Publishing E-Books For Dummies

Crafting a Compelling Blurb That Helps Sell Your E-Book

The blurb is a vital marketing tool. Amazon calls it the product description, but you can consider the blurb to be the enticing text you find on the back of a paperback or on the dust jacket of a hardback.

Most authors find blurb writing incredibly difficult, so give yourself plenty of time to craft and edit the blurb. (Mine required a fair bit of pencil chewing and tea drinking, along with lots of crossing out and starting again.) If you typed a few hasty sentences while listing your e-book on Amazon, you definitely need to revisit that description.

Study the blurbs of bestselling books in your genre or category. For example, if you’ve written a nonfiction book about running a restaurant, head to the category Hospitality, Travel & Tourism (under Business & Investing and then Industries & Professions). Or, if you’ve written a love story about vampires, take a look at the Fantasy, Futuristic & Ghost category in the Romance section.

Print several blurbs from other authors’ e-books (or copy them to your computer). Review the blurbs, and note which ones make you want to read their books. Underline sentences or phrases that seem especially effective, and see whether you can use similar wording for your e-book.

For a fiction e-book, the blurb should

Briefly introduce the main characters: A newspaper report might describe a ...