Today will be a brief post. Blame it on the day job. You know, the one that pays the bills? I exist for the day when I can write full time, but this ain't that day (yet). My boss - the trial lawyer at the firm where I do research and legal writing - is trying a big case next week. I also have a brief due to the Court of Appeals next Friday so next week promises to be a real ole' humdinger.
Thought I'd post a brief mention about my great experiment on Amazon. I'm playing with book blurbs or product descriptions again. Or maybe I should say that I'm playing with book descriptions still. It's sort of an ongoing battle. See, my contemporaries - Griffin's Law and E-mail Enticement - haven't yet found their audience. And I'm convinced that if I describe 'em just right people will check out the sample and then buy the ebooks for their Kindles.
Oh, I know, everyone says that nobody reads contemporaries. Everybody says that contemporary romances don't bloomin' sell as well as historicals unless Oprah picks 'em for her book club or Shonda Rhimes, Ron Howard, or Stephen King or Spielberg (or whoever) buys the movie rights. I'm still waiting for the call from Oprah or a film mogul. But despite that, I'm convinced that readers would enjoy the books if they gave 'em a shot.
I've been changing the descriptions of E-mail and Griffin's on sort of an ongoing and manic basis. (I've been waiting for the guys at Amazon's DTP to call the rubber room police to come get me.) First, I changed both to add the blog posts describing my process of writing each book. Nada. Just, nada. Then I went back and wrote a pithy, catchy 3 or 4 paragraph description of each.
You know what happened? Yep, more Nada.
Then, the other day, a light bulb went off in my head while a hammer struck my noggin repeatedly. (Okay, just the light bulb. I think Mr. Quack was responsible for the hammer.) Anyway, I had sort of a ta-da moment.
I was looking at Brotherly Love, which remains my best seller across all platforms. (That's especially interesting BTW. Back in the bad old days when I was one of the many hopeful nobodies knocking at the Castle Walls of the NY Publishing Royals, Brotherly was the book that confused literary agents the most. Was it a historical romance? No, they decided. It contains things people would have to think about. The Royals told me it would confuse romance readers. It must be literary fiction, they said. But wait, it has too much explicit sex. That would make literary readers uncomfortable. So you know what happened? It didn't fit one of their labels so they said - no thanks. We don't want anything different. We just want more of the same.)
So, I was trolling my books at Amazon the other day and looking at the page for Brotherly and it hit me. I've got a nice, long, lovely blurb for Brotherly. It's on the back cover of the paperback. But you know what? It ain't on Amazon. The description posted there is the very short 3 sentence or so one that I wrote for Smashwords. SW has a very strict limitation for descriptions. And I'd always considered that limit a real pain in my way-too-large arse. But you know what? Mark Coker, the SW founder is a damned smart guy.
Maybe keeping a description short means it only tells readers enough to hook 'em into checking out the sample. Maybe, there's method to Mark's SW madness.
I decided to try that for Griffin's Law. It's my newest book out there and it's an awesome story and a very fun read. It is my tribute to Grey's Anatomy. The story was born of the day I imagined what would happen if Grey's took place in a law school. There's a McDreamy professor with a rule about never getting involved with students. There's lots of the ambiance and attitude that good old Seattle Grace Hospital would have if you transplanted it to a Southern law school. So shades of the Paper Chase creep in too. They have to, really, because, well, it's a law school.
With the success of Brotherly in mind, I went to SW and copied my short little old 3 sentence or so description of Griffin's, pasted it onto the book page at DTP and republished the book. The description teases my having written the book as an ode to Grey's Anatomy a la The Paper Chase and it mentions the McDreamy professor. It doesn't do a lot more than that.
Now, I'm waiting to see. Is less more? There's no post-it wedding, but Griffin's is my over-the-top look at what a McDreamy Seattle Grace style romance would look like in a Southern law school.
If you've got a Kindle, check out Griffin's Law at Amazon and let me know what you think.