|
|
| Writing Information |
|
|
|
|
Sell More Books With a Powerful Back Cover
Did you know that your back cover information is, after the cover, the best way to sell more books? And, that most authors, emerging and experienced, miss this opportunity to engage more potential buyers? Your book's front cover and sizzling title must impress your buyers in four-eight seconds. If they like it, they will spend ten or so seconds on your back cover-a great opportunity to convince them that your book is necessary for their success. Does your back cover pass the test? Best Solutions to the Biggest Mistakes 1. Mistake: Too many non-powerful words and too busy to have a focus. Solutions: A back cover of 6 by 9 inches should have fewer than 70 words. Use sound bites; picture and emotional words; benefits, not features; and testimonials to capture your readers' attention to keep your message focused. Make every word count and be willing to get five-fifteen edits. 2. Mistake: Too much superfluous material on it such a long author's bio or large photo. Potential buyers want to know how the book will help them, teach them a skill, or entertain them. Solutions: Print only a one or two-line bio on the back cover. Put your photo and more bio on the inside of the back cover. Omit features such as format information, which belong in the mini sales letter short introduction. Connect with your buyer emotionally with specific, powerful ad copy. For self-help books use bullets with specific benefits, and enough of the right kind of testimonials to sell your book in under 15 seconds. For fiction, modify to include a startling scene with snappy including a bit of plot, and maybe a powerful quote. Use bookstore models to assist you. 3. Mistake: Repeating the book's title at the top of the back cover. Solutions: Since your potential buyers already know the title and are stimulated enough to look at the back cover, hook them with an emotional question or headline that gives them the #one benefit of your book. Create a "Hot Headline" that compels your reader to buy. Notice the headlines in your newspaper. Visit your bookstore and notice other best selling authors' headlines. "What's So Tough About Writing?" by wordsmith Richard Lederer, author of The Write Way; "Imagine Being an Author," in Dan Poynter's Writing Nonfiction; or "To Age is Natural?To Grow Old is Not! In Rico Caveglia's Ageless Living. 4. Mistake: Omitting testimonials. Solutions: Testimonials sell more books than any other information on the back cover. Put at least three up. Contact a variety of people. Use one from a top professional in your field, one from a satisfied reader, one from a celebrity who cares about your topic, and one from a top media person. These can be local contacts. In her book, A Kick in Your Inspiration, Ruth Cleveland got one testimonial from an ex convict! Jacqueline Marcell, author of Elder Rage, took eight months to get forty testimonials from celebrities. Her book is endorsed by: Steve Allen, Ed Asner, Dr. Dean Edell, Dr. John Gray, Dr. Nancy Snyderman/ABC, Regis Philbin. Jacqueline Bisset, and Phyllis Diller. Worth the effort? Yes, because in April 2001, she made the cover of the AARP Bulletin distributed to over 35 million readers. It included a feature story, some how-tos and contacts and pictures of the author and her book. She had to dance fast, and order 10,000 books to get distributed by the time the piece came out. After it came out, she was inundated with speaking engagements. There's a problem you might love to have! After you write several books and become rich and famous, you, like other professionals, will fill your back cover with testimonials. You won't even need to add benefits, because people have already bought your other books and liked them. Potential buyers will purchase when they see people they trust and know recommend the book. Besides filling the back cover with testimonials, you may want to even add extra testimonials in the front pages of the book. The more testimonials, the better! If you are unsure how to ask for testimonials the easy way, contact a professional book coach. 5. Mistake. Independent publishers submitting galleys to reviewers, distributors, and wholesales without ANY back cover information. Solutions: "Make the back cover your first area of concern," says Susan Howard, Director of Consulting Services at top publishing firm, The Jenkins Group Inc., who write "The Publishing Connection" She adds, "Waiting for testimonials is generally the reason the back cover of a galley is left blank. Failure to realize the value of the back cover seems to equate with the failure to realize that the text for the finished back cover can always be changed before the printing of the book." It's important for writers to "market while they write" with the "Essential Hot-Selling Points"-- To make each part of their book sell copies. The book's back cover is all-important. Judy Cullins �2004 All Rights Reserved. Judy Cullins, 20-year Book and Internet Marketing Coach works with small business people who want to make a difference in people's lives, build their credibility and clients, and make a consistent life-long income. Author of 10 eBooks including "Write your eBook Fast," "The Fast and Cheap Way to Explode Targeted Web Traffic," and "Create your Web Site With Marketing Pizzazz," she offers free help through her 2 monthly ezines, "The Book Coach Says..." and "Business Tip of the Month" at http://www.bookcoaching.com/opt-in.shtml and over 165 free articles. Email her at mailto:[email protected].
|
|
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
Kick-Start your Juices Listen, consider this scenario. Important Points of Fiction Fiction manuscripts receive feedback that addresses and scores: Characters In A Romance Novel Before you even begin writing your novel, you need to know who your characters will be. Minimally, you would want two major characters, the hero and the heroine. They will interact mostly with each other throughout the novel. How they interact with each other will determine the outcome of the story. Will they resist each other in the beginning of the story and by the end, fall in love? Or will they fall in love in the beginning of the story and then be driven apart by conflict? Once you've chosen them, then you need to decide what age they are, their personality traits, and their names. Put a Spin on Your Idea! Eight or nine times out of ten, picking up and leafing through a magazine's or book's table of contents, you will find at least one or more articles or chapters that will catch your attention immediately. Never mind that that article or chapter's subject had been written about many times before. The one that caught YOUR attention stood out, most likely, because it put the topic in a new perspective. For Beginners: Ten Ways To Prepare To Get Published (Skip directly to ten for the fastest shortcut!) Help! I Cant Write! Writer's Block can strike like a King Cobra, paralyzing every little golden nugget you try to create. What can you do to lick it? Below are some fun suggestions to crack the nut! (write about each prompt for twenty minutes) Increase Your Web Traffic By Using Keyword Articles If you have an online home based business you know that routing traffic to your web page is incredibly important. Not only in order to make sales and increase revenues but to continue your business. However, you probably have realized that getting your web page noticed and getting a high ranking result from the search engines is difficult. In light of that, here are a couple of tips you can use that will help you increase the traffic to your web page. Which Comes First - Short Story Or Novel? A writer writes. Bet you've heard that one before. Or maybe this one: if you want to be a writer, first you write one word, then you write the next. Both of these old clich�s are true, of course. That's how they turned into clich�s. But there's another dilemma a beginning creative writer often finds himself facing: do I write short stories or novels? Writing novels is almost always the end goal. You'll find exceptions---such as Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison, who primary built their careers writing short stories---but the vast majority of successful storytellers are novelists. The real question then is this: do I jump into novel writing with both feet or do I test the waters first by writing short stories? Generally, beginning writers don't understand that these are two very different forms. They see writing a short story as easier, less intimidating. At a cursory glance, it's hard to argue with that. But if you ask a writer successful in both forms, he'll almost always tell you that short stories pose a much more difficult task. Why? Because you're working on a small canvas. The novel is a wall mural. It's expansive. You have time to fully develop your characters. There's room for movement, for growth and change, for surprises and insights, for looking back as well as looking forward. The short story is an 8x10 landscape. It's a moment in time when your character faces a critical point in his or her existence, a moment that changes everything. In a glimpse, readers must believe in your characters, in the crisis they face, in the choices they make. It's a tiny, one-dimensional surface that must appear three-dimensional. With that understanding, starting out writing short stories can still be a good proving ground for a writer. You learn quickly what works and what doesn't. You learn to write tight, to pack as much meat into as few words as possible. You learn to capture the core make up of your characters. All very valuable lessons for both the short story writer and the novelist. How You Can Take Advantage of the Increasing Demand for Freelance Online Writers The freelance writing market is a growing market to be in. There are many jobs available, but sometimes, it can be hard to find the work that you want, and available at the time you want it to be. All opportunities will help you to develop a career in the field in which you want to, though. Six Tips for Submitting Fiction - if you want it to get published You can learn a lot about what it takes to place a story in an ezine by starting up one of your own. Why We Dont Write Our Books In the ten years that I've taught people how to get on with their books, I've noticed a phenomenon that I'll call "Author's Block." Would-be writers can, indeed, sit down and work when pressed to it. The problem is that they're not so sure they want the pressure of being an author. But they do want to. But they don't. And so on. Creative Problem-Solving: Following Your Stream of Consciousness Having trouble finding a solution to a nagging problem? Try a well-known journaling technique called stream of consciousness--you may be surprised at the creative messages you receive from your inner self. Writing Query Letters that Count -- Close the Deal with Your First Letter! Your query letter can be a deal maker or a deal breaker. So, if your query letter just lies there, you've killed the sale immediately or your story or novel immediately. If you want that story -- your baby -- to be read, reach out of that query letter, grab the publisher, editor or literary agent by the neck and say, "Hey, you absolutely have to have this story!" Query letters that begin with "Hello, My name is. . ." have as much chance of selling as vacation trips to Baghdad. Remember, your query is like a r�sum�'s cover letter, and if you're in a competitive industry, that cover will sell you far more than the resume will. So, you have to grab the reader with your first sentence. To do this, make him believe that he desperately needs what you're selling. Following are a few tips on how to do it. Writing Helpful Help ? A Minimalism Checklist User documentation is all too often written by programmers for programmers. It tends to focus on the product's features, rather than the user's tasks. Generally, programmers aren't in the ideal position to be writing user documentation. They're too close to the bits and bytes, and they're too far from the user. To them, what the product can do tends to be far more important than what the user can do with the product. Rejection ? Have the Right Perspective and Don?t Quit If you're getting rejections from your submissions, please don't quit yet until you read the following article. I want you to get a perspective on rejection. Write Again! - The Art Of The Written Letter Remember the days when we wrote with pen and paper? We took time and thought into each note written. There wasn't email, text messaging, cell phones, or instant messaging. Don't get me wrong these advances are great and useful. I have even succumbed to their wiles. What you Dont Know About Book Publishing Can Cost You Dream that your book can be a number one best seller? Read books or visit Web sites that say they have your answers? -- All you need to do is get their program, follow their advice, and the world is yours. Or, you think I'll write it, but someone else can market and promote it. And that would be who? Publishers certainly don't promote unknown authors. Why I Write I started writing as a way of keeping safe memories of a particularly adventurous 3 years of my life when I became totally addicted to the world of online chat rooms and met a number of 'gentlemen' for real that I met in fantasyland online. Story Structure - Final Conflict Beyond three and four act story structure, lies the Hero's Journey. Knock-Out Writers Block: Listening To Your Inner Voice When I was young, I used to talk to myself. Long, drawn out, one-sided conversations. I didn't have an imaginary friend, I just talked to myself. My mother says that's why I became a writer: because of my overactive imagination. I admit she may be right. Those conversations currently get me through my worst cases of writer's block.
|
| home | site map |
| © 2005 |