Do Self-Publishers Need to Learn Copywriting?

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Do self-publishers need to learn copywriting? Yes. Copywriting is writing words that persuade people to act, and on Amazon your title, cover and description are the only words a browsing reader sees before deciding to buy. When two books reach the market together, the one with the better sales copy usually sells more, even if the other is the better book. Here is what I learned the hard way.

What is copywriting?

Copywriting is writing sales copy. It has nothing to do with copyright, the little “c” in a circle that stops people copying your book. When I started, that is exactly what I thought it was. I had no idea.

Advertisers worked out long ago that people react to certain words. Put the right words on whatever you are selling, a product, a book or a politician’s ideas, and you change whether people buy. As a self-publisher, that matters more than I wanted to believe.

I thought writing was all about writing good books: put them on the market and watch them sell or flop. A lot of talented authors think the same, and the wake-up call is frustrating. They get beaten by authors with weaker books who pay attention to their copy. My own books did not sell in the beginning, and when I looked back, missing copywriting was the reason.

Does sales copy matter more than the quality of the book?

For the first sale, yes. I read several books on the subject, and it became clear that copy is central to getting books to sell. It is unfair, but a book often sells or doesn’t because of the words on its sales page: the title and the description.

If the book is bad, the reviews will show it and sales will fall. But when two books hit the market at the same time, the one with better sales copy will sell far more, and usually keeps doing so. Readers decide on the copy before they have read a page.

Once I applied copywriting to my descriptions, titles and the Amazon ads I run, my sales jumped, from changing only the copy.

The trick is that the description is not there to tell readers what the book is about. It is there to show you understand their problem. If the problem is boredom, as with most fiction, sell excitement: take them into a gripping scene instead of giving a dull summary.

For non-fiction, don’t give away the answers. If your book is about puppy training, don’t list the tricks. Work out why the reader wants a trained puppy and what is getting in the way, and speak to that, so they get curious and buy. Many will use “Look inside” to see the chapter headings, so write those as sales copy too.

There are good books on sales copy that are decades old and still just as useful, such as Eugene Schwartz’s Breakthrough Advertising and David Ogilvy’s Ogilvy on Advertising. I won’t try to fit a whole copywriting lesson in here. The heart of it is understanding your readers’ problems and pain points, and choosing words that show your book solves them.

How do you write a description that sells?

Describe the reader’s problem, the pain it causes and how your book solves it. The value of the book is the problem it solves, not its contents, so the description is not a list of chapter headings. It says: this is the problem you have, this is what it costs you, and this is how the book fixes it.

KDP’s description box takes up to 4000 characters, and HTML tags such as bold count toward that total (KDP, Write a Book Description). That is plenty of room, so spend it on the reader, not on a summary. I go further on non-fiction in non-fiction book descriptions that sell books.

How do the title, cover and description work together?

Each does one job, in order.

1. The title gets the book found. Unless you are already famous, readers search Google and Amazon for a topic, and your book shows up or doesn’t because of the words in the title and its keywords.
2. The cover gets the click. Once the book shows up, the cover has to pull the reader in, so pay a professional designer. I explain why in your self-published book is judged by its cover.
3. The description makes the sale. The reader clicks through, and the description walks point by point through their problem, what the book promises and the doubts they may have about whether it fits their needs. Make the cost of their problem clear enough that buying the book is the obvious way out.

If one of the three is off, the other two can’t make up for it. When none of them is working, it is usually the reason a book isn’t selling, which I cover in why your self-published books aren’t selling.

If your description is not selling, book a free 25-minute discovery call and we will look at it together.

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