Explore the world through language and math with a linguist/budding mathematician! In season one of Letters and Numbers, we focus on books - delving into the world of publishers and platforms, who writes (and why!), and what makes some books more successful than others.
https://sarahneofield.com
episode 39: What's the secret recipe of a best-selling book description?
Now that more books are purchased online, including print books, it’s vital that we understand how the best book descriptions work, and what role blurbs play.
Each book has its own distinct flavour, but the professionalism with which it is presented, and the quality of its ingredients – cover, spine, blurb, formatting – do not differ wildly from book to book. So it is perhaps unsurprising that the blurbs covered over the last five episodes in this mini series on blurbs and book descriptions followed something akin to a ‘secret recipe’.
Join author, linguist, and mathematician-in-the-making Sarah on an exploration of the world through the lens of letters and numbers!
Links from this episode:
Download Sarah's blurb cheatsheet (for FREE)
Example of a poorly-formatted description (scroll to end)
Example of a well-formatted description