he’s referring to the radio. And how can they relate to relationships conducted without the possibility of 24/7 contact?
And these are just off the top of my head – I’m sure that there are far more profound disconnects.
My best guess is that if the book will land with anyone, then it would have to be with people getting on in years, or less politely, old fuckers.
My target audience might also include a group that overlaps greatly with old fuckers: the terminally nostalgic. My own nostalgia is both a weepy yearning for youth and a homesickness for the lost continent of the past. Maybe my book can offer something on both scores.
It might also appeal to weirdos. I can’t get round the fact that I was, and remain, a bit weird. And even if readers don’t share my personal oddities, maybe they could relate to the general experience of alienation and being an outsider.
Having come up with broad categories of potential reader, I tried to think how my book might scratch their itches.
I grant you three itches.
Itch A, I reckoned, might be nostalgia for the 1980s. What do you associate with the eighties? My book description has this:
Four decades ago, we drove around in cramped death-trap cars, and wrote letters, and rang home from payphones, and looked things up in books, and watched four channels on a telly that had knobs. Our parents didn’t quite get Boy George, and talked about the miners’ strike and that Maggie Thatcher, and were already ancient but would never die.
The Best Nuisance I Can Be lands a nostalgic gut-punch, evoking those far-off days when life was objectively worse than it is now… and yet somehow so much better.
I hate myself for writing ‘a nostalgic gut-punch’. How could I possibly know if it provides that? I mean, I know the ending has had a couple of people in tears, but was that nostalgia, or something else? We’re back to the falsehoods inherent in marketing.
Anyway, itch B is alienation. I came up with this:
1980s students loved booze, hated the Tories, and had BMIs lower than Gandhi’s. That was the law.
Back then, anyone from the Black Country loved football, going to the pub, and being from the Black Country. That was the law too.
But Black Country student Phil doesn’t drink, couldn’t care less about the Tories, and has un-studenty muscles. He doesn’t understand football or pub culture, and wishes he wasn’t from West Bromwich.
At college, he’s terminally uncool. At home, he’s a freak.
Phil’s story is one for all the squares and weirdos out there, those of us who never quite fitted in… and didn’t want to!.
What do you think? I spent forever trying to boil down my various oddities into things people might relate to. Rather than, for example, simultaneously putting as many different foods into my mouth as possible.
The ‘all of us’ makes me queasy: any claim that my book will appeal to every alienated individual is objectively – and obviously – untrue.
Itch C leans further into nostalgia, focusing on memories of youth:
Phil’s diary is a love-poem to life in our early twenties, that sublime interlude between adolescence and settling down.
An age when we’re unstoppable, indestructible, nuclear-powered by youth.
A time when we’re old enough to know all the sensible choices… and still young enough to ignore them.
If you look back on your early twenties with longing and disbelief, The Best Nuisance I Can Be might ring a great big bell.
That old enough/young enough part is a nod to a line in Rush’s song ‘New World Man’. Not that anyone will spot it.
What do YOU think?
I repeat: I don’t know wtf I’m doing.
YouTube authorities on book marketing suggest I should continually be tweaking my book description. This would be easier if I actually had any sales to speak of. Which reminds me, I must write a post on the strange world of YouTube Book Marketing channels.
I suppose this could be proof positive that my book description sucks. However, this is only one example of my rubbish marketing, so that doesn’t follow at all that the book description is problematic.
What I can say for certain is that it’s too long. The bits that you’ve read follow on from a text extract, a synopsis and a sort-of endorsement. We’re assured by every marketing expert that we only have 4.3 nanoseconds to capture a reader’s attention. Anything after that is wasted effort.
Maybe I should just put ‘READ THIS, YOU WEIRD OLD FUCKERS!!’
Anyway, drop me a comment with your thoughts.
