Hi! I’m Dale Beaumont and welcome to another episode of 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 yesterday’s episode, we were actually talking about the back cover of the book and we were talking about what are the elements or what are the different things that you should have on the back. And as I was kind of trying to express, that every square centimeter or every square millimeter or if you’re in America, square inch is really important, so you really got to maximize it. So, just to quickly recap again, I’m not going to go into the detail that I did yesterday but headline is at the top. Underneath that are going to be two short sharp punchy paragraphs to really draw people in and explain what’s unique, what’s different, what’s special about your book. Why should they be continuing to read this as opposed to anything else out there? Then, in this book, you’ll discover or you’ll learn or whatever it is.
And then underneath that, you’re going to have somewhere between five to ten, that’s ten as maximum, bullet points not just features but what are the benefits of the actual book. Then what I am saying is after that, you’ve really used probably about three-fifths and you’ve probably got about two-fifths left and you kind of got two different ways to go. You can put both on there if you’re kind of really good with your use of space if you got kind of a larger book. If you got like a small space to work with then you may have already run out by now. If you got a larger space then it can actually work. The two things are: one, testimonials. So you can use testimonials ideally from high profile people in your industry or in your particular area that you are writing about to say what they think of the book. They are things like, “This is a must read for anyone who is serious about fly fishing” or whatever it is “from Joe Bloggs World champion fly fisherman or it could be something like, “This is a groundbreaking book for people that blah, blah, blah.” So you want to have maybe one or two short testimonials. Now, someone might give you a testimonial that goes over half a page. That’s obviously gives you sort of useless of the back cover because every line is really critical so your quotes are really probably going to be maybe one short sentence at the most two short sentences. So if they’ve given you this much text, maybe you are going to have one line and then a dot-dot, cut all these stuff out and then finish the end of the sentence if you want and then put the person’s name. And if they’re like Donald Trump then you probably don’t need to say “billionaire property developer.” Donald Trump is probably enough. However, if it’s somebody that isn’t a celebrity or isn’t a household name, then underneath or maybe not underneath because if you do it underneath then you’re losing another line of text. So you’d probably do is have the person’s name and then a dash and then next to it so it’s on the same line, write their claim to fame is. So here, we’ve actually got a picture of our testimonial and this is in fact a different way of doing it. What we got here is we’ve got a testimonial at the very top, so we got a testimonial at the top and we got one at the bottom. Then that kind of breaks that I was talking about before by having a headline at the top but what this person has done is that they’ve it in an actual box and they reversed the color, so here we basically got black text on white; here, they got white text on a black background. So technically, they kind of started the back is here, so that kind of works but they got Allen Pearce and then they got author of eight number one bestsellers. So, they got the name of the person and what their claim to fame is. So we got headline, we got two short sharp paragraphs, we got our bullet points and then we got one or two short testimonials from high profile people ideally or at least high profile people in your particular field or industry that you’re writing about and they’re going to go in there.
Now, if you got enough space, you can do the last thing or if you haven’t got enough space, you may want to not have the testimonials and instead you may want to have a bio or short bio of yourself. Now, this person is to manage to fit everything in. It’s not always possible. They’ve got everything that was mentioned before and they got two testimonials, one here and one here, or they could have had two here. And then they also got a bio of this particular and again, they’ve put white writing on a black background with the picture of the person. So, sometimes you have to choose. You have to say, what’s more important, to put of bio of me or to put some testimonials? And occasionally, you’ll decide either way. It’s really up to you. It comes down to do you want to be promoting yourself as an authority and as an expert? If so, then you might want to put in a bio of yourself but if not, maybe you’re just going to fill out with testimonials.
Now, in my case I really because I’ve got 16 different contributing authors in my book by the time that I actually mentioned who all those people are, then I didn’t have any room for myself. And I really didn’t even have any room for testimonials because I wanted to put photos of some of the people that are in my book. So, in order to make up for it, when you actually open one of my books, the bookmark fell out there, the first one, two pages are actually testimonials. I couldn’t have any testimonials on my back cover because I didn’t have the space, so I put testimonials here and here. So when they open up the book that’s the first thing that they see. I also didn’t have enough room to put a bio of myself. So what I did is actually the bio of myself inside the back cover. I got a picture of myself there with a little bio and my website dalebeaurmont.com at the bottom. There’s one other element that you’re going to have. There are actually few other elements but one of the main element and that is a call to action.
I’ll just summarize again. Headline, one or two short sharp, punchy paragraphs, “then in this book, you’ll discover”, then your bullet points, somewhere between five to ten bullet points, then one or two short testimonials, then if you got the space, a bio of yourself, that is what gives you the right or the authority to actually be an expert or to write this book with integrity. Are you just someone that has been fly fishing for only one week or have you been doing it for the last 20years and have you won to a championships or have you been coaching others in the area for many, many years. So that kind of gives you that credibility and the permission to say, “Yes this person is an expert, therefore, I want to listen to them.” And also maybe a photo of yourself as well because a photo builds a lot of rapport and connection but the one thing that you must have is you must have a call to action. So it could be something like, “If you are ready to dramatically increase your success in fly fishing, buy this book now,” something along those lines. That’s a bit corny and I probably wouldn’t go with it but you got the idea. “If you’re ready to” or “if you want… then”, so what you’re saying is you got two lines there basically. “If you want this,” “if you want to grow a multimillion dollar business, then buy this book” or “grab your copy today”, or take action and start reading. There are few different example what it does is to call to action that’s saying, “Now, you’ve read this, now you need to do something.” You’re telling the person exactly what you want them to do. Alright, so they are the main elements of the back cover of your book.
Now, there are a couple of other little bits and pieces that might, may or may not want to put on there. In fact, one of them you must put on there but some other ones you must have if you’re selling it in bookshops a barcode. In each individual country, there are agencies that you need to contact in order to barcode. In Australia, you probably need to go to Thorpe.com.au and that’s where you get a barcode from. In America, there are different places, so if you do some Google searching, you’ll be able to find it and each country has a website. There are agencies and you may pay some money. Normally, you’d either buy one or you can buy like a pack of five or a pack of ten. If you’re doing multiple books, and it becomes cheaper but you want to have a barcode.
Some other things which you may or may not want to have is the recommended retail price, the category of the book, what category it’s actually in. You may want to have your website, you may want to have the publisher’s website and you also may want to have some bonus gifts as well. Now, I’ve just gone through those last four very, very quickly. In fact, I probably should do another video where I’ll talk about those in more detail because again this person comes of going each way. You can probably tell there’s lots of information here and yes I am being very detailed when it comes to this but it’s really so important. You got to get this right in order for your book to really become a commercial success and also to make sure that you’re able to get this book out there and into the hands of lots and lots of people.
So, this Dale Beaumont from Get Published TV. Thanks again for watching. Make sure you come back again tomorrow to learn more great tips about how you can become a more successful author.
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