Writing Book Descriptions for Non-Fiction with Dave Chesson of Kindlepreneur

Your book description is fundamental to the success of your book. It's not just about writing compelling sales copy that's important, but it's also about writing compelling copy with keywords that the search engines, especially Amazon, will use to show your book to the right readers. So if you're wondering how to do that or you're just looking for some great book description writing tips, well, this video collaboration with Dave Chessen is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the book broad from Book Launchers. We're your professional self publishing team helping you write publishers, publish and promote a nonfiction book that will help you have a huge impact on your readers. And done right will help you grow your brand, build your business, and make you money. The best part? You keep all rights and royalties. Oh my friend. I am so excited about today's video. I am chatting with the Dave Chesson of Kindlepreneur and the creator of Publisher Rocket. And you're about to learn some powerful lessons around book descriptions and keywords. First, if you've never met Dave, please meet Mr. Dave Chessen.

I'm Dave Chessen, the founder of kindlepreneur.com as well as the creator of Publisher Rocket, a book marketing software. I've been a paid consultant to multiple publishing companies as well as worked with multiple New York Times bestselling authors in both fiction and nonfiction.

So, Dave, let's get right into it. How does an author write a great book description? Please give them your best tips.

The best thing you can do is use the words you, your market uses to describe the book they're looking for. Say, for example, you're writing a book about back pain and you just say, do you have back pain? However, though, if you know that people are searching for books or that they describe the back pain by saying a lower, sharp needle like pain in their back. Okay, that's excruciating. Now let's talk about a first sentence that says do you have a lower, excruciating, lower back pain that feels like a needle is sticking in you? 24.7Crack?. Now, notice how I've started to really use some of the components on how they feel and how they describe the pain that they have. By doing that, I will connect better with that potential shopper, more so than if I just stuck with the blase back pain. So make sure to do your research to understand exactly what your market is typing in. And when it comes to nonfiction, there are general areas that you can look at. You can look at their pain point. How do they describe the problem that they have, you can look at their demographic. Who do they identify themselves as? Okay, is it single mother? Is it, you know, for men? Is it office workers? Whatever it is, the way they describe themselves, the next thing is results. What do they want out of it? Okay, just. We'll go back to the previous example. If I have back pain, okay, what do I really want? Well, I want to have a carefree life. I want to get back to working out. I want to be free from the pain. So talk about the results that come from it. Okay.

I wonder how many people actually type in the word excruciating. I don't wonder. I checked it in Google Planner because I was curious. It's between 1,000 and 10,000 people in North America searching, search for the word excruciating. More commonly, though, they're searching to find the definition. The search phrases were excruciating in a sentence. Excruciating definition. Excruciatingly painful, though, was a search term that was used almost as frequently. The things you learn. But that's also why you need to do research. Then you can use the exact words. And publisher rocket is one of the main tools we use for this. But more on that in a second. Dave laid this out for you in a really, really cool way. So I wanted to make sure you caught this. When you write your book description, make sure you're using the language of your ideal reader. And specifically make sure you've got your reader's pain points. You know, how they define themselves. So it's not a demographic. It's actually a personal definition or a personal description. And number three, you understand the result they want to achieve. That's a great starting point. Then Dave has some great advice on bullet points or the specifics you may want to share in your book description and how you should write those to appeal to your reader.

When I was working for Apple, somebody would come in and say, hey, should I choose this Apple Computer or that Apple Computer? And a lot of people would make the mistake of saying the specs. Well, this one's a 2.4 GHz, you know, CPU, and that one's a 2.1 GHz CPU. But by saying it like that, nobody's gonna understand what I mean. Instead, I should translate that into the benefit. This one's actually a lot faster, whereas this one's a bit slower. See, that means more to the shopper than if I just stuck with the 2.4 GHz thing. So look at what you have and start to write things like help you to pass the test you are dreading, help you to save time so that you can. And when you do that, your book's benefits become something even greater.

Dave also shared that ending your book description with a clear call to action in their research has shown to increase conversions, you know, book sales by 2.6%. So instead of just ending your book description with a nice sentence like this one on Jeff Link's great book Protecting the Pig, where it says, don't be reactive, be proactive, and have confidence in your investment strategy, with this book, we're going to change that sentence to say, don't be reactive. Be proactive, and have confidence in your investment strategy. Buy this book today. Or instead of saying, buy this book today, you could say, read this book now. Either way, a call to action is going to increase your book sales, so you should do it. Okay, I'm back. I didn't know I left. Now. One thing we're already doing is using Dave's software, publisher Rocket, to do keyword research and adding those keywords to every book description. We want to put those words into the Amazon description so Amazon shows the book to the right people. Since publisher Rocket is his program, I figured now is a great time to ask him for his best advice. When you've used Rocket to do the keyword research to write your book description, what else should you do? So here's what he had to say.

One other thing that I love to do is that after I've done that and I have crafted my nonfiction book description, I also like to go through and change out or add what I call trigger words. Now, trigger words are words that are deemed more powerful, right? You could say that it was a dark night, or you could say it was an ominous night. See what I'm saying? It triggers that. This is a little bit more than just a dark night.

Oh, sweet. So we get the juicy keywords from Rocket, and then afterwards go in and add some trigger words. And wouldn't you know it, Dave has a list of trigger words he recommends. So I'll put that in the description below for you. Now, to wrap this up, I wanted to ask the keyword expert himself what his best keyword advice is, especially when it comes to Amazon and the seven boxes you're given for inputting keywords. Man, I'm glad I asked this, because he gave a pointer I've never given before. Check this out.

When you fill out your seven Kindle keyword boxes, there might be a phrase or it might be a box that actually is driving most of your sales and the others aren't. That's why when authors start to see that either their sales have dropped or they've stagnated and nothing's happened, it's very important authors just go through and change them up. Now, when you're doing this, the first thing you want to do is not change all of them. Because like I said, maybe there's one box or one phrase or word that's actually driving what you have now. So instead what I like to do is I like to take two of those seven Kindle keyword boxes and I change two of them at a time. This way I can control the manner. If I say change those two and my sales increase, then I know that I've made a right choice. However, though, if I do that and the change doesn't help, then I know that no bother. And finally, if I make that change and I see the sales drop, uh oh, then at least I've identified that the previous phrases were good ones and I'll mark those down. By doing these things, you'll not only increase the optimization for your sales, but also you may find out which words really are helping that can help out with either future books in a series or also different ways in how you create your advertisements.

We've talked about updating keywords before, but I've never talked about how you would do it. It's standard marketing practice to not change more than one thing at a or you won't know what change actually had an impact. So that was really, really great advice from Dave to only change two boxes at a time. Also, there's an awesome article on the kindlepreneur website about Dave's research into those seven boxes and what keywords work and keyword phrases will work. That is really gold. So you should read that. And I'll link to that below as well when you're reading those articles. By the way, if you have questions for Dave, there's a contact form on his website. You can go ahead and connect with him directly there. That was fun, wasn't it? Thank you so much for joining us today, Dave. If you want to thank him too, go ahead and smash that thumbs up button. Go ahead, try it. It feels good. And let's chat about what was your favorite tip that Dave shared today. Let's chat about it in the comments below. And when you comment the day a video is released, you'll be entered to win some sweet noboringbooksswag like our noboringbooks mug or our oh, so soft. Journal new videos every Tuesday and Friday. So make sure you've subscribed to the channel and turn those notifications on so you catch every, every opportunity to enter to win these fabulous prizes. You're fun. Would you like to spend a little bit more time together today? This video right here on Market Research dives deep into some of the other ways beyond keyword research. We use Publisher Rocket, but if you're good on that side of things, then this video over here is the latest and greatest from the channel. And it's definitely worth a watch either way. Click to your chosen video. I've got the coffee on and I'm looking forward to spending more time with you.