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Some things to prepare

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We’re getting really close to actual distribution and getting your book out there! Or mine, however we’re looking at this. Now, this is going to be a do as I say not as I do sort of thing, because you should have this stuff done, but I never do. This will be quick and you’ll be so happy if you keep it all in a document somewhere. Anyway, onward!

Synopsis

The write up for your book that will go on the sale page. What is your book about? What would you put on the back cover of your book to get people who picked it up to decide to open it and flip through it? Remember that this synopsis will be truncated as preview text on some outlets, and others will ask for a short version and a long version of this. Either way, I would suggest keeping it to two paragraphs at most, since people will probably not want to spend a lot of time on the page reading it to decide if they want it.

Categories

When I say categories, I mean BISAC codes. Read through them and make a list of seven of them, and put them in order of how important they are to you. Different outlets will ask for different numbers of categories, and some of them will use older or newer lists. Or so I’ve found. It’s good to have backup categories.

Keywords

Keywords are things people can search for to find your books. This is text that is not in the categories or the description or the title. There are a lot of articles about how to adjust these to hack the system and get all the sales, but I tend to just use them as intended. If there’s zombies, I add “zombies” as a keyword. These are less important, but they are useful to help people find your book.

And now we get to distribution!