Does Your Blurb Need a Makeover?
Whether your book has been published for a day or for a year, you have the ability to refine it if it isn’t performing how you would like. For some, that might mean getting a new cover to better fit the genre. For others, it’s sending the book for more proofreading or adding in that scene they went back and forth on. For still more, it’s changing the blurb on the sales page.
Blurbs are admittedly not the easiest things to write. Some would say it’s harder than writing the entire novel that needs the blurb! Fortunately, they are also one of the easiest things to test to see if it resonates with potential readers.
4 Ways to Tell if Your Blurb Needs a Makeover
So how do you know if your blurb needs tweaking? Here are four things to check against your blurb to see if the answer to your question is yes.
- It reads more like a synopsis.
- It’s too long.
- It doesn’t tempt the reader to buy.
- It’s buried.
A Blurb Is Not a Book Report
If your blurb sounds like a synopsis or book report, you should consider reworking your blurb. A synopsis tells the reader what’s going to happen. Tell too much and you’ve given everything away. If the reader knows everything, they might move to another book where they need to read to find out more. Get the reader interested so they want to discover those things for themselves. Don’t give away the ending, and don’t reveal the twists.
When It Comes to Blurbs – Size Matters
Sometimes this next part goes hand in hand with synopsis-like blurbs. You don’t want yours to be too long. Readers do not take much time in deciding what book to buy. If you don’t get to the heart of your blurb until 400 words in, they may have stopped reading before that, missing what otherwise would have been their perfect read. The sweet spot for blurbs hovers around 150 words, but it can go a little in either direction.
Raise the Stakes to Encourage Sales
So maybe your blurb isn’t too long. And maybe it isn’t a synopsis. But does it make the reader need to know more? How can you get the person reading your blurb to buy the book? By adding some stakes, and we don’t mean the kind that defeats vampires—unless of course, your book has vampires, and then maybe it does.
And by stakes, we mean, what’s at risk if your protagonist fails at their mission? Get readers invested in your story so that when you tell them what the main character might lose if they fail. Is it love? Is it respect? Money? Their life? The world as we know it? Only you can say, but remember, give us the stakes, not the results.
Make Your Blurb More Visible
Lastly, don’t bury your blurb. You get four lines on Amazon before a potential reader is stopped by a link to read more. If you’re sticking review snippets or a teaser or an excerpt first, you’re limiting what readers see of your blurb, possibly preventing them from seeing any of it. Let your blurb shine as the first thing readers see. If your blurb does its job, they’ll read all of that after the blurb.
If you do any of these things, it’s possibly time to switch things up with your blurb. If a blurb makeover sounds like something you can handle, great! You’ve got this. We hope you write an awesome new blurb for your book and that it pays off with more buys and/or page reads.
And If That Doesn't Work
If it doesn’t, try tweaking again. Maybe you need to really nail that tagline or try one to begin with. Or maybe you need to change something else, like rebrand with a new cover if the existing one isn’t to genre.
But don’t change both at once or else you won’t know what worked to get more sales (and page reads for those of you with books enrolled in Kindle Unlimited).
And if you need to change all the things, maybe a rebrand is needed (check out our recent post on that here). Don’t give up. We believe in you. If you need assistance, however, the Novel Publicity team is standing by to help.