Getting your book description right - Two examples

Let’s take a look at the keywords and descriptions of two best-selling ebooks

Here’s what a reader would see if they looked at Amazon’s page for ‘My Sister's Grave’ by Robert Dugoni which on 18^th October 2016 was number 6 in Amazon’s best seller list.

Would that description inspire you to click the ‘Read more’ link? No? I wouldn’t either. Checking I found the full description was 778 characters, none of the nine keywords the book uses are in the description. Eight of them are Amazon categories but one ‘United States’ isn’t and seems rather pointless ('US' might have been a better choice).  I suspect this ebook appears in Amazon’s top listings because of the reputation of the author (Ranked #40 at Amazon at the time of writing) and because of the publisher paying to have it promoted. If I was the author, I would be upset at the publisher (Thomas & Mercer) for doing so little. You can see Amazon’s top 100 authors at:      https://www.amazon.com/author-rank#1

My second example is ‘A Shade of Vampire’ by Bella Forrest. Here’s what you would see before that ‘Read more’ link:

Notice the use of bold text? You can use limited HTML to do this in a description. Notice also the writer has appealed to Twilight, The Mortal Instruments and Vampire diaries fans also. Be careful here that you don’t mention other author’s names or copyright items since this is likely to get your book a lower ranking. In this case, especially since the description stops mid-sentence, I would read on.

This time the description is 3,070 characters long and includes short review statements. Bella Forrest appears to be self-published. She uses 17 keywords/tags. Here’s how she uses them:

·         One appears in the title (vampire)

·         Romance and fantasy are keywords used in the description

·         Romance, vampire, werewolves, shifters, coming of age, romantic, angels, ghosts, psychics are compulsory keywords for specific Amazon categories

·         Werewolves & Shifters, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Paranormal & Urban, Teen & Young Adult, Demons & Devils, Witches & Wizards, Paranormal & Fantasy are Amazon categories

Seems to me Bella Forrest has done a pretty good job of her keywords and description.

No description is ever perfect though so it’s always worth revisiting and tweaking the next time you produce a new book edition. This is what Bella Forest's description looks like now:

It's certainly worth mentioning those extra 2 million sales and the 5-star reviews but that extra text has pushed out of visibility 'she cannot wake. A quiet evening walk along a beach brings her face to face with a dangerous pale' It's still effective though but perhaps that blank line could have been made narrower using embedded styles in the HTML Unfortunately Amazon allows none of that 'clever stuff' in their author HTML Only the following tags are allowed:

HTML Tag	Description
<b>	Formats enclosed text as bold. Use: <b>This text will be bold</b>
<br>	Creates a line break. Use: <br> This text is forced to the next line
<em>	Emphasises the enclosed text; generally formatted as italic.Use: Normal text <em>emphasised text</em>
<font>	Determines the appearance of the enclosed text. Use: It is possible to use <font face="Courier New, Courier, monospace">a different choice of font</font>
<h1> to <h6>	Formats enclosed text as a section heading: <h1> (largest) through <h6> (smallest). Use: <h1>This is heading 1</h1>
<i>	Formats enclosed text as italic. Use: <i>italic text</i>
<li>	Identifies an item in an ordered (numbered) or unordered (bulleted) list. Use: See <ol> and <ul>
<ol>	Creates a numbered list from enclosed items, each of which is identified by a <li> tag. Use: <ol> <li>This is first</li> <li>This is second</li> <li >This is third</li> </ol> This produces: This is first This is second This is third
<p>	Defines a paragraph of text with the first line indented; creates a line break at the end of the enclosed text. Use: <p>This is some text which you want displayed in a paragraph. This paragraph is not very interesting but then… maybe I should tell you about the next book I'm writing. It's about time travel.</p> <p>Nope - you don't want to hear about that. This is the next paragraph.</p> This produces: This is some text which you want displayed in a paragraph. This paragraph is not very interesting but then… maybe I should tell you about the next book I'm writing. It's about time travel. Nope - you don't want to hear about that. This is the next paragraph.
<pre>	Defines preformatted text. Use: <pre>Here's an example of preformatted text. It's usually monospaced.</pre>
<s>	Formats text as strikethrough. See also, <strike>.
<strike>	Formats text as strikethrough. See also, <s>. Use: <strike>this text is struck out</strike
<strong>	Formats enclosed text as bold. See also, <b>.
<sub>	Formats enclosed text as subscript: reduces the font size and drops it below the baseline. Use H<sub>2</sub>O which produces H2O
<sup>	Formats enclosed text as superscript: reduces the font size and places it above the baseline. Use: πr<sup>2</sup> which produces πr2
<u>	Formats enclosed text as underlined. Use: <u>This text will be underlined</u>
<ul>	Creates a bulleted list from enclosed items, each of which is identified by a <li> tag. . Use: <ul> <li>This is first</li> <li>This is second</li> <li >This is third</li> </u> This produces: This is first This is second This is third
NOT Allowed HTML/CSS	<div> <span> and any CSS

Extra keywords

Did you notice that I said both examples of book descriptions used more than the seven keywords Amazon allows you to use? That is possible if you produce an epub book with meta tags and use that as the source document at Amazon. They will still expect you to submit up to seven keywords but also appear to use the extra ones you put in epub meta tags.

Description content

Now - what about the content of your book description? The first five lines of it are by far the most important. In those five lines of text you must capture enough of the readers interest to make them want to click that 'Read more.' Work at those five lines. Use power words - words that have great emotional impact. Above all leave the reader on a cliffhanger where they have to find out what comes next. Try putting the sentences through a headline check - there's a good one at https://coschedule.com/headline-analyzer Try and get a score of 60+ for each sentence.

Keywords

Book descriptions are searched by Amazon for keywords other than the seven they ask for. Try including more keywords in your description to capture those people who search for books like yours but not with your chosen keywords.  There's an art to choosing keywords and if you have only seven, chosen in ten minutes when you came across that section of KDP, then you haven't understood that art yet, But that's the subject of a 'Getting your keywords right' blog.

Are some book marketing sites cheating authors?

If you pay for promoting your book through Twitter and website posts; how do you feel about these sites having fake Twitter followers and no website traffic?

What is a fake follower?

A fake follower isn't a real person - just a name  They will never read your tweets, interact, retweet posts and will certainly never follow links or buy anything.

How do you tell if a Twitter account has fake followers? 

There are certain clues:

• people who have an egg profile image or a scantily clad female image
• people who don't have a profile description or one which don't describe the personality or profession of the person
• people who don't tweet in your language
• people whose tweets are protected
• people who don't interact or interact nonsensically/aggressively
• fake accounts will have a disproportionate follower and following count. Far more people are followed than follow back. A real account will have a more balanced ratio.
• people who have not tweeted in the last 3 months. These may be genuine accounts but if they are they will be of little value to authors
• people who tweet the same limited number of tweets endlessly

All of these are indicators only. If a Twitter account has several of these clues it's an indication but not proof of a fake account.
It's all too easy to buy Twitter followers. Software exists which generates Twitter accounts. It would be immoral for promotion sites to purchase such followers and unethical to knowingly allow such followers to remain. There are sites normally available which will check for 'fake' followers for you.
https://www.twitteraudit.com/ and https://fakers.statuspeople.com are two of them. Neither claims to be 100% perfect in that they may wrongly identify genuine followers as fake and fail to detect others which are fakes. You can also use Twitter management tools such as ManageFlitter to help you identify fakes.

What about website traffic?

No matter how attractive a book review on a website is, if the website doesn't get traffic and the pages are not discoverable by searches then the review will never be seen. You can use
Alexa.com to examine the website traffic. If you are using Chrome as your browser you can install a toolbar icon to quickly gauge a site's traffic. (http://www.alexa.com/toolbar) A site with an overall traffic rank of more than 2 million is unlikely to be of much help. A website with an Alexa rank of more than 1.5 million will be little use.

Paid advertising

What about paying for your book ad to be displayed? In a recent case Facebook suggested that an ad would be displayed to 420,000 people within a 50 km radius of the advertiser. Yet the total population of the area was only 320,000. You also have to factor in your advert being shown to 'bots' rather than real people. Watch the video at http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-click-fraud and for 'soap' think 'book'

I'm making a list of who's naughty and nice...

Here's an example of a group of sites which charge $99 to promote your books by posting them on websites, promoting on Twitter and adding books to emails sent out to subscribers. I'm not identifying these well known sites because there is still some room for doubt about 'fake' followers. It's possible for a troll to skew the results by purchasing fake followers for a site. A site which TwitterAudit.com identifies as having just 14% of real followers is pretty damning though. At the best, in my opinion, the site owner is careless and at worst, dishonest!

Site	Twitter Followers	'Real' followers	Website Alexa Rank	My opinion
1	19,094	14%	#316,685	Tweets from this site are useless but promotion in the website may be worthwhile
2	1938	93%	#23,976,799	Very limited tweet value and website promotion will be unseen
3	11,707	97%	#217,001	Moderately useful tweets and excellent website visibility - a site worth promoting on.
4	12,697	31%	#5,801,496	Tweets of little value and few people will see the website
5	14,201	51%	#8,434,577	Half of tweets won't be seen and few people will see the website
6	No Twitter account	n/a	#2,912,361	Website is not very visible
7	7,657	98%	#391,624	Few but genuine tweets, good website visibility
8	23,705	97%	#1,824,011	Good site for tweets. Website is just 'average'

In all these sites have a 91,000 twitter following - better than the 60,000 they claim but there are 72,000 unique followers of which 33,000 are likely to be fake.
Of course there is no conclusion to be drawn about how this group of sites promotes your books by email. This can be an effective method. However based on these results would you pay $99 to the group?

Will you help me to 'check it all twice?'

Have you paid for a promotion and got unspectacular results? If so can you check the site's 'Fake' followers at
https://www.twitteraudit.com/ (You can check them free there) or at https://fakers.statuspeople.com/ (You can check 5 tweeps and yourself there.) Also download the Alexa plug-in for Chrome at http://www.alexa.com/toolbar and let me know the site's overall rank. Be cautious of making accusations. Just give the results and your 'opinion'.

If this post has helped, informed or entertained, will you help me? Download a FREE copy of our book 'Immortality Gene' from http://smarturl.it/avi Even if you never read it (but we hope you will) - it will help our rankings.