Ah, Squiders. How I long for the days when all you had to do as an author was write the books, and someone else would sell them for you. I am not a good seller. You guys have probably noticed that.
Last week I mentioned how I would be re-reading my 2013 novel Shards in an attempt to tweak some of its marketing, specifically its book description. Well, I finished Shards. And then I skimmed through it two more times because, as is probably expected, seeing how I wrote it, there were some parts I really liked.
(Some people can probably write books they don’t have emotional/intellectual connections with, and more power to them. It turns out I can’t write books I wouldn’t want to read myself. I tried ghostwriting once and it was an abject failure.)
(Coincidentally, reading Shards has put my brain into overdrive on plotting out two related Shards!verse books, neither of which are on the schedule until the end of the year at the earliest, so that’s less awesome.)
(I mean, awesome, because said ideas haven’t really gone anywhere in the six years since I originally wrote Shards, but not awesome because I’m working on editing something else at the moment. We’ll talk about that Thursday.)
(Right, out of the parenthetical statements.)
And, Squiders, I was right. The current book description for Shards does not match the book. At all. The current book description makes it sound like a big mystery, when in reality there’s very little mystery at all. No wonder people were disappointed. As I said, I do like the book, but it’s more adventure/romance/mythic romp. The mythology is not subtle. No mystery.
I think I must have been so focused on making the description draw people in, that at the time I didn’t consider that I was doing the book, and its marketing, a disservice by being misleading. I don’t even think I realized I was being misleading.
It’s a learning situation, that’s for sure. Now I know how careful I need to be about this sort of thing. And hopefully I’m getting better about the whole thing. I certainly think the book description for City of Hope and Ruin is much better and more appropriate, though admittedly I had someone else to work with on that.
And I have to write a new book description. Groan.
Someone should invent a service where they write your book descriptions for you. They would make a buttload of money.
Marketing or description thoughts, Squiders? Collective moaning about how we wish someone else would do this for us?
