Thanks to my friends at eFiction Magazine’s Book Marketing Group, I’ve transformed my long, unfocused product description into a more dynamic pitch for my eBook, Any Tomorrow: The Calling.  Advice from eFiction editor Doug Lance and group member Richard Sutton helped me rebuild my product description following some simple general rules:

1. Be concise.  Don’t expect the potential reader to sift through a long meandering description.  Attention spans are short.  Keep the description to a few high-impact sentences.
2. Use the third person.  Doing so seems to help with credibility.  It gives the description the feel of a review.
3. Start the product description with some information about yourself to establish your credentials, establish credibility, and peak interest.
4. Introduce the main character(s).
5. Establish a time reference for when the story takes place.
6. Describe the plot.
7. Don’t give it all away, save some surprises for the reader to discover.
8. Provide a good wrap up to seal the deal.

Keeping these rules in mind, here is my latest product description:

Kevin Fraleigh, a former intelligence analyst, artfully crafts a tale that transcends typical offerings in the horror/fantasy genre by seamlessly blending historical reality with speculative fiction. This first book in the Any Tomorrow Trilogy introduces Gustav Linder, Henry Turner, and Tyler Nolan, three men whose disparate lives are bound together by an ancient, pervasive evil. Gustav Linder is a brilliant young Jewish theoretical physicist in pre-war Germany, isolated in his own thoughts from dramatic changes in the world that spawn the rise of Nazism, whose dreams of a past and future are inexorably linked and of which he is an integral part. Henry Turner is a sociopath and hit man for a Miami drug cartel who as a boy had all the advantages, yet at age thirteen heard a voice that filled his empty places and made him a murderer without remorse. Tyler Nolan, an intelligence analyst for the Agency whose fragile psyche is caught in a struggle between reality and madness, is trapped in a secret deep underground facility alone the day a worldwide nuclear-biological holocaust nearly brings everything to an end.  A common evil that longs for the destruction of everything binds the destiny of the three men.  The challenge to defeat the evil before it can achieve its insidious ends fills this bracing tale with unexpected twists and turns that leave the reader wondering what will happen next.

I managed to pare my description down to seven sentences.  Do you think I met all the criteria for an effective product description?    Does it make you want to know more about my eBook?  Remember that the rules I listed are general in nature and can be changed your personal requirements and style.

I was never really happy with my last description or the one before that, but wasn’t sure exactly why.  Maybe I just needed to step back from it and get some other opinions.  Doing that really helped because I’ve never been comfortable with self-promotion.  It seems like I’m always happy to help others, but I never want to help myself.

I’ve said before in this blog that I’m not a joiner, but I’m glad I joined the eFiction community.

If you have comments about this or any of my posts, please leave a comment by selecting the Leave a comment or Leave a Reply links.  I look forward to your comments.
© Copyright 2011 by Kevin Fraleigh.