The saddest truth in book sales is that even the greatest story on the shelf can’t sell itself without solid packaging. Book marketing is a big business, and most publishing companies have staff devoted to book design above and beyond the editorial team, including graphic designers, cover artists, and copywriters.

Typically, a copywriter crafts the text that appears on the book jacket or paperback cover. A copywriter may either be on the staff at the publishing house, or the publisher may contract out, or outsource, to freelance copywriters. Either way, it’s the job of the copywriter to craft a paragraph or two about your book that will sell it to readers.

Otherwise, and this too occurs more often within larger publishing houses, an overworked and underpaid editorial assistant may be tasked with crafting your book jacket copy. This is often viewed as an onerous task and is obviously less than ideal; while editors (and editorial assistants) are useful in helping to shape and enhance your story, they may not have the necessary ‘sales writing’ skills to entice the reader to purchase your book on the shelf.

So, while most of the time you may not be writing your own book jacket copy, it’s still important for any writer to be able to do so. Here’s why:

1. It allows you the opportunity to succinctly summarize your book and revisit the story – it’s like going through a copy edit of the plot.
2. It allows you to make sure you’ve been writing towards your target audience, OR it can help you to determine the target audience for your book.
3. If you’re sending query letters out to publishers with hopes of selling your manuscript, you’ll essentially have to write a paragraph to pitch your idea anyway.

Finally, once your dream publisher has picked up your book, you’ll be able to ensure that the copy your book jacket receives is the copy it deserves. Next week I’ll discuss tips on how to craft top-notch book jacket copy that will have readers grabbing your books off the shelves.

While you may try to design and format your book jacket cover on your own, know that there are professional editors who do it for you.   An experienced professional editor, such as the editors at FirstEditing will create a professionally written book jacket cover that will capture your audience’s attention. This is short, succinct copy that sends a strong message about your writing.

Related posts:

1. How to Get Testimonials for Your Book Jacket Cover
2. How to Improve Your Writing: Capitalization
3. How To Improve Your Writing: em dashes and ellipses
4. 7 Ways to Check Your Commas When Self-Editing
5. Finding the Right Literary Agent for Your Manuscript

Tags: book jacket cover, editing, fiction editing, firstediting, novel editing, professional editor, tips for authors

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 4th, 2010 at 4:01 pm and is filed under Book Editing, Book Editors, Editing Skills & Services, Manuscript Editing, Novel Editing, Writing & Publishing Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.