Hi! I’m Dale Beaumont and welcome to Get Published TV. This is the only dedicated show on the internet to help authors and aspiring authors to write, publish and market their own bestselling book. Now in today’s episode, we are going to talk about the back cover of your book. Now, this is actually responding to a question that has come in to us via email. Someone is saying that they're about to write the text for their book cover and what should they put on there and what should they not put on the back cover of their book? So, a great question. We’re going to give you answer in just a few moments time. Before that I just want to make a mention that if you just new to Get Published TV, then I’d really encourage you to subscribe to make sure that you're getting updates of each of these videos and there's a few different buttons that you can click on just around this video, that’s if you're on the GetPublishedTV.com website, the first thing is just putting in your email address then you get sent an email every time there's a new show. So then you can click and you can get into it and you can start watching or you can subscribe. I think you should definitely do the email thing. But in addition to that, you’ve also got iTunes if you have an iPod and you'd prefer to actually watch some of our episodes on demand through iTunes and that would be a great idea. You’ve also got Twitter, you’ve got Facebook and maybe one or two other ones as well. So just please subscribe and that way you will never miss out on one of our shows and it will arrive into your inbox in some way or into your computer screen, you can click and you can start watching.
Alright, so having said that, lets now talk about what to have on the back cover of your book. Now, this is again very subjective and different people will give you different opinions on this what I will say though is that that cover of your book is really, really important. Because this is the text that is actually going to sell your book and if this is not good, people will stop there and they won’t go any further. So this is how it is. You go into a bookshop; there are hundreds of books there. Now, normally all people have got to see is just that respond. However, if you're lucky enough they may get to see your front cover which is great. Now, if it grabs their attention and we’re going to talk about front covers in another episode, okay. So we’re not talking about front covers now, just the back cover, they're going to look at that and go, “That sounds interesting.” Or “That looks interesting.” And they're going to turn it over and that is exactly what you need. The whole purpose of the front cover is just to engage them, to draw them in and there are a number of different strategies or methods about how you do that. Again, that’s a whole topic in itself. Its at least one video if not, two or three videos just on the front cover because it is so important. But then people are going to turn over and that’s where they're going to make their decision whether they're going to go any further or not and its either going to go one of two ways. Not what I’m interested in, back on the book shelf, it’s gone or they're going to read the text on the back cover. They’re going to go “That’s interesting.” And then you going to start t get them to flick and that’s what you want them to do, they start to flick through the book and then to say, “Wow! There's a lot of text here.” Or there's some good visual, there's some good diagrams. It looks clean. It looks professional. Then I go to back of the book again, read it a second time then they’ll go to the cash register and they’ll buy it so that cover text is really, really important.
Now here is an example of a really good one. He’s a friend o mine called Pat Mesiti, and in fact he’s just in an office, two offices over there to the left or to your right. So, Pat Mesiti, he’s an Australian author and speaker, probably one of the best speakers in Australia who had also spoken in a number of other countries right around the world. I think you can check out the website, I think its PatMesiti.com or if you Google Pat Mesiti, you’ll be able to find out about the books that he has written and also his presentation or you can go along -- check out PatMesiti.com. So, he’s a great guy and this is an example of a really good back cover text. He’s an example of one which I would say, you know, I don’t know if you can see that clearly enough but so many people, I don’t know why they do this, like the back cover text is so important like every square millimeter is important and you want to use that space. This is the most valuable real estate in your book. If you look at it that way, it’s the most valuable real estate, so -- there's a lot of gaps and there's a big border and there's a photo that is small and down the bottom and so it probably doesn’t sell, this book as well as what it could sell it. And I can go through lots of different examples. Some people would do it well and other people not so well. I’m not trying to be a critique here or anything like that. All I’m saying is, the back cover text is so important. So make sure you use every bit of the back cover text to your advantage.
Now, what I’ll probably going to have to do is -- because I know that I get into the detail of this, I’m going to run out of time. So what I’m going to do is share with you another bit of the -- another piece of the puzzle when it comes to the back cover text and then in tomorrow’s video, I’m going to talk to you about what are the specific things that should on it. So let me just go down one path and I’ll go down the other path tomorrow. So the path that I want to go down now is that for most people, they actually -- you know, they're quite talented in the area of writing or maybe you’ve got someone else who is a ghost writer who has put that book together for you and just because you're good at writing your book, often times you are not the best person to write the text to actually sell your book because its very, very different. The text that should be inside is going to be very different to these texts here. This is kind of what we call copy or sometimes sales copy. This has got to sell not just the features but also the benefits of the actual book and its got to engage people under emotional level. Zig Ziglar who is one of the best sells trainers in the world, he says, “Logic will make people think. Emotions will make people act.” So one of the things that you need to do is to learn how write in an emotional way that -- to walk towards people to actually take action. Remember, logic makes people think, emotions make people act. So what I would recommend in many cases not for everyone but in many cases that you should engage a professional copywriter to write the back cover of your book. Yes, it’s going to cost you some money in order to do that. It may cost you $500. It may cost you a thousand dollars if you got a really, really good copywriter. Hopefully, it won’t cost you that much but lets just say a few hundred dollars. Its probably going to be one of the best investments that you’ve made because from a bookshop point of view this can make or break the success of your book in bookshop terms. Now, if you're selling books at seminars and events and people love you, look, to be honest, they're going to buy your book no matter what's on the back cover even if it’s a blank. They’d probably would still buy the book because they're connected to you. However, its very different when you're actually -- in a bookshop because you're competing with another hundred, 200, 300 books on that same shelf so therefore your book’s really got to sell, you got to sell your book and the way that you actually sell it is through the back cover text. So here is the -- what I’m going to leave you with before I finish this video, I think you should put just as much, big statement, just as much time, not time but just much focus into the back cover of your book as you would the entire text. That’s a big statement. And I say that not necessarily that you take it literally because if its taking you three months to actually to write your book, I wouldn’t say that you have to take three months to write a back cover but treat it with that same amount of importance because a lot of people, what they do is they write their book, it takes three months and then they do this in 5 minutes. Slap it on and say, okay, it’s done. And they put the least amount of time into this and more time into that. This is so important and make sure you engage the services of a professional copywriter to do that.
Now, having said all of that, no one -- isolate people with Get Published TV. I’m really a -- I probably should’ve mentioned this up front talking about non-fiction here. Of course fiction is very different. I haven’t had a huge, I haven’t actually written a fiction book before so therefore, I’ll get an expert in some other time to talk about this from a fiction point of view. I’m purely talking about non-fiction here. And so just remember, this is important. Spend a lot of time to make sure that you get it right and also engage the services of a professional copywriter in order to help you with this and comeback tomorrow because I’m going to talk to you about what should actually be on the back cover of your book. So make sure you come back again tomorrow so you can get part two of this conversation. This is Dale Beaumont from Get Published TV. Thanks for watching. See you again tomorrow.
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