Today, between cleaning house, playing backgammon, and drinking a very nice sherry (don’t you love Sundays?) I worked on the book description and the tagline.
From what I understand, the tagline is one of the most important components of a book (especially for an indie author). It is what tempts people to learn more. It is enticing, exciting, and comprehensive. It also can’t be more than 10 – 15 words in length. Ok, no pressure here!! After all, I’m drinking sherry. I can handle this.
Steve and I laughed a great deal while we each shouted out ideas but no matter how many we came up with, nothing seemed to do the trick. I love the tagline for Art and Fear. It reads, “An artists’ survival guide written by and for working artists). Its perfect. It could be the title of the book all by itself. In this tagline, you get what the book is and, more importantly, why you need to buy it.
So, a tagline for Shaping Destiny….
Here are some of the things we threw against the wall:
“The beginning is always and end.”
“Art equals life”
“Life equals art” (I think the sherry was starting to win.)
“No matter where you go, there you are.”
As you can see, it wasn’t going very well. We finally agreed that “Knowing what you want is only half the journey,” was good enough for today. But really, its not good enough at all — not if you are paying attention to keywords, metatags, or just plain human interest in hopes of effectively marketing your self-published book. Tomorrow, I’ll go back to the drawing board and rely on coffee. Maybe it will help.
Destiny Allison 