Welcome back to Get Publish TV, this is Dale Beaumont. This is the show that helps authors and inspiring authors to write, publish, and market their own bestselling book in eight minutes a day.
Now, over the last couple of days, I know I've kind of go overtime a little bit I think of you know average 10 maybe 11 minutes or so. So this time, I really want to cut it back for you. I'm going to try and stick to run about six minutes or so to try and make it short and sharper and punchier. In that way, I can create more and more episodes so please hang on, please trust me, we’re going to do our best here. This is hopefully going to be a shorter one to catch up for the last couple of days so without any further do, I'm going to get into today’s topic area.
We’re still talking about the back cover of your book. And essentially, we’re looking at it from more of the non-fiction angle. Later on in a feature episode, we’ll look at it from a fiction writer’s perspective and I’ll make it in another expert to talk about that area specifically. And the other thing that you should probably know, I didn’t really point this out. But this is primarily for self publish office because as—if you’re going through a publisher, the publisher is ultimately going to make these decisions. However, sign that. I would really want to empower you to say that even though you may go with a publisher, in my opinion you should at least attempt to write the back cover text yourself or you may even want to pay a professional not the publisher, you pay a professional to actually do it and present that to the publisher inside. Here is what I think. This is the best that I could come up with ultimately this is your decision as the publisher but I just wanted to give you my input and perspective.
Now, what you may find is that the publisher may go “Wow! It's amazing, look like she’s wrong with that” or they might choose bits and pieces or what elements. But you know, sometimes a lot of times we think that publishers know everything, they actually don’t. You know often times authors themselves know more than the publishers, okay. That’s not always true, I don’t want take anything away from publishers, there are some great ones out there but many of them act as kind of good at book publishing as you may think.
Alright, so we talked about all of the elements I'm not going to repeat them, okay. Go back on yesterday’s video and the day before. But some of the other elements that you should consider having on the back of the book that we briefly spoke about was your barcode so you must have a barcode if you want to sell it on book stores, if you don’t want to sell it in book stores then you don’t need to have a barcode.
Sign that, even if you don’t want to sell your book in bookstores, having a barcode actually makes your book look like it should be in a book store or it makes it look professional. Sometimes I get people send me books and they don’t have a barcode and I know that their books aren’t sold in bookstores and therefore, I kind of—it gave me a bit of the sense of why that person ask. I haven't done a lot of the things that I'm not teaching you how to do. My opinion is even if you don’t plan selling it on bookstores still, get a barcode anyway because it makes your book look more professional and makes your book become more valuable. So, people will be, you know, more inclined to buy it because it has that level of professionalism.
Alright, another thing is some books have it, some books don’t. And I'm just trying to look now for different books where this one here has the recommended retail price. It's got Australia or AUST 1995 and it's got New Zealand and it's got 2395. In my opinion—now there's two different ways that you can go. Some people say, “Look, put the price there because it puts a value on the book.” And that’s kind of can be a good thing because people know what the price is. However, my opinion is don’t put the price on the back cover and the reason being is because that as a publisher you want to be able to fluctuate the price and you don’t want to have to go and reprint books. So, if you decide after a year or two years that you want to increase the price, then if you’ve got a price there you obviously can't do that or you have to do a reprint and get a change. So, I would probably say don’t have it there, okay because when it goes into a bookshop anyway they're going to put a price sticker on it anyway so you don’t actually need to write the price on the book. If you want to you can but in my opinion, you shouldn’t.
The other thing that you probably want to have on the book, you want to have it but some people have is an actual category. Now, this is not always, not all books have it in fact. I'm kind of right now struggling to find the book that actually has this. But many books actually have—here we come I've got one. This has got business/management. Now, this can be useful because if it's actually going to a bookshop then someone in a bookshop can go and knows exactly where it belongs because this one is called generation, why? By my friend Peter Sheahan and it's got Thriving and Surviving with Generation Y at Work.
Now, it's kind of pretty clear where that book belongs because it's obviously about work but an often time is not clear, often times they think, “Where does this book go?” So, having that there, it tells them where to put your book on the bookshelf. So, that can be a really good thing. But remember, once you do that, then you kind of stock with it. If you kind of want to move it around a little bit, it's kind of—and that even if you don’t have it here then inside the book, you would normally put it on the imprint page. So, what you basically have is on the imprint page. Now, this one again doesn’t have it but all of my books on the imprint page. And we’ll talk about what the imprint page actually is, it actually tells people what category this book actually belongs in.
So I recommend, probably don’t have it on the cover, back cover but have it on the imprint page, okay. So, that’s just a recommendation but you can decide whatever you want to do there. Look at other books that are similar to yours and see what category they're in and you can either put the same thing or you can choose not to have it at all, it's up to you. The other thing which I really recommend that you should have is your website. Now, if you go through a publisher they may not want to have your website there or they may want to have their own website there, the publisher’s website.
Now, that’s one of the advantages of self publishing of course because you can decide that, you can decide whether you want your website there or not. So, I actually have my website there at the bottom. And again this one has—this has got the publishers website so it's not very good for the author, it clearly this book is by someone who’s going through a publisher. This is another friend of mine. He’s name is Tony Melvin, great guy and in his book he actually does have his website because he is self publish. So, he’s got solvencymakers.com. So, you can check out that particular website. So again, that’s another reason to actually self publish. And the last thing that I'm going to mention is that you may want to have a stamp or a little sticker or maybe it's in a little book or something like that about some bonus gifts.
Now on my books, I actually have a little boom blasts it's called on the front cover and I'll explain this in a future video about the importance of having bonuses. But here I've got $357.00 of free bonus gifts. And that is on the front cover. If you’ve got or if you can put that on the front cover otherwise you can put that on the back cover if you’ve got space. So, put free bonus gift as well and that adds a little value to the book and if people are looking at two or three books that are very similar and one’s got $300.00 or a thousand dollars sometimes of bonuses and one’s got nothing then they most likely will pick yours as a poster of somebody else’s. Again, that’s a whole lot of conversation that we’re going to look at the future today about bonuses. But I promised that I make this video shorter than my last few so I'm going to wrap up now, they are all of the elements. If you watch this video in the last couple of day all of the elements of the back cover and lots of detail.
Now it's over to you, you can now make the decision that’s right for you and your book. And I would talk again very soon, thanks for watching. This is Dale Beaumont from Get Publish TV.
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