Morgan Clasper Author

Every so often, a client comes to me with a particular problem.

They have a nonfiction book filled with so much content and so many selling points that including everything in the book description becomes an impossible task.

One recent book I worked on was part travel guide, part self-help, and part memoir. While this combination can absolutely work, trying to treat each of these selling points equally will turn the description into a mess.

I’ve seen this problem enough times that I think it’s worth writing about. So, how can you take a book that covers a broad topic, or appeals to many readers, and turn it into a compelling description?

A problem for nonfiction book descriptions:

Let’s say you have a nonfiction book about health & wellness. It’s designed to help people eat healthier, exercise more, improve their sleep, reduce inflammation… and the list goes on. Can you see the problem?

A book description has limited space, and readers have limited attention. If you try to squeeze all of those benefits into the description, it will feel disjointed, confusing, and too broad to be of specific interest.

The reader gets a long list of things the book can supposedly help them with, without a clear sense of what makes the book different or why they should care.

Every individual claim might be true. But collectively, the issue is that readers will be unable to answer the fundamental question: “Why would I want this book?”

How to position a book with multiple selling points:

Rather than trying to give each selling point equal weight, the solution lies in filtering your book’s information and finding an overarching theme or angle.

Take the example from before. The audience and the content are far too broad. One reader might be interested in weight loss, while another might want to beat insomnia. These are two different buying motivations, and treating them equally will diffuse your message, rather than strengthen it.

The solution lies in finding one primary angle. For example, maybe the book is really about helping busy people build healthier habits they can actually maintain.

In that case, eating well, exercising, sleeping better, and reducing inflammation aren’t four separate selling points competing for attention. They’re all evidence of the same overarching promise: a practical approach to becoming healthier without turning your life upside down.

We can still mention all of the book’s secondary benefits, but now they’re included under one central idea.

Authors may worry that doing this will cost them readers. But trying to appeal to everyone ends up appealing to nobody. It’s far better to position your book toward a specific problem or reader desire, rather than casting your net too wide and having readers slip through the gaps.

Example:

Without an angle, you risk having a book description that lacks cohesion. It’s just a list of supposed benefits, and it doesn’t show readers how those benefits relate to one another. It reads like “buy my book and you get this, and this, and this other thing too…”

“Learn how to eat healthier, exercise more, sleep better, reduce inflammation, manage stress, improve your energy, transform your overall wellbeing…”

But when you organize those selling points under a central idea, you can make sure each one contributes to the main reason a reader would want to buy:

“This practical guide shows busy people how to build healthier habits that fit into real life—from eating better and moving more to getting the sleep your body needs.”

Now, readers understand how each individual selling point “fits” into an overarching goal: that of building healthier habits.

A practical exercise:

Before you write your book description, come up with a list of every reason somebody might want to read your book. Then ask yourself, “If I could give people only one reason to care, what would it be?”

That answer becomes the overarching idea. Other selling points don’t have to disappear, but they become supporting evidence for your primary angle.

If your answer reads something like: “It’s about eating healthy, but there’s also personal growth, and some practical exercises, and a section on sleeping better…” Then you probably haven’t found your angle yet.

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Not sure if your current blurb is working? Send it to me for a free review. I’ll take a look and give you a seasoned perspective.