Lesson III: Research and Testing
Like most everything in self-publishing, the genre-specific research you do should guide your way. Before writing your book’s description, you should be studying the descriptions of the bestsellers in your genre, looking for commonalities in the things below. If there doesn’t seem to be a lot of commonality, that’s okay. You’re probably best starting with a simple three act description with standard boldings and using the testing strategies covered later to hone in on the best format on your own.
Commonalities to Look For
Format
Are most of the descriptions in this genre in the three act structure style? Or has a different style been adopted that is proving successful?
Type of Opening Blurb
Your opening blurb holds a lot of importance. It’s not the deal-breaker — if people have clicked through to your page, they’re going to at least read a sentence or two of the description — but it sets people up to read the rest in an excited state of mind. Look at both the style and substance of the blurb to see what types are doing the best job.
Do most people lead with a hook or a review? What type of hook? Humorous? Scary? Personal? Mysterious? Is there still a hook after the review? What’s the average length of the blurb? Are they using a comp (a comparison to a movie, book, or author) in place of a hook?
Type of Closing Line
There is generally a lot more spread in closing line styles than opening blurbs, so don’t worry if you can’t find any through line. But look for stylings, length, type. Is there a review or blocks of reviews after the closing line? A call to action?
Font Stylings
Bold and italics help draw attention to text. How are the bestsellers drawing attention with these stylings and what are they drawing attention to? You’ll see a lot of different uses in your research and in the samples below. Try to figure out not just the commonalities in stylings, but if there is a common aim for the attention grabbing, even if different stylings are used.
Blurbs and Reviews
When you have good reviews, you want to show them off. But in some genres, shouting them out in the opening of your description might do more harm than good. Some genres like their reviews in with the description. Others like them in their own spot. Keep an eye on what the bestsellers are doing and place your reviews there.
Everything Else
People will try new things and some of them will stick. Any commonality between bestselling book descriptions should be considered.
Other Formats and Alterations
While the three act description structure will serve most of your needs, it won’t fit all all of them. Sometimes your research will determine your genre’s readers reward other types of descriptions. Other times the book isn’t converting and you need to try something new. Here’s some other formats and alterations you may see or want to try.
First Person
Even if the book is in first person, the description usually isn’t. Until it is. First person narratives occur in YA a fair amount, and also in paranormal and romance. If you’re seeing a bunch of them, try it out for yourself. It should give an immediacy to your description that might have been missing.
A lot of first person features a clipped style that uses short sentences or sentence fragments, often only one per line.
Extra Bolding
I spotted this style first in one of bestselling indie author Freida McFadden’s book pages. She bolds different sentences or partial sentences other than the opening blurb and closing line, adding emphasis to different parts of their description. It works better in a longish description, breaking up the blocks of text even more. Try it out on sentences with good priming words.
Note that neither her opening blurb nor her closing line are fully bold. The closing line has no bolding and instead uses italics to set it apart.
Emojis
These are mostly used to put stars after reader reviews you’re quoting. Other than that, be cautious and only use them if it seems genre appropriate. They look natural in the reader’s enthusiastic review Figure 3 below, but in the meat of a description they’re likely to look unprofessional.
Italics Instead of Bold
The opposite of putting emojis in, for a quieter genre, consider using italics instead of bold for your emphasis lines. More like a gentle insistence than a shout for attention.
Listing Your Tropes and Trigger Warnings
Very genre-specific. Mostly seen in romance, but expanding into other genres, especially trigger warnings.
Testing
Now that you have all the tools to write a good description, you should be able to write several of them. Change big things. Change small things. But give each iteration a specific name so that you can keep records. Records of what? you say. Records of conversions for each description.
If your ads are getting a good click-through-rate, but those clicks aren’t turning into sales, there’s something on your book page that isn’t working for the people clicking through. So, change something. I like to start with the description. There are two reasons for this.
- Since the cover is usually part of the ad, it’s less likely to be part of the problem.
- It’s easier to change a description than a cover.
You don’t want to just change the description and hope. You need to go about it with some intention. And, as always, the intention is to sell books. You do that by running several descriptions for a set time (at least a week), then comparing their sales numbers. Even if things turn right around, you should probably run the whole test as planned. Because you don’t know whether the next iteration will sell even bigger, and also, everything you learn in these tests can be applied on your next book, so you don’t have to go through it again.
Assignments:
- Research your genre’s descriptions. Read the “What Does a <<<genre>>> Book Look Like?” section of your genre guide and then look at the bestseller lists on Amazon. Use the skills you’ve learned to determine what the best format for your description should be.
- Write several descriptions in that style.
- Download the Sales Element Tester (SET). On this spreadsheet, you can enter the days the description was up and the associated clicks (if you’re running ads), sales, and KU page reads (if your book is in Kindle Unlimited) for that description. Along with the length of the book, this will give you an average sales per day and sales per click for that iteration.
- Run Ads for Your Book. If you can afford it. But money spent now in testing should have benefit not just for this book, but for your entire author career. And if you’re doing Amazon ads, you can keep the price down. Facebook will cost more, but will also get you a far greater volume of clicks. Clicks are a better metric than days because you have no idea if anyone actually came to your book page. With clicks, you have a definite set of views.
- Use the SET to figure out which description is best. Use that one, or better yet, make small changes to it and keep testing. Active testing in all things — descriptions, covers, ads, A+ content, other text areas — is the best way to keep your sales materials current and successful.
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