Lean Publishing Tip of the Day: Writing Good Book Descriptions
In addition to your book description being seen by people, it will also be seen by bots and algorithms, so you need to keep keywords in mind when you’re writing it.
When people first discover your book, the first thing they’ll probably see is the title and the cover image.
So, you should think hard about both of things!
But the next thing they’ll see is probably your book description, so you should think hard about that, too.
On Leanpub we call this the “About the Book” section, although we also have a shorter text called a “Teaser” that will appear under your book’s title and cover image on its landing page.
In addition to your book description being seen by people, it will also be seen by bots and algorithms, so you need to keep keywords in mind when you’re writing it.
One theme of these tips is to look for successful examples of what you’re trying to do, when you’re doing it for the first time.
Look for recent bestselling books in your book’s subject area or genre, and study what their book descriptions say, and how they’re structured.
Based on this research, we recommend you should try writimg three separate book descriptions, choose one, and ask people for feedback.
You can also test how different book descriptions perform, if you want to get more sophisticated. To do this, you would, for example, buy an ad, and run it one week with one book description, and then run the same ad the next week, with the a different book description.
