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    Ally Machate on “Blowing Up” by Mirasee FM

    Interested in learning about all the different ways a book can bring in revenue? Well, we have the perfect listen for you! Tune in to this interview with our Founder & CEO Ally Machate on Blowing Up by Mirasee FM, a podcast that explores how successful entrepreneurs find and turn that one key to ignite their business growth.

    In this interview, Ally and her hosts dive into important topics such as:

    • How to plan and write a book that generates tons of revenue…beyond just book sales
    • How to use a book like a “supercharged business card” that attracts clients, speaking gigs, and other high-paying opportunities
    • The story of a former Navy SEAL who used a book to evolve his popular Navy-SEAL-style fitness boot camps into a leadership training empire
    • Much more…

    To hear the full interview & gain valuable insights listen to the episode here.

    “Which Editor Do You Need?” at the Washington Writers Conference – May 13, 2023

    Please join us on Saturday, May 13th, 2023 for the Washington Writer’s Conference. This event will be held at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel & Conference Center at 5701 Marinelli Road, Rockville, MD 20852.

    Hosted by the Washington Independent Review of Books, the conference includes numerous talks and panels, including “Which Editor Do You Need?”, featuring our very own Ally Machate. Here are the details:

    Get your questions ready for top book editors Ally Machate and Katherine Pickett. In this session, Ally and Katherine will give you the inside scoop on the types of freelance editors available to you, what they do, why you might need them, and how you can make the most of the editing experience. We’ll discuss developmental editors, line editors, copy editors, and proofreaders. There will be plenty of time for Q&A with this dynamic duo, so come prepared. Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of how editors can help them achieve their dreams of publication.

    All the conference information and registration is available on the Washington Independent Review of Books website. Hope to see you there, and be sure to say hi if you attend!

    Sell More Books with Targeted Cover Copy

    I recently posted an article about how target audience should influence your book’s cover copy, aimed at nonfiction authors. But novelists and memoirists also need to know how you can sell more books with targeted cover copy, meaning that you are providing an intriguing summary of your book’s plot and themes that takes your target audience into account.

    Before we dive in, a brief note on why I’m lumping fiction and memoir together, even though memoir is nonfiction.

    Memoir is a story about something that really happened. Fiction is a story about something made-up. But both types of books involve creating a compelling narrative with themes, story arcs, and character arcs. Prescriptive nonfiction (self-help, business, etc.) might contain some anecdotes but ultimately those books are not narratives. Therefore, you’ll see that copy for fiction and memoir relies on narrative devices or story details to intrigue book browsers, whereas other types of nonfiction typically rely on highlighting benefits to the reader. This is an important distinction to understand.

    Now here are some best practices to help you sell more books with targeted cover copy for fiction and memoirs.

    What’s In It for Me?

    While you aren’t highlighting benefits per se, cover copy is still all about connecting with “What’s in it for me?” In other words, what does your ideal or target reader want to see in your book, and how will you show them it’s in there? Figure that out before you start writing your copy and you’ll be well ahead of the game.

    Consider your genre as an example. What kinds of story elements do fans of horror or sci-fi expect compared to readers of inspirational memoirs? If you can’t answer this question easily, you have some research to do if you want to sell more books using targeted cover copy. What are your target readers interested in? What tropes do they enjoy?

    You don’t have to highlight every single trope your story includes—there may be a lot! But if you can write your plot summary such that it highlights some of the most popular tropes or the ones that take center stage in your novel, your copy will better engage your target audience.

    [TIP: If this discussion of tropes is new to you, check out this useful case study that explains the concept of writing to market and how it can help you to sell more books.]

    Start with a Strong Headline

    Now that you know the question your copy should answer overall (What’s in it for me?) and some basics on the structure of your copy, let’s talk about the headline.

    If you are getting advanced endorsements, this could be a quote from another author that includes details about the book without giving away the plot, such as noting that the story is frightening, dark, and keeps you on the edge of your seat.

    If you’ve previously published, you could also consider using a review snippet. Choose something that speaks to you as an author or your writing in general, since the story of this book is surely a bit different than the last one.

    Alternatively, you could just use a straightforward teaser-type headline, something that raises a core question your protagonist or narrative will explore, or that highlights the type of story this book tells.

    Ideally, the header should include one or two primary keywords or key phrases that a reader might be using to search on Amazon—imagine the effect of having searched for a thing, and then a book popping up that specifically mentions that thing right away! But you shouldn’t bend over backward to make that happen as it’s fine for them to appear within the rest of the description too.

    [TIP: You can make your headline stand out by using boldface type and lightly design other elements of your description for display on Amazon using this cool book description generator.]

    Build a Body of Evidence

    The body of your copy should flow linearly as in first this happens, then this happens. It should also focus very narrowly on two things: Your protagonist’s character arc and your primary or main plot line. You just don’t have time to go down rabbit holes opened by subplots or secondary characters.

    First, sketch out the most exciting and interesting details relative to the main character (in a memoir, that’s you!) and main plot line. Are there major scrapes you can turn into questions that the reader will want to know more about? Which secrets can you hint at for the reader to drool over? What heartstrings are you going to pull on? When you can incorporate mentions of the most popular tropes in your genre, that will really help you sell more books using targeted cover copy.

    For example, if your book is a romance, you’ll want to highlight the growing tension between your protagonists and hint at their happy ending (while also throwing in a major obstacle to overcome). If your memoir is heartbreaking, your copy should make readers gasp and think, “Oh my god, how is this person still functional? How did they overcome this? I need to know!”

    It’s also a good idea to touch on the story elements that relate to the main theme or themes of the book. Most memoirs are about overcoming something, so let’s say yours is about going through a horrific divorce from some abusive, powerful person. Maybe your copy shows what life was like “before” (you and said spouse enjoying a life of luxury, escaping in your private jet each weekend), then reveals the start of things going wrong (spouse escalates from being nosy to hacking into your email), and wraps up with a hint of how it seriously goes wrong (when a flattering jealousy turns into stealing her passport and leaving her on a remote island with armed guards, can she keep pretending that this is what love looks like?).

    Focus on Selling, Not Just Summarizing

    Sites like Amazon can be misleading in that they label this section of your book’s sales page as “Book Summary” or “Book Description.” But great cover copy is more than that. Overall, your description should be more marketing copy than summary. Aim for details and statements that raise questions in the reader’s mind. Will he rescue his beloved in time? Can she save the world without sacrificing herself? Who is really behind the evil plot that has left thousands inexplicably dead?

    It’s a good idea to examine the copy of successful books both similar and directly competitive to yours to see what they highlight, and how you might want to put your spin on it. You can learn a lot from reading good copy. Big publishers pay professionals to create theirs—you can read and study it for free online!

    Include A Call to Action

    It may seem obvious, but there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence that explicitly asking for the sale improves your chances of getting it. So you might consider including a call to action at the end of your cover copy. Make it clear and concise, and make it urgent: Potential readers should feel like they need to act now.

    There are other ways to wrap up your copy, of course. Ending with a tantalizing question is a classic approach. You could also be explicit about how your book fits into its category by noting 1-3 authors whose work is similar to yours, a la “Fans of Author1 and Author2 will enjoy the thrilling ride and international flavors of this brave new mystery series.”

    Don’t Be Afraid to Experiment 

    When you self-publish, you’re the boss, and that means you can upload new copy any time you want. So try out different approaches! Trends change, and what worked great yesterday may not work great a few months from now. If you change your copy, don’t change anything else or else it’ll muddy your results. You want to see how just the copy change affects your sales. And be sure to give it at least a few weeks before you change the copy again so you can get a fuller picture.

    Writing great cover copy is not easy, but it’s a critical skill to master. If you’re hiring pros, it’s still useful to think through all of these points so you can give the best details to your copywriter and be clear about what you want to see in the final draft. By following these tips, you’ll sell more books with targeted cover copy and reach more readers.

    Founder of The Writer’s Ally, Ally E. Machate is a bestselling book collaborator, award-winning editor, and expert publishing consultant who loves using her insider knowledge and experience with the publishing industry to lead serious authors toward success. She and her team live to help make great books happen, whether that means showing a writer how to improve a manuscript, get an agent, or self-publish; or coaching an author on growing her platform to sell more books. Since 1999, she has supported hundreds of authors on their publishing journey and takes pride in serving as their books’ best ally.

    How Target Audience Should Influence Your Book’s Cover Copy

    When I speak to nonfiction writers, I talk a lot about the importance of identifying the correct target audience for your book. Many authors understand that knowing your target audience is a crucial factor in planning your book’s content, but do you know how target audience should influence your book’s cover copy as well?

    Your cover copy, which often doubles as your online book description on vendor sites like Amazon.com, is more than just a summary of your book. It is an essential piece of marketing copy that helps sell your book—after all, when readers are shopping, once your cover catches their attention, the next step is usually to check out that copy and see if continues to pull them in.

    And while the final copy isn’t needed until quite late in the game, it can sometimes be helpful to write an early draft of your copy even while you’re still drafting your book. As an exercise, writing cover copy is a great way to get into the mindset of your ideal readers—in other words, how will you pitch the book such that your audience will know it’s for them and will solve their problems? How will you highlight its contents to best attract and connect with those browsers so you can convert them to buyers?

    Know Your Focus

    For a nonfiction book, cover copy is all about connecting with “What’s in it for me?” Once you start thinking about the answer to this question from your ideal reader’s perspective, you can begin to see how target audience should influence your book’s cover copy—the benefits that are most attractive to any given reader will vary widely depending on who that reader is!

    Attention Readers! The Headline

    It’s typical, and effective, to write a headline that grabs a person’s attention. If you are getting advance endorsements from other authors, your headline could be a quote that includes details about what the book will do for the reader from someone of note. But it could also be a powerful question that speaks directly to the core problem or solution of the book, or it could even just be a straightforward teaser-type headline.

    Ideally, the headline should include one or two primary keywords or key phrases that a reader might be using to search on sites like Amazon: Not only does it help your book come up sooner in search results, imagine the effect of having searched for a thing, and then a book popping up that specifically mentions that thing right away. But don’t bend over backwards to make that happen as it’s fine to pepper some keywords and key phrases into the body of the description too.

    Highlighting the Right Body Parts

    The body of your book description or cover copy should be short, often just a few paragraphs. Trends come and go, but generally, you’ll find that the copy you see online isn’t much longer than the copy you’d find on the back or flaps of a print book. Don’t let the fact that the copy is displayed online lead you to overwrite—interested book browsers want to know immediately if this book is right for them, they don’t want to have to read a page-long article convincing them of it.

    First, touch on the needs that most likely drove the reader to seek out a book like yours in the first place. This may be the most important example of how target audience should influence your book’s cover copy. What is the problem language your target audience is using to describe their challenges? What pain points do they struggle with? Try to think from your ideal reader’s perspective: Is this book right for me? Is it going to help me with my specific problems, questions, or goals? Now, how can you speak to that as directly as possible?

    Next, outline succinctly how your book will solve those problems and provide other benefits. Again, thinking from your reader’s perspective: What exactly will this book help me do or show me how to do to solve my problem? What will I learn? What will I achieve? Bullet lists are very common and very effective in highlighting key benefits the book will deliver. This is another opportunity to work in some keywords or key phrases your ideal reader might be using to search on Amazon or their favorite online bookseller that would take them to your book.

    [Tip: You’ll actually be programming these keywords and key phrases in your book’s listing as metadata when you set up your account. It’s the combination that helps more people discover your book through searches.]

    Learn From the Best

    Besides those basics, it’s good to look at the copy used by some successful similar and directly competitive titles to see what kinds of pain points and benefits they highlight and how you might want to put your spin on it.

    You can learn a lot from reading good copy. Big publishers pay lots of money to professional copywriters to create theirs—you can read and study their examples for free online!

    Overall, your description should be more marketing copy than summary, and that’s what you’ll see when you examine the copy of the bestsellers in your category. It’s misleading that some sites refer to this copy as a Book Description or Book Summary, when really, this is a pitch. What’s the difference? When pitching your book, you aren’t just telling prospective readers about the book, you’re trying to convince them that they should buy and read it. What do they need to hear and know about the book to feel that the solution they need is within your pages? If your book essentially has the same information as your competitor, why would they choose yours?

    [Tip: I personally like to see a lot of “you” in copy that speaks directly to the reader, meaning phrases like “This book will show you…” The more personal the problem set, the more personally you want to connect with your reader. Something less personal, like a business book, might work better with phrasing like, “This book will help readers…”]

    Don’t Be a Sore Thumb

    While you’re absorbing techniques from these examples, beware the tiny voice inside you that says, “We should do something different to stand out!” There are times when standing out from the crowd is important. This is not one of those times.

    It’s a smart instinct: You read book description after book description, and you start to see patterns and similarities. You think, “I’ve got to take a different approach if I want to distinguish my book from the others.”

    But this is a rookie mistake.

    While you do want to positively distinguish your book, the overall packaging of your book has a specific job: Quickly and even subliminally signaling to prospective readers that this is in fact the book they’re looking for.

    Consider cookbooks, for example. Almost universally, cookbook covers feature gorgeous images of the kind of food one presumably learns to cook when you buy and read the book. If the author is a celebrity chef, the cover may have a photo of them on it too. Flip any given cookbook over and you’ll find copy that speaks to the food philosophy guiding the book, some examples of recipes contained within, a little about the author and their experience or unique take on food preparation, and enticing language designed to get you excited about trying these recipes out.

    If you publish a cookbook and put a beautiful picture of a beach at sunset on it and write copy that is twice as long as usual and waxes poetic about the joy of food and how it enhances your life, how cooking can be like taking a mini vacation, how eating well can let you enjoy more of your time…well, that will certainly stand out.

    But, it’ll stand out like a sore thumb. Not like a superstar.

    When people are scanning a table or bookshelf at their favorite bookstore, or if they’re scrolling through the cookbook category online, they’re looking for a cover that feels like it’s speaking to them. They see their fave celebrity chef smiling and holding out a plate and think, “Yes! I want to cook like Giada, I love her show!” They see a bowl of bright, fresh, delicious veggies they don’t even recognize covered in exotic looking spices and think, “Yes! I want to make healthier food that’s less boring! This will help me do it.” Pair either of those covers with copy that talks about adopting Giada’s best recipes for your family in 30 minutes or less or creating inexpensive, delicious vegetarian meals even your pickiest eaters will love and you have a winner.

    But when they come across that book with the picture of a beach at sunset? With copy that runs so long, the designer had to use a font that’s too tiny to read comfortably (and online, it just seems to go on forever)? Prospective readers seeking a specific cooking solution aren’t going to snap that book up. They’re going to think, “What the heck is this?”

    They’ll most likely scroll right past it, assuming it’s mislabeled. Or else they may start reading the copy out of curiosity and put it down within seconds out of boredom (or difficulty reading that tiny font!).

    A Word On Keywords (and Key phrases)

    Given the role that keywords and key phrases play in your book’s discoverability, it’s worth taking the time to research them for both use in your copy and, as I mentioned, you’ll be choosing these to program into your book listing as metadata.

    You can start by just thinking logically and putting yourself into your ideal reader’s shoes: What might a reader be looking for such that this book would pop up as a welcome solution? Make a list of these words and short phrases.

    Next, go to Amazon (it’s the biggest online retailer for books, so it makes sense to put your focus there, especially at first). Then actually type the words or phrases into the search bar one at a time and see what books come up in the search results. Are you seeing books like yours? If they are competitive titles, then you’ll know you’ve hit on the right words.

    It can be good to have some keywords/key phrases that take you to books in whose company yours belongs, but if you can additionally find a couple of search terms that get even narrower and more specific so that your book would be the only or first one that comes up for searches, that’s even better. You get enough slots on bookselling platforms that you can accommodate both types in your choices.

    There are advanced techniques and tools (my fave is Publisher Rocket) that help you drill down into narrower and narrower subcategories where your book will have less competition, but again, this is not the time to stand out like a sore thumb. You only want to niche down if the keywords and key phrases you identify as less competitive (i.e. they bring up fewer competitive titles) are still highly relevant. Otherwise, your book will stand out…but to the wrong target audience, which means fewer sales and more negative reviews.

    Parting Tips on How Target Audience Should Influence Your Book’s Cover Copy

    It’s very common for authors to have an idea and then begin writing their book from there. However, if you start thinking about your book from a marketing perspective at the start, you will end up with a much more marketable book!

    In particular, understanding how target audience should influence your book’s cover copy as well as the content of the book itself improves your odds of reaching the right readers and selling more books, having a greater impact, and growing your business.

    And isn’t that the whole point?

    Don’t miss these related posts:

    How to Sell More Books with Targeted Cover Copy

    How to Have an Epic Launch for Your Nonfiction Book

    Ally Machate, Book Editor

    Founder of The Writer’s Ally, Ally E. Machate is a bestselling book collaborator, award-winning editor, and expert publishing consultant who loves using her insider knowledge and experience with the publishing industry to lead serious authors toward success. She and her team live to help make great books happen, whether that means showing a writer how to improve a manuscript, get an agent, or self-publish; or coaching an author on growing her platform to sell more books. Since 1999, she has supported hundreds of authors on their publishing journey and takes pride in serving as their books’ best ally.

    Your Book, Your Choice: 3 Proven Paths to Publication with the MWA, Feb. 11, 2023

    Dreaming of “getting published?” With many options for bringing books to market, how do you choose the way that’s most aligned with you and your goals? This in-depth presentation reveals how traditional and self-publishing paths work, what kind of projects are best suited to each (as well as an underappreciated third way to publish), and the decision-making shortcuts that will help you identify which of the 3 proven paths to publication is ideal for you.

    You’ll also learn insider secrets to getting a book deal (and why you might be better off without one), how to avoid common publishing mistakes that waste your time (and money), why doing everything yourself can either be a mistake or your best option, and more.

    Join us on February 11, 2023, at 2 pm – 3:30 pm as our very own Ally Machate helps you decide which of the most common paths to publication may be best for your project with Your Book, Your Choice: 3 Proven Paths to Publication, a webinar hosted by the Maryland Writers’ Association.

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