Book Cover Designs Tips - Part 4

Hi! I'm Dale Beaumont and welcome to Get Published TV. This is the only dedicated show in the internet to help authors and inspiring authors to write, publish and market their own best selling book. Now, in the yesterday’s episode if you been tuning in every single day, congratulations. We’re actually talking about the importance of the copy that goes on the back cover of your book. That’s the end and cross the board whether you'd be a fiction writer or a nonfiction writer or even if you have a poetry book, the same importance supplies but what we’re going to talk about now is what are the specific things that should be on that back cover of your book. We’re going to talk about the front cover in another video. So, we’re going to talk about this mainly from a nonfiction perspective. So it’s still a good idea if you're a fiction writer and going to watch because you will pick up some good ideas. But I want to just point that out before we continue. Now, so let's go through this, so we’ll have a little basketball ring in the background let's see if I can get one in behind. No luck. Anyway, let's talk about the back cover of the book. What are the elements, what should be on there, and maybe what shouldn’t be on there? Okay, the first thing is an attention grabber. Attention gabber should be something which is going to be at the top. Now, normally we’re talking about a headline and a headline -- if you think about a newspaper and newspaper, in newspaper they used headlines all the time. Why do they use headlines? Well, to draw you into the story. People asked themselves the question why should I bother reading this particular article but if you got a headline there, it just grabs people. Now, obviously newspapers are being testing this for decades for probably over a hundred years now. So, they kind of know headlines work and it’s the same thing with regards to your book as well. So, don’t just go into heavy blocks of text. You know, have a headline to draw the people in, okay. So, here’s an example you can see that they're maybe not clearly but at the top they’ve got this an orange headline which is used at the top. After the headline, I recommend having two short paragraphs, two short paragraphs that again draw people in and you know, it starts to tell people what your book is about, who the book is actually for, who will it actually help. So this again draws people in even further so you got your headline and then you got two short paragraphs. Now, when it comes to back cover texts, you can't have a long drawn out sentences because people start to switch off and you can make people work too hard. They may just give up and put the book back on the shelves. So, but if you got short, sharp punching statements then it makes it easier for people to actually read. And again, with newspapers most of the time, they know the people have a short attention span so they try to keep sentences fairly short. And most paragraphs either one or two sentences same thing when it comes to the back cover of your book. Headline, then you’ve got two short paragraphs then after the two short paragraphs you would have that -- in this book you’ll discover or something along those lines, you may want to draw it out a bit further or you know in this book you’ll learn or this is a ground breaking study and in it you’ll discover or learn either one of those two words or uncover or unlock whatever really appeals best to you. And then underneath that line, in this book you'll discover that’s in simply terms you can embellish that and expand it however you like. You're going to list some bullet points and normally you can have anywhere between five minimum or probably you're not going have at least five and don’t have any -- so at least five, probably maximum, you know eight, maybe maximum ten but that maybe even be going too much. And for me, it’s not that important but I'd like to have odd numbers instead of even numbers or either five or seven is ready good but if you want to do six or eight then that’s fine as well. Then you actually get to write the bullet points. Now, these bullet points are really important. Most of them should be one sentence and they should all you know finish that sentence. So, in this book you'll discover, it could be you know the fastest and easiest way to blah, blah. How to, why it’s important, the essential qualities and the biggest reasons why, blah, blah! So, you're kind of want to mix it up. You don’t want to have them all the same like how to this, how to that, how to blah, blah! Those hows get a little bit too boring and repetitive. So, mix it up with some of those things that I just mentioned. If you want them repeated just for one, this video and you can go back and use or write some of those words or starting words down. Or otherwise just start reading sales copy on websites. There's a lot of copy that -- you know, there's a lot of websites out there and that kind of long websites that have lots of text and most of those have lots of bullet points and look at how they stop them and that will give you a trigger to how to write them so they sound unique, they sound different, they all don’t sound the same. Now in another video, I probably will come back and talk about the bullet points in more detail because I went through a process when I came to writing the bullet points from my book not this one but one of the ones over there or over there and so we’ll come back and talk about that in more detail later on. Underneath that you can go one of two ways, so you have a bit of a decision to make here. You can do both or you may want to do one or the other. So, let's just quickly recap at the top, you have your headline, okay. Very important to draw people into your book so that's normally the -- what is the biggest reason for people to -- want to actually read your book or could be the biggest fear that they have or the biggest concern or maybe it’s the thing that they're going for and the thing that they want. So, sometimes it can actually be a question like, do you want to grow a million dollar business and still enjoy a balanced lifestyle, if so keep reading, that’s just one example of the top of my head or it could be another one. You know, I used that up by not ever getting to the second date; well this book has the answer and maybe it’s a book about relationships or something like that. So, you got like an attention grabber either what’s called the move towards which is something that people want or move away from. So you know, with another book that I had somewhere is about Hair Loss. You can beat hair loss. So, the headline at the top, this may not be the greatest headline but they’ve got Hair Losses now preventable -- is now a preventable and treatable condition. So, they got a statement, so sometimes statement works or questions work. Then you’ve got two short paragraphs with very short punchy sentences followed by in this book you’ll discover and then after that you have your bullet points listed down after the “in this you’ll discover.” So, that should take up about half if not maybe 3/5s of -- or maybe not as much as three quarters but maybe three-fifths of your actual back cover. So over half way, so what we’re going to do now is I'm probably talking for a quite a while I'm going to wrap this video up because I will run out of time if I keep talking and I'm not going to talk about the bottom half or the little bit -- less than a half but still really, really important, okay. So, again, I kind of going into quite a bit of detail here. I think it’s really important and so I don’t want to just kind of rush through it and then you’ve got a whole lot of questions or you don’t understand why, we’re actually doing it. So, I will wrap up this video and now and I’ll come back and continue again with this conversation on what to put on the back cover of your book. There's a few other bits and pieces as well, so make sure you come back and watch tomorrow’s episode. I'm Dale Beaumont from Get Published TV. Thanks for watching. See you again next time.