Pull your book up on your phone

THIS ISSUE

Where your description stops

Pull your book up on your phone. Scroll down to the description, and read what it says before you tap to see the rest.

Whatever you see before you have to tap is the most important part of your book's description. Everything under it gets read by somebody who was already leaning toward buying and went looking for confirmation. The "pre-tap", incredibly short description has to do the heavy lifting to encourage buyers.

Authors rewrite descriptions constantly and almost never see the result the way a buyer does. The rewrite happens in a text field that's far larger than what your buyer looks at. Book buying and description reading happen on a phone, in a list, sometimes beside four other books, by somebody casually browsing.

Your description is not one field. Your Kindle edition, your paperback and your hardcover each carry their own, stored separately and edited separately. So an author who rewrites the description has usually rewritten one of them. Two years later the paperback is still running the version from launch, and nobody caught it, because nobody had a reason to open all three at once.

THREE THINGS TO GO AND CHECK

1. On your phone, where does your description cut off? What is the last thing a reader sees before they have to tap?

2. Open every format of your book in its own tab. Do the descriptions match each other? Do you want them to?

3. From your paperback page, can a reader get to the Kindle edition and back without searching again? If your formats are not linked to each other, your reviews are split across them.

While you're looking at your description, pull your book up as a buyer would. Do you see all of your book's editions under one listing without having to search for your book again? Linked editions pool their reviews onto a single page. Unlinked editions do not, so an author with reviews scattered across three listings is showing every visitor a third of their own credibility and has no idea. It usually happens when a format gets added months after the first one went live. This can be an expensive mistake if you don't fix it.

Identifying the gap between what you wrote and what buyers see allows you to improve your listing. Fixing any of this is free. Run the three checks before you rewrite a word. What you find tells you whether this is a ten-minute edit or a rebuild.

FROM THE INDUSTRY

The Anthropic settlement notices are real, and so are the fakes

Claim notices from the settlement administrator started going out September 4. The Authors Guild confirms the genuine ones come from info@anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com, and warns that scammers have registered look-alike and misspelled domains off the back of it. If you have an allocation dispute with a publisher or a co-author, the window to sort it out between yourselves was extended from thirty days to sixty before a court-appointed Special Master decides it for you. Authors Guild

Writer Beware took one of the AI scam emails apart

The solicitation that sounds like the sender actually read your book was assembled from your website, your retail listing and your reviews, fed into a chatbot. Victoria Strauss published the real emails with the tells marked, including the one worth knowing: the fee never appears in the first message. It shows up several friendly exchanges later. Writer Beware

IF YOU WANT SOMEBODY TO GO THROUGH ALL OF IT

The Amazon Listing Audit

It is $197. I record a walkthrough of your live listing and send it over with a one-page written summary of what I would change and the order I would change it in. It covers the description, your categories and backend keywords, your author bio, and where your last page sends a reader. It comes back within 48 business hours of your book file and intake answers reaching me.

If you go on to buy the $997 Amazon Listing Build within thirty days, the $197 comes off it.

See what's involved

Best regards,

Elizabeth