How To Write A Catchy Book Blurb That Sells With AI

Full video transcript

Hey, what’s going on everyone, Darby here. What’s up guys, Zechariah here. We are tuning in today to talk to you about book blurbs and writing a book blurb with AI, specifically for non-fiction books, so we’re super pumped to be sharing this video with you. We’re going to be diving in, but before we get into that, if you like this video, if you like our content, make sure to like and subscribe so you get notified as we continue to release more content. As we will for today, let’s dive right on in.

Zechariah, if you kind of, while I’m pulling it up in Jarvis, kind of give us a little quick rundown on what book blurb is, where it fits in, kind of the skinny there as we’re pulling this up.

Absolutely. So a book blurb, if you’re not familiar, is about a paragraph that goes on the back of your book, sometimes it’s also on the inside cover. This is kind of the first thing that people read to give them an idea of what your book is about, so this really needs to be targeted to your ideal customer, the ideal person you want to read this book, and it also needs to have a great hook at the beginning to tie them in. A lot of times it’s with like a crazy fact, right, that you’re talking about, like “90 percent of people don’t know that this exists,” or something absurd. Then it goes into what the things are that they’re going to learn from this book, right, so those are two important things, and then generally at the end it’s the hook. So if you think of a paragraph as four sentences, you have your observed fact at the beginning, that kind of big statement that you’re going to make, one or two sentences about what they’re going to learn in the book, what they can expect from the book, and then the last sentence would be your hook, right — buy this book today, only learn the secrets inside, something along those lines. So we’re going to kind of be riffing off of that strategy and that structure, and we’re going to be using AI to do it.

Right on, so I’m going to pull it up now, it’s going to be on our screen here. So this is going to be the book blurb recipe that you find inside of your Jarvis account, if you have the link, which we’ll have here either below or on our website somewhere around this video as you guys are watching it. But this is going to be the book blurb recipe that we’ve put together, following the same structure. So when you click run right here, it’s going to open up inside of your Jarvis account. You can obviously rename the document to whatever you want, and to start here, we’re just going to be using the example for helping people sell on Amazon.

Anytime we’re starting using one of these Jarvis recipes, we always start with answering these six core questions for context that we’re giving Jarvis. Jarvis is obviously a robot, any AI copywriting tool you’re using needs context to pull from, whether they’re pulling from OpenAI GPT-3 or another source — the more context you can give it, the more accurate the information that it’s going to give out to you that you can use ultimately for content, for your business, for your book, for whatever. So what we want to do over here, right before we get started, and you can see how we structured this recipe, it’s going to be based off of the AIDA framework, which is Attention, Interest, Desire, Action, and we’ve included several commands in here beyond that initial AIDA framework to kind of get your creative juices flowing and for you to follow that same kind of format for a quick, short, to the point, compelling book blurb that’s going to get somebody’s attention to open up your book and dive in a little bit deeper.

So I guess for this example today we’ll just kind of go off of what we’ve been using, like Amazon copywriting consulting, it’s non-fiction, take it for Amazon. If you run a digital marketing agency, if you’re a consultant or coach, just insert your own niche and who you serve there and apply it in a similar manner. So I’m going to use the example of, let’s just use, maybe like the second edition of my first book that will be coming out sometime this year, “Amazon Copywriting Secrets.” So the purpose of this book, I want to answer and tell Jarvis: what’s the concept, where does it apply, why does it matter, who is it for, when is it about to happen, where is somebody at in the process, and how is it going to happen. So I’m using a tool called Voice In, you can use other kinds of dictation tools for that, to just kind of speak it, and then we’ll dive right into the AIDA. So on this left hand side, as you’ll see, all right, so we’ve got, start here, this is a book blurb about the book titled “Amazon Copywriting Secrets.” The book is for Amazon sellers and e-commerce brands that want to sell more products on Amazon. This is important because your Amazon listing is the ultimate salesperson for your products, and people on Amazon are ready to buy, so it’s important to capture those sales inside of your Amazon listings while people are shopping, so they purchase from you and not one of your competitors. This is important for seasoned sellers on Amazon as well as people just getting started.

Let me say, like, the book, to wrap it up, because I’ve got about 40 characters left, I’m just going to say: the book shows you how to build a million dollar listing.

And Darby already has a really good idea of what his book is about, but as you’re working with the recipe, just fill in what you know, answer those questions, each of those sentences, and then copy and paste those sentences into the content description brief, and feel free to clean it up from there too.

Absolutely, and you might end up refining the content brief more and more, but this content brief almost acts as that kind of north star direction for the general topic of your book. If I could only tell somebody in under a minute what this book is about, you want to be able to cover that inside of what you’re doing with your content brief. Same goes for a chapter, for an introduction, for a title, for whatever you’re using Jarvis for — you want to really dial that in for what you’re talking about. And once you’ve done that, it took us a few minutes to get it done, and now I’m just going to go jump right into the recipe, which is “write a compelling book blurb,” that’s what it is. So I’m going to go ahead and click Ctrl Shift Enter, I am on a PC right now, but it would be Command Shift Enter on a Mac, and that’s going to essentially highlight this command and tell Jarvis, all right, spit this information out.

We’ve got our first output here, right, so: “I want a compelling book blurb” — for this book about the content that we just inputted there. Attention: Ever wondered how to sell more products on Amazon? Interest: You’ve come to the right place. This book will show you how to build a million dollar listing and get your products in front of millions of customers who are ready to buy. The author has been selling on Amazon for over 10 years and has helped thousands of sellers grow their business by using his copywriting secrets. He knows what works, and so he shares his best tips with you in this book. Click here now to get started reading today.

Now, before we dive into dissecting this a little bit more or running any more, Zechariah, I want to highlight that this is not true. I have not been selling on Amazon for 10 years, I started selling on Amazon in 2017, so it’s been, wow, close to five years now. But I have been, since that time, in 2017, 2018, consulting as well with other Amazon sellers and brands and building their listings. So what I want to do is essentially just edit this for fact check, right, and make sure that it is actually conveying what I want it to say. But this is like a good start scratch. Do you have any comments on this initially, Zechariah?

My initial comments are, you know, that amazing fact, “ever wonder how to sell more products on Amazon,” that’s very boring, so I would look at how to spice that up, or maybe even, Darby, we get three different outputs and we kind of compare.

So let’s do that right now. I’m going to go ahead and I’m using these little things just to kind of block this section off so I know that this is one output, and I’m going to go up and rerun that command, right, the beauty with this is it’s just technology, it’s not going to hurt its feelings if we think what it just put out was crap, but we can spit out a few different variations of this and kind of piece them together, even Frankenstein them together, modify it, edit it, so we get what we really want.

So again: “Want to sell more? This book is for you,” kind of reiterates what we were talking about inside of there. “Get to learn about copywriting secrets used by top sellers. This book will teach you all the best writing practices, direct compelling copy. You’ll also learn how to write bullet points with power words and phrases to compel readers into clicking add to cart.” And that’s good, right, because if you can capture someone’s attention inside of your main images and your bullet points — like the description is kind of like fluff as it is there anyway, for extra details on it — but you need to sell people on that top part of the page. That’s what’s great about Amazon, especially browsing on desktop, everything you need to buy the product is literally right there in front of your face, you shouldn’t need to have to scroll. If you do, there’s other ways to capture the conversions, there’s reviews, there’s other reasons people do scroll, but that’s a good point there.

I like this one actually better than the first one, but I like some pieces of the first one that we can fit into this one. I want to get another example just to kind of get three to actually play off of.

Also, if you’re finding that the outputs are not even close to what you want, try either tweaking the content description or brief, or even changing slightly what you’re asking it to do. So we’re saying “write a compelling book blurb,” maybe it’s just “write a book blurb,” or maybe you’re changing the title around slightly. I find that sometimes these little tweaks go a long way in actually directing Jarvis to write something that suits you better.

Absolutely, and it’s all about testing, testing, testing, and the more comfortable you get with making those little tweaks inside of the software, the faster you’ll be able to go through these tests, and what might take someone an hour might take you five minutes, because you’re just that comfortable with it. So give it a try, fail forward in a sense that you want to generate content here, but you want to pick up on, okay, what is the software repeating, is there a loop that it’s catching itself on, right, you need to give it more context, and changing the tone. So you could say, “write an exciting book blurb,” or, you know, changing what you’re asking Jarvis to do, just for the fun of it, let’s use the word “depressing,” that’s the only word we’re going to change there.

“We’ve got enough depressing in 2021.” Man, I know. Just get an idea if it’s going to pull any words around people being sad about something on Amazon. It’s not easy but it’s possible, right? Maybe some tone here, and another thing with the tone is the tone of voice, right, so if you really wanted to get a certain angle — depressing probably wasn’t the best word to pick here, if I’m being honest with myself — maybe what’s like another, exciting, let’s see what we got: “From zero percent to one million in revenue,” and get, that’s a good angle to go out right there, easy to read with practical tips, it can provide action. By this book now, good stuff.

And so now that I’ve got five solid examples of things that could be book blurbs, I’ve really got a much longer edition that I can trim back down easily and quickly, in 15 minutes I’ve generated a pretty solid idea of what I can compel and mold into that book blurb. And scrolling down to the bottom now, with that in mind, we’ve included, like, now that you’ve done this, if you want to continue to develop and expand on it, we’ve split up this into like the four real sections, right. Section one, if all you wanted to do now was start brainstorming, we’ve got the blockers right up there, it’s not reading anything above, when you see those three asterisks the AI is not reading anything above it.

“So if you’re an Amazon seller, then you need to read this book, it’ll show you how to build a million dollar listing,” right, if that’s me, that might catch my attention, and so you can kind of play with these sections. Let me go ahead and, let’s see, actual steps: “Wow, there’s a new guide in town, and it might just be” — what did that say — “and it might just be the most detailed book ever conceived for Amazon sellers.” That’s awesome, that’s, I like that, thanks for saving that one.

You just list, see, like this is interesting, it’s like it’s saying the hook and now it’s trying to dig into some of the pain points that you might be experiencing if you’re just getting started, right, a bunch of chit chat from all these different places but nothing serious and actionable, and that’s what this book is going to give you, actionable steps and specific guidance to sell via your very own product listing. That’s amazing, that’s probably my favorite one so far, “there’s a new guide in town.”

So was that a catchy one-sentence hook? It was a little more than one sentence, but Jarvis got the idea of what we’re shooting for.

“I was at the mall the other day when I overheard a woman talking to her friend about how she had just spent three hours listing items on Amazon. I thought, holy cow, it takes you that long to list your products on Amazon, little did she know…” Well, another shocking fact here, especially thinking about this from the expert perspective, is like how many Amazon sellers fail in their first year, how many companies, brands, businesses, startups fail in their first year anyways. Did you know the average Amazon seller makes X per year, right, maybe there’s modification on these facts, but someone wants to sell on Amazon because they want to make money, right.

And this is where being an expert in the field you’re writing on will come into play. If you’re an expert in your own field, you should know or have some interest in or be able to find some interesting facts on what you’re writing about, right, so Darby obviously knows a lot about Amazon copywriting secrets, so he can go in and fact check what Jarvis is writing. And this is just giving unique ideas, right, even if you don’t use these for your book blurb, you’re going to need to catch people’s eyes and attention for other things on social media, whether it’s Twitter, whether it’s posting on Facebook, doing social media content, emails, whatever, right, these are all like angles that you could open up a conversation with, and that you should be testing, and I should be testing, right, as we build out this content for the next book, this is all stuff that I can use in my marketing, and I can just come back to it because I know I save it, I’ll put it in another doc somewhere and it’s there, I’ve already generated it.

So after you go through that section again, examples of who this book is for, right, let’s see what it kind of books up here: “This book is for Amazon sellers,” seasoned sellers, just getting started, I kind of already said that, but that interest is like “if this is you,” “if that is you.” Examples of what they’re going to learn in this book, right, what does someone want, “you’ll learn how to write persuasive,” I mean that’s so good, right, “Amazon copywriting secrets,” and if I’m looking at the book blurb now, I’m like, okay, attention, interest, “in this book you’ll learn,” bang bang bang, like maybe there’s a few more, so command J, “Jarvis give me some more.”

And if I didn’t even have a book, right, and I was just brainstorming what would this book be about if I wanted to write one, and here’s Jarvis on a rant now, just ripping and rolling through, giving itself commands — look at this, I didn’t type this in, so Jarvis is now giving itself this command because it recognizes the pattern of what we’re writing here: Action. It prompted itself, Action, Desire, Action, I already wrote a section down here, right, and Jarvis isn’t reading this, it just understands what we’re feeding it already.

“Let you do to start applying the book, write persuasive copy,” right here, “get unique custom pictures of your Amazon product listing optimized,” see, maybe, maybe not, but just interesting because sometimes it will prompt questions that I’m like, oh, that’s a really cool angle that I could approach. But let’s just wrap it up with just getting some more ideas, if you want to do it, “write me a call to action.” “If you want to sell more products, if this, then that,” see, it’s using that framework, right, “if this is you, raise your hand, then this is the,” in the case it’ll teach you how to write persuasive, eye-catching listings that will skyrocket your sales and revenue. What is more enticing than that to somebody that wants to make more money selling on Amazon?

Absolutely, now we have it actually giving it that framework down here specifically, it did that on its own because Jarvis is trained by some of the best copywriting in the world, it’s referencing still stuff up in the back of it, a good finish there. I like that second one: “If you’re an Amazon seller teaching how to write persuasive, eye-catching listings that will skyrocket your sales,” so then just mix them together, “If you want to skyrocket your sales on Amazon, then you need to read Amazon Copywriting Secrets,” boom, call to action right there. So be creative with it, Jarvis gives you more than enough to work with.

Yeah, and so, just looking at the clock here, you know, 21 minutes and 50 seconds, if we’re being on the ball with it, that’s a lot more than I could have written without using this tool for a book blurb. If I’m spending 20 minutes on it, give me another 15 minutes or so, even just 10 minutes, to just dial it in, and now you’ve got at least a working book blurb that you can start to share with people, engage interest, right, if I want to get it out there and say, hey, I’m thinking about writing a book for Amazon sellers, this is kind of the elevator pitch, right, is basically kind of your book blurb in a lot of cases. Does this sound interesting to you? And I start getting feedback from people who are maybe current clients, potential clients — you could start using this to market and sell your services without even having a book, I guess is the end takeaway here. As you’re writing this book, this is content, all content for you to post on social media to start engaging your audience, like, great, cover designs are another great way if you’re testing out different cover designs, book blurb, like all of this little content will just build towards the launch of your book.

Yeah, I know, it’s such good stuff, and I hope you guys get value out of the recipe as well. We are constantly making new recipes around the topic, not only of just books but also just using this stuff for the marketing and selling of your books, your products or services, if you’re writing a book to sell your consulting, coaching, your other offers, right, this is all stuff that you can use in your other marketing. So the book is really kind of like that catch-all, the cornerstone of your content marketing, so think about the unique ways that you can use this recipe today to start growing your business, growing your book, growing your brand, and just brainstorming with stuff along those lines.

So, thank you for watching and tuning in, make sure that you do like and subscribe to us on YouTube so you get access to more of these videos as soon as they’re released, and click the link below wherever it is to take you to getting this recipe, downloading it for yourself inside your Jarvis account. If you don’t have a Jarvis account and you go through our link, you’ll get 10,000 free words to test things out, give it a little bit of a trial, see if it is for you or not. If you’re already a Jarvis user, then awesome, you already know what the deal is. So thank you guys for watching, and if you have any questions or things you want to see, make sure just comment below, we read every comment, so we’re in there, we want to provide a ton of value for you guys, so make sure you engage. Yeah, tell us what your kind of insights you got out of this and what you’d like to see next. Until next time, cheers. Thanks guys.