A short YouTube talk (by Michael Evans) about book marketing and honest representation: the speaker recounts how renaming a book to "The Lost Colony Ship" increased sales by about 20%, and emphasizes that blurbs often omit the most interesting elements—so authors should accurately and compellingly describe their books to attract the right readers.
I'm an artsy author thing going on. It's like, oh, they have this destiny and they're never going to get it. And I would run ads for it. And the best performing ads I always had was where my headline on the ad said the Lost Colony Ship. And everybody would comment on the ad saying, I clicked on this ad for this Lost Colony Ship book. And the book, I think it's the wrong book. I think you've linked to the wrong book. And I would say, like, oh, no, this is a story about how XYZ happened. And it's trying to explain to all these people. But it took me years to finally set my ego aside and be like, maybe I just need to retitle the book. So I actually retitled the book the Lost Colony Ship. And my sales went by 20% just by doing that one thing. And so that's the kind of thing I think that so circle all the way back around. That's why sometimes I will sort of interrogate an author because their blurb is oftentimes missing the most interesting things.
