Morgan Clasper Author

When writing your book description or gathering ideas for your book cover, it’s helpful to browse Amazon and look at what bestselling books in your genre are doing.

This is particularly helpful for authors who are stuck on their book description. Taking inspiration from others is a great way to stimulate your creativity and give you an idea of the current market.

Even after working on thousands of blurbs, I still regularly do this whenever I feel stuck. It can give you ideas for structure, wording, and selling points.

That being said, there’s a word of warning for anyone who’s studying successful authors in their genre: the most successful books aren’t necessarily the best examples to study.

Famous authors have an unfair advantage

I’m a fantasy fan, and so I’m very familiar with Brandon Sanderson’s books. That means when I see a novel of his, I already know roughly what to expect in terms of style, themes, tropes, genre, and quality.

The book description could be completely blank, and I’d still check out the book.

Have you ever wondered why some books have the author’s name in giant typography—even larger than the book title itself—while other books keep the author’s name small and unobtrusive?

It’s because when an author has name recognition, their name alone works as a powerful marketing tool. It taps into readers’ existing knowledge and expectations, doing “heavy lifting” that an unknown author’s name simply can’t.

The value of name recognition

People often try to reverse-engineer success without determining what actually caused it. If you study bestselling books, it’s tempting to conclude “this is what a successful book’s packaging looks like.”

However, you don’t always know how much of that success came from the author’s existing readership, publisher marketing, advertising, or the book packaging itself. The blurb is simply one variable behind a given book’s success—and if you try to copy it wholesale, you might end up missing the point.

Books by big-name authors can “get away with” having less effective book descriptions because their existing popularity and readership already “sells” people on their writing.

In this way, the author’s name functions as part of the sales pitch.

It does this in two ways. First, it appeals to popularity. We’re more likely to buy something that everyone else is buying. Second, advertising has long shown us that being familiar with a name or brand makes us far more likely to trust (and therefore buy from) them.

Of course, a good cover and quality writing are a given. But if you’re a fan of an author like Stephen King, you’re likely to approach a new book of his with less uncertainty—and less scepticism—than an author whom you’ve never heard of.

This gets even more interesting with authors who write in a series. A new book in an established series may only need a tiny description because the reader already knows the characters, premise, world, and genre.

How being an unknown author changes things

For an unknown author selling an unknown book, the description has a much tougher job. You’re essentially starting from zero. Without the help of name recognition or an existing readership, the description needs to establish the book’s premise, genre, tropes, style, quality, and whether they’ll enjoy the author’s work.

It’s essentially saying, “You don’t know who I am or what I write. Here’s why you should buy from me anyway.”

When readers don’t know who you are, they don’t trust you—and this means they’ll be more sceptical. To overcome this and convince them to take a chance on you, your book description needs to pull its weight, because there are fewer existing sources of trust.

What should you do instead?

If the big names are giving you skewed data, the solution is to study successful books where the author’s name isn’t doing the heavy lifting.

Look for books that have accumulated plenty of readers and reviews despite coming from authors who aren’t household names.

These authors don’t have huge fanbases to do the selling, their names don’t function as a genre or quality signal, and readers might not have any previous experience with their writing. Consequently, the packaging—including the book description—has to work much harder to establish trust.

This is much closer to the situation most indie authors find themselves in.

That makes these descriptions particularly useful to study. Instead of copying what Brandon Sanderson does in his descriptions, you can learn what successful indie authors are doing to attract readers and convince people who’ve never heard of them before to take a chance.

Look at books that are performing well within your genre, then pay attention to the authors behind them. Are they established names with a large back catalogue? Do they have an existing readership? Is the book part of a popular series?

If the answer is no, you may have found a far more useful case study.

Conclusion

Studying bestselling books by household names can yield interesting insights into publishing and readership trends—but if you’re trying to learn how to sell an unfamiliar book to a reader who has never heard of you, those books aren’t always the best examples.

If you want to understand what makes a book description effective, look for successful books whose authors don’t have enormous name recognition. These books have fewer advantages outside the description itself, which means their packaging has to do more of the work.

This will give you a much more accurate picture of how an effective description converts readers, and how you can apply it to your own books.

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