📣 Selling the book

A blurb is ad copy, not a summary. Its job is to make the right reader want the book, not to be fair to your plot. A structure for fiction, one for nonfiction, and the rules behind both.

A+ content is the image-and-text section below your book description. It answers the questions a reader has after the blurb — and its modules are fixed pixel sizes, so an image not built for the slot gets cropped or refused.

A flat cover image is a file. A rendered physical book is an object, and readers respond to objects. Where a mockup earns its place, where it never belongs, and the details that quietly give a fake one away.

An advance review copy buys you something you cannot buy any other way — reviews and word of mouth in the first week. Who to send one to, what the stores actually forbid, and how to send them.

A launch is a sequence, not a campaign. What has to be finished before the week starts, what to do in the week itself, the four ways it usually goes wrong, and why the quiet is normal.

A series does not need three good covers. It needs one design system used three times, because the reader who finished book one is scanning for book two and has a second to recognize it.