Skittles

Chapter 2: Getting more reads on your novel

Chapter 2

Not a day goes by where I am not asked “How did you get all those followers?” or “How can I get more reads on my book?” so to help you out I’ve decided to offer you all a little advice, using my own experiences as a guide.

I joined wattpad October 17, 2012 and about a month later after reading book after book on the site, I finally decided it was time to start my own journey into the world of writing, which to my surprise and pleasure, was almost an instant success and I owe that to four major things:

1. The Cover

2. The description

3. The body

4. Interaction

Laid out in this way I’m pretty sure it doesn’t make a lick of sense, so I’ll break it all down into four headings in order to better explain it.

                                THE COVER

Practically every day that we go through life we hear the saying; “Never judge a book by its cover.” Well guess what? We’re all human and we judge, it’s what we do, so with that in mind everyone should strive to have an attractive book cover. 

Let’s look at it practically; if I’m scrolling through a list of books on wattpad for instance, searching for something interesting to read out of hundreds of other books, the first book I’m going to choose is the one that grabs my attention right? I’m certainly not about to click on every book and read the description to find out what it’s about, especially not when there is already such an extensive list to choose from.

Simply put, the cover of your work is of tremendous importance, especially when you’ve just started out and you have to compete with so many other authors. Make sure the cover is such, that if you saw it on another book it would pull you in instantly.

For example when I first uploaded my boyxboy stories I made sure to slap some sexy guys on my cover and clearly if that’s the kind of story a reader is searching for it will pull him or her in. Likewise if it’s a book of recipes slap on some cookies or some delicious looking treats on that cover and watch the readers swarm.

You’ll notice that once your books become popular enough, you’ll be free to put up even plain covers because by then you’ll have gained a reputation and no one will care what your books look like.

I suppose I could go on and on about this, but you get the gist of it I’m sure. Create an attractive cover and people will be drawn to your work. HOWEVER, that’s only the beginning, once a reader is pulled in by your cover, he or she will want to read your description and this is also a crucial stage in the ‘reader recruiting’ process.

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                                 THE DESCRIPTION

Now that you have your beautiful cover in place and the readers are circling your book, you need to make sure you don’t repulse them with a crappy description. It is your job as the author to advertise your work in such a way that it appeals to those who are reading it. So let’s get into the tips shall we;

1. Never make your descriptions too long, this tends to give away too much of your story and no one likes spoilers. At the same time never make it too short. Make it just long enough to excite the reader.

2. A description is the first insight the reader has as it relates to your writing style. If the description sounds amateur or contains grammatical errors it will be a huge turn off.