Friday, April 15, 2016

Back Cover Blues

Late last year, during a time when I considered self-publishing my only option, I forged ahead and designed the cover for my book. I had my cloud photo, a general idea of what I wanted on the front, and not much else. I certainly didn’t have the all important text for the back of the book.

“It’s such an important thing-the whole cover (front and back) can sell a book or make a buyer walk away from it.”
Lori Perkins, Absolute Publishing Services

First of all, I have to admit that I never really had an outline to guide my writing. I spent most of my time being a “pantser” as in one who writes by the seat of their pants. As a process, it gets kind of messy, so I had to stop and make a list of what each chapter was about. I found it a very useful for tracking who was doing what, where, and when. It was also very useful when the time came to write a synopsis for my agent query letters.

I took my list and wrote out the story as it focused on six main characters. It took up far too many pages. I then condensed it down to five pages. Then three pages. Then to less than two pages.

For my back cover, I reduced the essence to less than 200 words. I tried to make it interesting. Give it a hook. But I was never sure if I really succeeded. Would I buy this book?

So, I’ve been fiddling with the back cover text ever since then.

Every time I got a new piece of advice, I went in to incorporate it into what I already had. But it never completely worked.

Every time I tried for a complete rewrite I ultimately found it lacking. My original kept holding its own. I guess I managed to find a pretty good feel for the back cover months ago.

It kind of surprises me. I’m happy, but I still plan to ask for second opinions before I make the final decision.

No comments:

Post a Comment
https://marydavidsaver.blogspot.com/2016/04/back-cover-blues.html
marydavidsaver.blogspot.com
CC-MAIN-2024-18
67478
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:YDECBKSKH2FUNBUDJ5OOGIPHMK4LXLGF
<urn:uuid:2b48f88f-b218-4585-b15f-e8dc8cd1038c>
2024-04-24T00:25:53Z
142.251.167.132
text/html
sha1:YNKZKV2OUQPT6FTG6DEP6LM45XP6WDWC
<urn:uuid:d19cd510-494b-4529-a50a-b9a91f2d343b>
https://marydavidsaver.blogspot.com/2016/04/back-cover-blues.html
response
<urn:uuid:1e8ca9d5-426b-4d62-b2e2-35bc60e6877e>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2024-18
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for April 2024
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-188
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.5-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/