This Screenwriting Technique Can Help You Write Copy for Your Book
You’ve written and published your book and launched your baby into the wild. You’ve got a fantastic cover and back cover copy that sells. You’ve researched your categories and chosen them wisely. Your book has been proofread, copyedited and polished to perfection.
But now what?
Maybe you’ll get lucky and your book will find its hands into just the right reader and make your sales explode. But it’s a risky proposition to leave the success of your book up to chance. So that means you need to advertise. And to advertise, you need to write copy.
No problem, you say! I’m a great writer. I’ve got this. But then you sit down and struggle to condense the epic you’ve poured months, if not years of your life into down to a few snappy phrases. It’s not easy! Copywriting is a whole other style of writing from books or even cover copy, as it requires you to look at your work in a different way.
The back cover copy was likely challenging enough, but you had the advantage of a few paragraphs to really sell your book. However, a blurb is only going to sell your book if they click on your listing. Writing snappy copy will help get you to that point. Where a reader who clicks on your book listing or picks up a physical copy might spend up to 30 seconds perusing, an online ad has about five seconds to engage the reader. In that five seconds, you need to capture their attention, hint at the central conflict and tell them why they should be interested in your book.
Whew!
Using Loglines to Create Copy
To help you with the all-important (and very challenging) task of distilling your book down to its key selling features, we can borrow a page from screenwriters. People who write screenplays have become very adept at summarizing their work succinctly and accurately.
It’s important to realize that loglines are not advertising copy by themselves. Instead, creating loglines is a distillation exercise to help writers hone in on the key selling features of their work. Once you’ve distilled your work down to its key selling points, you can then dress up and inject some excitement back into the language.
The structure generally goes like this: [protagonist] + [inciting incident] + [protagonist’s goal] + [central conflict]
Play with the emphasis as you iterate on the logline. In some cases, you might emphasize the universe, in others you might emphasize a character’s journey. Try to encapsulate both, but keep in mind that this is a distillation exercise. Don’t get hung up on pretty phrasing. Just the facts, please.
This exercise can also be useful in positioning your book. Once you have the key points, you can start identifying your audience. Then, you can adapt your copy to speak directly to that audience.
A logline will help you create a tagline. Taglines are still not marketing copy in and of themselves, but they’re a much closer cousin. The most important difference between a tagline and copy is that copy is speaking to a specific audience accompanied by visuals on an online advertising platform such as Facebook or in a print ad.
Give Me Some Examples!
As loglines generally aren’t used for fiction, the following examples are pulled from film and television. It does give you an idea of how something epic in scope and sometimes very long can still be distilled into a few sentences.
The Godfather: The aging patriarch of an organized crime dynasty transfers control of his clandestine empire to his reluctant son.
Titanic: A seventeen-year-old aristocrat falls in love with a kind but poor artist aboard the luxurious, ill-fated R.M.S. Titanic.
The Matrix: A computer hacker is led by a stranger to a forbidding underworld, where he discovers the shocking truth – the life he knows is the elaborate deception of an evil cyber-intelligence.
Stranger Things: When a young boy disappears, his mother, the police chief, and his friends must confront terrifying supernatural forces in order to get him back.
The Mandalorian: The travels of a mysterious lone bounty hunter in the outer reaches of the galaxy as he risks his life to protect a powerful child wanted by the remnants of the Galactic Empire.
Game of Thrones: Nine noble families fight for control over the lands of Westeros, while an ancient enemy returns after being dormant for millennia.
The Expanse: The disappearance of rich-girl-turned-political-activist links the lives of Ceres detective, accidental ship captain and U.N. politician. Amidst political tension between Earth, Mars and the Belt, they unravel the greatest conspiracy.
As you can see, it is entirely possible to distill epic and complex stories down into just a few words. That’s what you’re looking to achieve with this exercise.
So how do you create a logline?
Let’s not reinvent the wheel, so here’s a few resources to help from logline experts:
Screenwriting Tips: How to Write a Logline - MasterClass
The Simple Guide to Writing a Logline - ScreenCraft
I have my logline! Now what?
How you write copy from your logline will depend on a host of factors. It will be influenced by your audience, the format and platform of your ad, along with the size. It will also depend on your audience.
For an example though, let’s convert the logline for The Matrix into advertising copy for a cyberpunk-loving audience on Facebook.
LOGLINE
The Matrix: A computer hacker is led by a stranger to a forbidding underworld, where he discovers the shocking truth – the life he knows is the elaborate deception of an evil cyber-intelligence.
COPY
How do you know what’s real? Enter The Matrix and find out.
Question your reality. Discover the truth. Enter The Matrix.
Rogue hackers must liberate humanity from false reality created by an evil cyber-intelligence.
The future of humanity is in the hands of hackers who wage war against a cyber-intelligence that has enslaved mankind.
Some copy will only tease at the central conflict. Others will encapsulate the whole story in a few words. It takes experimentation and testing to discover which kind of copy appeals to which audience.
There is no one size fits all solution or surefire formula to write effective copy. So much depends on what audience you’re speaking to, how much space your ad takes up, what visuals accompany it, and how niche or broad your audience is. The logline exercise should help you take the first steps, and overcome the hurdle of distilling a large and complex work down to a few sentences.
If you need more guidance refining your copy, we can help. Check out our services page for more information.
What other topics would you like to know about for book marketing and production? Leave a comment below!