The Second Hook--A Book Description

            If the first chance to hook a potential reader is the cover, the second is the description. I am having trouble writing a description of my book. That’s why I haven’t posted one yet.

Know your audience. Isn’t that one of the first things you hear as a writer, something you should decide before you ever start writing a story? I admit that I am kind of vague on that for this book. I guess the answer is people who like to read what I like to read: fantasy, science fiction, cowboy stories, and some other things. So what if I mixed them up a little bit? “Fusion” is popular in cooking. Why not “fusion” writing?

Think ‘business.’ To market a book, sellers like to put it into a category, a genre, to help buyers find what they like. Well, Carico Trails takes place on another planet with some technology that doesn’t exist here and now. That makes it soft science fiction. It’s a frontier culture with horses and livestock and people that act a lot like cowboys, but it isn’t a black hat-white hat kind of a story, not what people expect when they pick up a Western. It’s a love story, but it doesn’t follow the pattern of a romance novel. It is character driven rather than action-adventure, psychological but not a thriller. Yup—fusion.

A ‘brick-and-mortar’ bookstore has to put a book on a shelf in one section. Luckily, online sales of either print or e-published books can deal with multiple designations for one search item. Once a potential buyer goes to their selected genre and finds my title, then the book description has to set up the correct expectation. Misleading a reader’s expectations looks like a sure way to get bad reviews.  

And that brings us back to my problem trying to write an adequate description. I’ll post it for you when I get it done, and you can let me know what you think.