book description creative writing

The Best Descriptive Writing Examples From Books!

by Stefanie Newell | Mar 21, 2021 | Tips For Writers

As a newbie writer, you may be starting to figure out your own personal style of writing. You are discovering what kind of narrator you are best with, what length of books you prefer, what genre you want to write in, along with so many other things that factor into what your books will be like and what audience they will attract. Despite all of these things, one thing that is essential in whatever you explore is descriptive writing. Descriptive writing brings your readership into your writing by taking advantage of their imaginations. In this post, you will find descriptive writing examples that will help you utilize the senses to the best of your abilities as a writer.

3 Descriptive Writing Examples

1. “In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.” –Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

If you are looking for advanced descriptive writing examples, then this excerpt fits the bill. Hemingway uses only the sense of sight, but the scene is very easy to imagine. He uses things that everyone can recognize no matter who they are and he uses them to his advantage. This is what you want to strive for when using descriptive language. This is the kind of descriptive writing that would work extremely well in fiction or nonfiction, no discrimination.

2. “It was lit by thousands and thousands of candles that were floating in midair over four long tables, where the rest of the students were sitting. These tables were laid with glittering golden plates and goblets. At the top of the hall was another long table where the teachers were sitting […] The hundreds of faces staring at them looked like pale lanterns in the flickering candlelight […] Harry looked upward and saw a velvety black ceiling dotted with starts […] It was hard to believe there was a ceiling there at all, and that the Great Hall didn’t simply open on to the heavens.” –J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

The Harry Potter series provides lot of great descriptive writing examples due to the fact that it is meant for children. It still teaches a good lesson to newbie writers though. Sometimes, the most obvious descriptive writing is the way to go! You know your story, and sometimes that can lead to you accidently leaving out important details. Once you have finished your writing, it is always a good idea to go back and make sure you didn’t leave any descriptive language out accidentally.

3. “The flowers were unnecessary, for two o’clock a greenhouse arrived from Gatsby’s, with innumerable receptacles to contain it. An hour later the front door opened nervously, and Gatsby, in a white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold-colored tie, hurried in. He was pale, and there were dark signs of sleeplessness beneath his eyes.” –F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

This descriptive writing example is short, but it gives a lot of information to the reader in just a few words. The description of Gatsby in this instance is very easy to picture in your mind. Just the idea of him being pale with dark circles under his eyes leads the reader to imagine the face of a very tired man. You don’t always have to exhaust yourself with descriptive writing, keep it short and precise. As long as you can picture your character from your writing, your readers will be able to as well.

Using descriptive language can be challenging, but descriptive writing matters in all genres . So, bookmark this blog and use these descriptive writing examples as a guide if you ever need a little help with your newest creation!

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Tags: Fiction , Language , Nonfiction , Novel , Writing Tips

Are you ready to make your book irresistible for readers? Understand how to write a description for a book in 6 easy steps! This guide will help you capture the heart of the story without giving spoilers. Wondering how long should a book description be? Browse through our guide and learn the perfect length for a book description.

We’ve included some of the best book description examples of popular literary works. With this, we’ve also added 4 amazing strategies to increase your book description’s credibility and visibility on online platforms. Whether you want to create a book description for Amazon or any other platform, these strategies are sure to help!

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So without wasting time, let’s begin with the basics!

What is a book description?

A book description is a brief overview of the plot, main characters, and themes of the story. It’s an important tool that helps in book promotion and sales. Many times, book descriptions also include information about the author. This helps to build credibility and establish a connection with the reader.

The book description is usually written in the 3rd person’s point of view (using the characters’ names, he, she, it, they, them, etc). It usually has short paragraphs to ensure a better reader experience. You can also bold and italicize key aspects of the book to highlight them in the book description.

Now that we’ve understood the meaning of a book description, let’s understand its length.

How long should a book description be?

A book description usually ranges from 100-250 words. It aims to capture the readers’ attention without revealing too much about the story. It’s different from a book synopsis and a book review which can be longer.

How to write a book description?

Here are the 6 easy steps to write the description of a book:

Begin with an eye-catching hook- Start your article with a shocking statement or intriguing question. You can also showcase an interesting conflict without giving spoilers or start with a bold statement, challenging conventions.
Summarize the plot- Briefly describe the book’s important events and introduce the main characters. Highlight any plot twists or surprises to keep the reader engaged.
Mention the book’s USP- This can be the setting, an unexplored theme, an intriguing character, or a different take on a common theme. If a character makes unconventional choices, it can also be the book’s USP.
Convey themes and the genre- Give readers an idea of the book’s genre. Let them know whether the book is a romance, thriller, fantasy novel, or belonging to any other genre.
End with a cliffhanger- Unlike a book summary that gives away the ending, keep the reader in suspense about what happens next. You can do this through an intriguing question/ statement. Another method to do this is by including an interesting plot twist in the description of a book.
Edit and proofread- Check your book description for any grammatical, spelling, and word choice errors. Ensure that the book description has clarity, coherence, and a logical content flow.

Wondering how to write a description for a book to maximize sales? Explore these 4 simple strategies and take your book description to the next level!

Top 4 strategies for the best book description

Include reviews and endorsements- Add any positive book reviews or endorsements from famous personalities/organizations in the beginning. This helps to increase your book’s credibility.
Use evocative language- Use literary devices like personification, metaphor and symbolism to make the description engaging. You can also implement the show, don’t tell principle and objectively describe sensory details (visuals, sights, smells, taste, and touch).
Consider SEO- It’s important to include relevant keywords in your book description (about the book’s genre, themes, and setting) to help more readers discover it. This is essential if you’re self-publishing on Amazon, BookBaby, or another online platform.
Test and update- Once your book description is ready, share it with friends, family, and any literary experts. Make changes, depending on the feedback. If your book receives any accolades, you can update the book description to improve credibility.

Want to understand better how to write a good book description? Dive in to see the best book description examples!

Top 2 book description examples

1. the firm by john grisham .

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the master of legal thrillers, a page-turning classic of “suit-and-dagger suspense” ( The New York Times ): At the top of his class at Harvard Law, Mitch McDeere had his choice of the best firms in America. He made a deadly mistake.

Don’t miss John Grisham’s new book, THE EXCHANGE: AFTER THE FIRM!

For a young lawyer on the make, it was an offer Mitch McDeere couldn’t refuse: a position at a law firm where the bucks, billable hours, and benefits are over the top. It’s a dream job for an up-and-comer—if he can overlook the uneasy feeling he gets at the office. Then an FBI investigation into the firm’s connections to the Mafia plunges the attorney into a nightmare of terror and intrigue. With no choice but to pit his wits, ethics, and legal skills against the firm’s deadly secrets—if he hopes to stay alive…

2. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

The beloved, #1 global bestseller by John Green, author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and Turtles All the Way Down

“John Green is one of the best writers alive.” –E. Lockhart, #1 bestselling author of We Were Liars

“The greatest romance story of this decade.″ – Entertainment Weekly

#1 New York Times Bestseller • #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller • #1 USA Today Bestseller • #1 International Bestseller

Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel’s story is about to be completely rewritten.

From John Green, #1 bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and Turtles All the Way Down, The Fault in Our Stars is insightful, bold, irreverent, and raw. It brilliantly explores the funny, thrilling, and tragic business of being alive and in love.

The above examples accurately demonstrate how to write a good book description for a book. For readers who want more clarity, browse through our simple book description template!

Book description template

You can use the following template for reference while creating your book description. This template will help you write a book description for Amazon and other social media platforms.

This concludes our guide to how to write a book description. Now, you can start exploring ideas to create the perfect book description. Want to take your book description to the next level? Take advantage of PaperTrue’s expert self-publishing services like editing, proofreading, and formatting! With this, PaperTrue also helps authors develop a book summary, and secure an ISBN, online book distribution, and promotion.

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How to Format a Book in 2024: 7 Tips for Print & EBooks

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the key elements of a book description, how to make a book description stand out, what common mistakes should i avoid.

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Secrets of Writing a Book Description that Sells (With Examples & Templates)

on Aug 21, 2023
in Writing Tips
Last update: September 26th, 2024

With the countless number of books that get published every year, all competing for attention, it’s usually the book description that possesses the power to captivate potential readers and compel them to make the purchase. And while the book cover and title may initially raise their interest, it is that captivating description that seals the deal.

By creating a well-crafted book description, you’ll be able to intrigue your readers’ curiosity and evoke their emotions. But in order to achieve that, you need to understand what exactly goes into writing a creative yet professional description for your book, and maybe check some bestselling books for inspiration. And that’s exactly what we’ll cover in this article.

What Is a Book Description?

A book description is a short and exciting summary of your book that highlights its best parts to grab readers’ attention and make them want to buy it. A well-written book description gives the readers a sneak peek into the story and gets them interested in reading the rest of the book. Along with your book title, cover, and price , the description can be a great marketing tool for converting potential readers into buyers.

The Importance of Book Description

There are many reasons why you should care about perfecting your book description. Not only does it have the power to convert potential readers into buyers, but it can also affect the following:

Conversion: Let’s say you’re going to an interview with a great resume and you’re well-dressed, but the first words that come out of your mouth aren’t what the interviewer is looking for, they probably won’t be interested in hiring you. The same would happen if you have a great title and book cover, but your description is poorly written; chances are no one is going to be tempted to purchase and read your book.
Visibility: Your book description should be SEO optimized to help readers find what they’re looking for (we’ll discuss this in more detail later in the article). This can be done by including certain keywords that you know your potential readers are searching for. Let’s say, for example, that you’re writing a cookbook for beginners called “The ABCs of Grilling”; while the title might be catchy, your target audience might not be searching for “ABCs of Grilling” and instead searching for “grilling guide” in their search engines. That’s why it’s always advisable to use these kinds of related primary keywords in your book description to reach your target audience.
Uniqueness: What could possibly differentiate your book from every other book in the same genre? Your book description should. Because even if your title is catchy enough, the description usually gives the reader an idea of what your book is about and how different it is from similar ones in the same genre.

Book Description vs Book Blurb

Since they can be pretty similar, many people get confused between a book blurb and a book description, often using the two terms interchangeably. And while both should be compelling and catchy, there are a couple of differences between them, such as:

Placement: While a book description appears on the book purchasing online page on the digital publishing platform it’s published on, the blurb is written on the book’s back cover.
Word Count: Usually a book blurb is between 150 and 200 words. The book description can be an expanded version of the blurb that is a little more than 150 words.
Target: The book description is crafted with online shoppers in mind, while the blurb usually targets shoppers in physical bookstores and libraries.

How to Write a Book Description

Now that you know the importance of writing a captivating book description, let’s look at how you can actually create one. Below, we have divided the process into a few simple steps so you can master one after the other. But before going into the details of each step, please note that you don’t have to apply all of them; just include whatever feels right for your own book.

1. Headline

While not every book description has to start with a headline (or a small phrase about the book), it is a sure way to make a quick, powerful impression. Some platforms, such as Amazon, allow you to start your book description with a headline to hook your potential readers.

Usually, the headline is about 25 words or less, written in bold and followed by a paragraph break so it can stand out from the rest of the book description. And it could be anything that can grab your readers’ attention, such as:

Awards you have won;
Your book’s genre;
Key topics your book discusses; or
Editorial reviews.

While writing this headline, try to show instead of just telling. For example, if your book is a yoga guide for beginners, don’t just write “Learn how to do yoga like a pro;” instead, you can go with something like, “An interactive ebook where you can actually see your yoga instructor and follow their lead every step of the way.”

2. Explanation (without Spoilers)

Whether it’s a fiction or a non-fiction book, you don’t want to give away too much in your book description. And now that you’ve hooked the readers with the headline, it’s time to give them some more details. Think about the details that would get your readers most excited and interested in your book.

As for fiction books , the conflict is what gets the readers invested in the story. Many stories have one main conflict that drives the plot. Even if there’s more than one conflict, one of them tends to take over the flow of events. Try to briefly describe this conflict in an emotionally provoking way that gets your potential readers’ invested in the story.

In non-fiction books , on the other hand, you want to focus on the problems your book solves for your readers. Try answering the following questions: what are the pain points that you’re addressing how does your book help in overcoming them?

3. Relevant Keywords

It’s very important to include the keywords in your description that your potential readers are using to search for books like yours; otherwise, they might not be able to find your book at all. With that in mind, remember that it’s also important not to stuff your book description with many keywords; only keep the relevant ones.

To find the perfect keywords for your book description, you can use tools such as Ahrefs or Keyword Tool , where you can select the language and country you want to target.

For fiction and non-fiction books alike, your keywords could be:

The genre or subgenre of your book (romance, sci-fi, self-help, economics, etc.);
Major themes (self-discovery, friendship, grief) or topics (time management, diet, etc.);
Awards (NYTimes Bestseller); or
Previous books.

4. Formatting

Using the right format in your book description can be very powerful for readers who are in a hurry and don’t want to go through every single word, especially if it’s just one bulky paragraph. So try implementing these formatting elements to make the text scannable and make it easier for the reader to understand what the description is about:

Paragraph breaks
Bullet points

It’s worth mentioning, however, that overusing any of these elements can make the description look unprofessional. So use them wisely to help the readers understand what your book is about.

5. Author Credentials

While the book description should focus mainly on the book and not on you, it wouldn’t hurt to mention what makes you qualified for writing this book. This could be anything related to your book, like any awards you’ve won or degrees you have.

Adding your credentials can help paint you as a subject matter expert in the topic of your book. This, in turn, can increase the readers’ trust and confidence in what you wrote, especially for non-fiction books.

6. Testimonials or Endorsements

You can also add any testimonials or endorsements you received from other readers or well-known figures. Testimonials are usually a brief summary of your book by someone who has enjoyed reading it or found it helpful. An endorsement, on the other hand, is usually written by someone who is a subject matter expert, saying that you’re indeed qualified to write this book.

7. Comparative Titles

It’s a good idea, especially if you’re a new author, to add some comparative titles in your book description. This can help indicate the tone and genre of your book, and make your potential readers find it more relatable.

If your book is a crime mystery, for example, you can add something like, “In the tradition of Murder on the Orient Express , this book takes you on a journey where all the suspects are related, and the truth is buried.”

8. End with a Cliffhanger

Just like how you started your description with a hook, you want to end with a cliffhanger that would leave your readers wanting more. This is especially true for fiction books and novels.

The same thing can be applied to non-fiction in the form of a call to action; after hooking the readers with the headline and touching upon their pain points, you can urge them to buy your book to know how to overcome such problems.

how to write a book description step-by-step

Book Description Examples from Best-Selling Books

Looking at book descriptions written for best-selling books can give you an idea of what grabs readers’ attention and push them to purchase these books. You can do that by browsing websites such as Goodreads or Amazon and searching for books in your genre.

To make things easier for you, we’ll present a couple of examples for book descriptions of both fiction and non-fiction books, and show you how famous authors used each part of the description in a smart and captivating way.

1. Non-Fiction Book Description Example

Written by Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point was an instant bestseller for many reasons. Looking at its book description, you can see how it starts with a hook, moves to a spoiler-free explanation, and concludes with an endorsement from another famous writer. It also makes good use of formatting options, such as making the title bold and adding quotation marks.

Another great example is the book description of Atomic Habits , one of the all-time best-selling books. Its description starts with an attention-grabbing, bold title, uses paragraph breaks, and contains bullet points that highlight the main takeaways.

2. Fiction Book Description Example

Now let’s look at a description of fiction books, which might be slightly different than non-fiction ones in that it doesn’t have takeaways or lessons. Still, the descriptions of bestselling fiction books tend to paint a picture of the story and highlight the main themes.

Here’s the description of All the Light We Cannot See by Anthoney Doerr, which also starts with a headline, highlights the author’s credentials, then explains the storyline in an engaging way.

all the light we can't see book description

Book Description Template

To make the process of writing a book description easier, we have added below a couple of templates that you can use for your book, instead of creating one from scratch. Whether you need it as a fiction or a non-fiction book, we’ve got you covered.

1. Non-Fiction Book Description Template

Start with a catchy title, a few words that captivate your reader and urge them to continue reading the book description. Describe the main message of your book in a few, scannable sentences using power words. Touch upon the pain points your readers face and briefly explain how your book helps resolve them. Make sure to use bold, italic, and underlining to highlight the important parts of your description. Start listing the main topics or takeaways from your book. Write something like, “In this comprehensive guide you will learn”: – Takeaway #1 and how it’ll benefit them – Takeaway #2 and use some trigger words – How reading this book will help them in the long run You can close by adding a testimonial, endorsement, or a strong call to action.

2. Fiction Book Description Template

Start with a title that hooks the readers and makes them want to continue reading the description. Then you can start describing the setting of your story, including the time, place, and genre. Move on to the main character of your story and their role in the plot. Describe their journey briefly and make the reader empathize with them. Use power words to show the reader why this story matters. highlight the main themes of your story and use formatting elements such as bold, italic, and underlining . Add some comparative titles that are familiar to your target audience. This can be books, shows, or movies. You can also add here a sentence or two about your credentials and any awards you’ve won. End with a cliffhanger, leaving the reader wanting to know more about the journey of the main characters of your story.

Book Description Generator

If you feel that all the previous steps are too much, then you can definitely use a book description generator to write one for you. And while we recommend that you rely more on the human touch, you can always edit and tweak the results that come from these generators to be more to your liking.

Here are some book description generators that can help you get the job done:

Nichesss : This website offers over 150 advanced AI tools to help writers with different aspects of the writing process. Their free book description generator can create different ones in a matter of seconds. All you have to do is type a short description of what your book is about and the title of your book, then choose whichever option you feel is the most captivating.
Paraphrasing Tool : While this is mainly a paraphrasing tool, you’ll find many other useful AI writing tools, including a free book description generator. It allows you to enter your book title and one or two sentences explaining what your book is about. It then proceeds to generate a captivating description that you can use on your book page.
Kindleprenuer : If you have been looking for how to write a book description for Amazon, then this tool is perfect for you. Instead of writing the description for you, this tool helps you get a formatted HTML that you can copy and paste to your book description page on Amazon, among other platforms.
Book Raid : Unlike the other tools, this one doesn’t just write your book description for you. While it can do that, giving you a beautifully tailored description for your book page, it also has a couple of other options that can help you market your book to the right audience. The first is categorizing your book, suggesting the genre and sub-genre you can enlist your book under; and the second is highlighting the main themes in your book so you can write a better book description.

How to Add Your Book Description in Kotobee

Now that you know how to write your book description, let’s see how you’ll add it to your ebook in Kotobee Author . Here’s all you have to do:

Open the Book Manager from the Edit screen.

2. Then paste your book description in the field labeled Description . Click OK and you’re done.

Wrapping Up

A compelling book description can be a powerful marketing tool that hugely affects your book sales. By applying the tips we shared in this article, you’ll be able to get the readers’ attention with a concise yet emotionally engaging description that has the potential to convert them into buyers.

So roll up your sleeves and start crafting your description, and maybe even try to create multiple drafts until you find the perfect fit. And if you ever need assistance, keep in mind that numerous description generators are available to lend a helping hand in getting the job done.

How to Write a Book Title: Practical Tips for Authors

8 Ebook Design Tips from Professional Designers

Self-Publishing on Amazon: Pros and Cons

Why Your Book Description Matters

How To Write Your Book Description

Book Description Examples

More book description best practices, how to write a book description that sells [with examples].

After the title and the book cover, your description is the most important book marketing material.

The book description goes most prominently on the back cover , and the top of your Amazon page (below the price and above the book reviews ). It’s crucial it be compelling, because readers make buying decisions from the book description.

In this guide, I’ll walk you through how to write a book description, provide you a template, and include good and bad book description examples.

Download the Scribe Book Description template below, and let’s get started:

Download Book Description Template

Here’s what we’ll cover:

The book description is the pitch to the reader about why they should buy your book. When done right, it directly drives book sales.

There are so many examples of how book descriptions lead to huge changes in sales. One of my favorite stories is for JT McCormick’s book, I Got There.

Despite having a nice cover and receiving good reviews, it wasn’t selling as many copies as it should have. So we dove into the book description, figured out the flaws, and completely revamped it.

Sales doubled – within an hour .

This isn’t uncommon. Often the description is the factor that solidifies in the reader’s mind whether the book is for them or not.

If you get it right, the sale is almost automatic.

If you get it wrong, very little else can really save you.

Remember, people are looking for a reason to not buy your book, so having a good back cover description is key to keeping them on the purchasing track.

How to Write A Book Description

At Scribe, our copywriters use the “Hook, Pain, Pleasure, Legitimacy, Open Loop” format, which is very similar to how we write introductions .

(Note that these instructions are optimized for non-fiction books. Fiction book descriptions follow different rules.)

1. Write A Compelling Hook

Just like a great cover design captures your eye immediately, every good book description you see is interesting from the first line.

People are always looking for a reason to move on to the next thing. Don’t give it to them. Make the first sentence something that grabs them and forces them to read the rest.

Generally speaking, this means focusing on the boldest claim in the book, or the most sensational fact, or the most compelling idea.

2. Describe The Current Pain They Are In

Once you have their attention, then describe the current pain they are in. If you can describe the pain of the reader you can engage them in entertaining the idea of buying the book.

You don’t need to be gratuitous here, all you need to do is be accurate: what pain is in their life? What unsolved problems do they have? Or, what unachieved aspirations grand goals do they have? Clearly and directly articulate these, in plain and simple language.

3. Describe How Your Book Will Solve Their Pain

Then tell them what the book does to help them solve for this pain. Done right, this creates an emotional connection by describing how the book will make the potential reader feel after reading it.

Or even better, what the reader will get out of reading the book—how will their life transform because of this book?

Will it make them happy or rich? Will it help them lose weight or have more friends? What do they get once they read this book?

Be clear about the benefits, don’t insinuate them. You are selling a result to the reader, not a process (even though your book is the process). Explain exactly what the book is about, in clear, obvious terms.

4. Legitimize Yourself To The Reader

This is about letting the reader know why they should listen to you. Why you’re the guide they want to lead them through this journey.

This can be very short, like a book blurb. You want just enough social proof to make them keep reading.

This can also go in the hook. If there’s an impressive fact to mention (e.g. “the New York Times Bestselling Author”), that should be bolded in the first sentence.

Or if there is one salient and amazing thing about you or the book, that can go in the book description.

Something like, “From the author of [INSERT WELL KNOWN BESTSELLING BOOK.]” Or, “From the world’s most highly decorated Marine sniper, this is the definitive book on shooting.”

5. Create An Open Loop

You state the problem or question your book addresses, you show that you solve or answer it, but you also leave a small key piece out.

Like a cliffhanger. This holds the reader’s attention and leaves them wanting more. You do want to be very explicit about what they will learn, but you don’t have to go deep into the “how.” This is to create an “open loop” so to speak; you are keeping back the secret sauce that is actually in the book.

This being said, do not make the reader struggle to understand what your point is, or how to get the reader there. This is especially true for prescriptive books (how-to, self-help, motivational, etc.). People like to understand the basics of the “how” (as well as the “what”), especially if it’s something new or novel. This is a balance that our examples will show you how to hit.

Examples of Good Book Descriptions

Cameron herold’s vivid vision.

Many corporations have slick, flashy mission statements that ultimately do little to motivate employees and less to impress customers, investors, and partners.

But there is a way to share your excitement for the future of your company in a clear, compelling, and powerful way and entrepreneur and business growth expert Cameron Herold can show you how.

Vivid Vision is a revolutionary tool that will help owners, CEOs, and senior managers create inspirational, detailed, and actionable three-year mission statements for their companies. In this easy-to-follow guide, Herold walks organization leaders through the simple steps to creating their own Vivid Vision, from brainstorming to sharing the ideas to using the document to drive progress in the years to come.

By focusing on mapping out how you see your company looking and feeling in every category of business, without getting bogged down by data and numbers, Vivid Vision creates a holistic road map to success that will get all of your teammates passionate about the big picture.

Your company is your dream, one that you want to share with your staff, clients, and stakeholders. Vivid Vision is the tool you need to make that dream a reality.

What Makes It Good?

Three things make this a great book description:

Engaging hook: Everyone knows that mission statements are BS, but how many people say this out loud? By doing this it takes a stand and engages the potential reader immediately.
Important keywords: We tend to advocate staying away from buzzwords, but in some cases—especially business books—the right use can work. This works. Words and phrases like “easy to follow” and “simple steps” and “drive progress” do well here.
Clear pain and benefit: This book is not appealing to everyone, but to the perfect reader, it’s very appealing. It clearly articulates a real problem (“slick, flashy mission statements that ultimately do little”) and then tells you the result it delivers (“detailed, actionable three-year mission statements for their companies”) and how it gets you there (“mapping out how you see your company looking and feeling in every category of business”).

Tim Ferriss’s 4 Hour Work Week:

Forget the old concept of retirement and the rest of the deferred-life plan—there is no need to wait and every reason not to, especially in unpredictable economic times.

Whether your dream is escaping the rat race, experiencing high-end world travel, earning a monthly five-figure income with zero management, or just living more and working less, The 4-Hour Workweek is the blueprint.

This step-by-step guide to luxury lifestyle design teaches:

How Tim went from $40,000 per year and 80 hours per week to $40,000 per month and 4 hours per week
How to outsource your life to overseas virtual assistants for $5 per hour and do whatever you want
How blue-chip escape artists travel the world without quitting their jobs
How to eliminate 50% of your work in 48 hours using the principles of a forgotten Italian economist
How to trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and frequent “mini-retirements

There are three things that make this good.

It has a great hook: Tim immediately tells you why this book matters to YOU—because you can stop waiting for retirement. Who doesn’t want to retire now? OK, I’m interested, tell me more…
It has a bulleted list with specific pain and pleasure: A vague promise is no good if it doesn’t deliver. Tim makes specific promises about the information in the book, both about things that have happened, and things it will teach you.
It makes you want to read more: After the contrast of the big broad goal and the specific information, at the very least, any reader is going to keep going into the reviews and other information. You’re hooked—you want to know HOW he teaches this.

Philip McKernan’s One Last Talk:

If you were about to leave this planet, what would you say, and who would you say it to?

This shocking and provocative question is at the core of the remarkable and inspiring book, One Last Talk: Why Your Truth Matters And How To Deliver It. This book emerged from the speaking series designed to help people discover their truth, and then speak it out loud, developed by renowned coach Philip McKernan.

In this book, McKernan goes beyond the event, and dives into what it means to discover your truth and speak it, why people should do this, and then deeply explains exactly how this can be done. If you feel living more authentically could allow you to have a greater impact on others, or you can’t find the words to speak your truth as boldly as you know you need to, this is the book for you.

Make no mistake, the path McKernan lays out is simple, but not easy, because your greatest gift lies next to your deepest wounds.

This is one of the best book descriptions I’ve read. It grabs you from the first sentence, and forces you to read the rest, which is short and to the point.

Since it is his first book it gives the credentials of McKernan, then explains what the book is about, where it came from, states the huge question it addresses, and it does so in a way that creates an emotional reaction. Who doesn’t want to speak their truth?

Examples of Bad Book Descriptions

Ben horowitz’s, the hard thing about hard things.

Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley’s most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, offers essential advice on building and running a startup—practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular blog.

While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one. Ben Horowitz analyzes the problems that confront leaders every day, sharing the insights he’s gained developing, managing, selling, buying, investing in, and supervising technology companies. A lifelong rap fanatic, he amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs, telling it straight about everything from firing friends to poaching competitors, cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality to knowing the right time to cash in.

Filled with his trademark humor and straight talk, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures, drawing from Horowitz’s personal and often humbling experiences.

What’s Wrong With It:

This description is bad because—based on this description—the book seems somewhat bland and boring.

If I don’t know anything about Horowitz before I read that description, what in there makes me want to know more? Nor does it really tell me anything about the substance of what he says in the book, and it substantially undersells both Horowitz’s prominence and the resonance and importance of the book’s message. And who cares that he likes rap? What does that matter to me, the reader?

As a side note: this book is very good. The book description just reads like a bad self-publishing novel (and they re-did it since then).

Douglas Rushkoff’s Coercion: Why We Listen to What “They” Say

Noted media pundit and author of Playing the Future Douglas Rushkoff gives a devastating critique of the influence techniques behind our culture of rampant consumerism. With a skilled analysis of how experts in the fields of marketing, advertising, retail atmospherics, and hand-selling attempt to take away our ability to make rational decisions, Rushkoff delivers a bracing account of media ecology today, consumerism in America, and why we buy what we buy, helping us recognize when we’re being treated like consumers instead of human beings.

Short descriptions are great, but this is too short to even tell me what the book says. This is an example of overselling, without doing it right.

Look at the descriptions, “devastating” “skilled analysis” and “bracing account”—this description sounds like he’s doing what he says he’s warning us about: selling without substance. In no place does this description connects the reader to the issues in the book in a way that is engaging or compelling.

1. Mindset Shift: It’s an Ad, Not a Summary

Don’t think of the book description as a synopsis. So many authors want to put everything about their book in this section. Resist that urge (you can do that with book blurbs , which are a different thing).

It’s an advertisement . An elevator pitch. Think of it like a verbal book trailer for your book. It’s designed to make people want to read your book. You want them to feel a call to action to buy it.

2. Use Compelling Keywords

It’s not enough to be accurate, you need to use high traffic keywords that increase the likelihood your book will get picked up in search.

For example, if Sports Illustrated does a book you’d want to not only say Sports Illustrated Magazine but also mention the names of the A-list athletes in the book.

Even better, use words that evoke an emotional on the part of the reader. Don’t use “jerk” when “asshole” will work. Amazon especially rewards compelling keywords .

3. Keep It Short

On average, Amazon Bestsellers have descriptions that are about 200 words long. Most descriptions are broken up into two or three paragraphs.

The easier to read, the better. You want it to look approachable one the book page, especially for the top Amazon book description.

4. Simple Writing

Keep the writing simple. Use short, clear sentences. You don’t want anyone to struggle to comprehend what you’re trying to convey because you’ve strung too many ideas together in one long run-on sentence.

5. Write as the Publisher, Not the Author

This will probably be obvious to you, but the book description should always be in a third person objective voice, and never your author voice. It is always written as someone else describing your book to potential customers.

6. No Insecurity

Don’t compare your book to other books. I see this all the time, and all it does is make the book (and the author) immediately look inferior. Plus, a reader may hate the book you are comparing yourself to and you’ll lose them.

The only place a comparison makes sense is if you are quoting a very reputable source that makes the comparison itself.

7. Don’t Insist on Doing it Yourself

I can’t tell you how many amazing authors I’ve had come to me utterly befuddled because they couldn’t write their own book description.

This is normal.

The reality is that the author is often the worst person to write their own book description.

They’re too close to the material and too emotionally invested. If this is the case, we recommend either asking a friend to help, or going to a professional editor or even better—a professional copywriter—for assistance.

Novel writing ,

How to write descriptions and create a sense of place.

By Harry Bingham

Your first job as a storyteller is a simple one, and a crucial one. You have to get your passengers into your train – your readers into your story. Only then can you hope to transport them.

And that crucial first step doesn’t have much to do with characters or story or anything else.

What matters first is this: your fictional world has to seem real. It has to grip the reader as intensely as real life – more intensely, even.

Writing descriptions that seem vivid, with the use of evocative language, is therefore essential. The buildings, cities, places, rooms, trees, weather of your fictional world have to be convincing there . They have to have an emphatic, solid, believable presence.

A big ask, right? But it gets harder than that.

Because at the same time, people don’t want huge wodges of descriptive writing. They want to engage with characters and story, because that’s the reason they picked up your book in the first place.

So your challenge becomes convincing readers that your world is real . . . but using only the lightest of touches to achieve that goal.

Not so easy, huh?

Start Early

Set the scene early on – then nudge.

It may sound obvious but plenty of writers launch out into a scene without giving us any descriptive material to place and anchor the action. Sure, a page or so into the scene, they may start to add details to it – but by that point it’s too late. They’ve already lost the reader. If the scene feels placeless at the start – like actors speaking in some blank, white room – you won’t be able to wrestle that sense of place back later.

So start early .

That means telling the reader where they are in a paragraph (or so), close to the start of any new scene. That early paragraph needs to have enough detail that if you are creating a coffee shop, for example, it doesn’t just feel like A Generic Coffee Shop. It should feel like its own thing. One you could actually walk into. Something with its own mood and colour. One vivid descriptive detail will do more work for you than three worthy but colourless sentences.

And once, early in your scene, you’ve created your location, don’t forget about it. Just nudge a little as you proceed. So you could have your characters talking – then they’re interrupted by a waitress. Then they talk (or argue, or fight, or kiss) some more, and then you drop in some other detail which reminds the reader, “Yep, here we still are, in this coffee shop.”

That’s a simple technique, bit it works every time.

One paragraph early on, then nudge, nudge, nudge.

As the roughest of rough guides, those nudges need to happen at least once a page – so about every 300 words. If it’s natural to do so more often, that’s totally fine.

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Be Specific

Details matter! They build a sense of place like nothing else.

Gabriel García Márquez, opening One Hundred Years of Solitude , introduces his village like this:

Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs.

Boom! We’re there.

In his world. In his village. Already excited to see what lies ahead.

And yes, he’s started early (Chapter 1, Page 1, Line 1). But it’s more than that, isn’t it? He could have written something like this:

Macondo was a village of about twenty houses, built on a riverbank.

I hope it’s obvious that that sentence hardly transports us anywhere. It’s too bland. Too unfocused. Too generic. There are literally thousands of villages in the world which would fit that description.

In short, what makes Marquez’s description so vivid is its use of telling detail. They’re not just houses, they’re adobe houses. The river doesn’t just flow over stones, its flows over polished stones that are white and enormous, like (wow!) prehistoric eggs .

The sentence works so well because Marquez has:

Created something totally non-generic
Via the use of highly specific detail, and
Uses surprising / exotic language to make those details blaze in our imagination.

That basic template is one you can use again and again. It never stales. It lies at the heart of all good descriptive writing.

So here, for example, is a more ‘boring’ space . . . but still one redolent with vividness and atmosphere thanks to the powerful use of atmospheric specificity. In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale , Offred introduces her room with details that not only grab us but hint at something dark:

A chair, a table, a lamp. Above, on the white ceiling, a relief ornament in the shape of a wreath and in the centre of it a blank space, plastered over, like the place in a face where the eye has been taken out. There must have been a chandelier once. They’ve removed anything you could tie a rope to.

Those clipped words transport us straight to Offred’s enclosed, and terrifying, space. We’re also told just enough to give us an image of that place, enough to heighten tension, enough to tease curiosity. This is just a description of a room – but we already feel powerfully impelled to read on.

Be Selective With Your Descriptive Details

Be selective – don’t overwhelm.

It might be tempting to share every detail with us on surroundings.

Even with a setting like Hogwarts – a place readers really do want to know all the hidden details of – J.K. Rowling doesn’t share how many revolving staircases it has, how many treasures in the Room of Requirement, how many trees in the Forbidden Forest. That’s not the point. (And it would write off a little of Hogwarts’ magic and mystery.)

If you’re describing a bar, don’t write:

The bar was approximately twenty-eight feet long, by perhaps half of that wide. A long mahogany bar took up about one quarter of the floor space, while eight tables each with 4 wooden chairs occupied the remaining area. There were a number of tall bar stools arranged to accommodate any drinker who didn’t want to be seated at one of the tables. The ceiling height was pleasantly commodious.

That’s accurate, yes. It’s informative, yes. But it’s bland as heck.

The reader doesn’t want information. They want atmosphere. They want vivid language. They want mood.

Here’s an alternative way to describe a bar – the Korova Milk Bar in A Clockwork Orange. This description delivers a sense of intimacy and darkness in a few words:

The mesto [place] was near empty … it looked strange, too, having been painted with all red mooing cows … I took the large moloko plus to one of the little cubies that were all round … there being like curtains to shut them off from the main mesto, and there I sat down in the plushy chair and sipped and sipped

We’re told what we need to know, thrown into that murky Korova atmosphere and Burgess moves the action on. All we really have in terms of detail are those mooing red cows, some cubies (curtain booths?), and a plushy chair. There’s lots more author Anthony Burgess could tell us about that place. But he doesn’t. He gives us the right details, not all the details.

And if that’s not enough for you, then try reading this .

Write For All The Senses

You have a nose? So use it.

Visuals are important, but don’t neglect the other senses. Offering a full range of sensory information will enhance your descriptive writing.

Herman Melville, say, describes to us the chowder for the ship’s crew in Moby Dick : ‘small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuits and salted pork cut up into little flakes.’ Such descriptions are deft, specific, and brilliantly atmospheric. Where else but on board a nineteenth century American whaler would you get such a meal? By picking out those details, Melville makes his setting feel vibrantly alive.

Here’s another example.

Joanne Harris’ opening of Chocolat plays to readers’ senses, as we’re immersed straightaway in the world of her book through scent, sound and sight:

We came on the wind of the carnival. A warm wind for February, laden with the hot greasy scents of frying pancakes and sausage and powdery-sweet waffles cooked on the hotplate right there by the roadside, with the confetti sleeting down collars and cuffs and rolling in the gutters .

These non-visual references matter so much because sight alone can feel a little distant, a little empty.

By forcing the reader’s taste buds to image Melville’s clams or Harris’s pancakes – or making the reader feel that warm February wind, the confetti ‘sleeting’ down collars – it’s almost as though the writers are hauling the readers’ entire body into their scenes.

That’s good stuff: do likewise.

(And one easy test: take one of your scenes and highlight anything that references a non-visual sense. If you find some good references, then great: you’re doing fine. If not, your highlighter pen remains unused, you probably want to edit that scene!)

Get Place And Action Working Together

That’s where the magic happens!

Use the atmospheric properties of a place to add to other properties of the scene. That doesn’t mean you should always play things the obvious way: no need for cliché;.

You can have declarations of love happen in idyllic meadows, as in Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, but why not at a bus stop in the rain? Shouted over the barriers at a train station?

Your character also brings one kind of mood to the scene, and the action that unfolds will bring other sensations.

Lynda La Plante’s crime novel Above Suspicion makes a home setting frightening after it becomes obvious a stranger has been in protagonist DS Anna Travis’ flat, and she’s just been assigned to help solve her first murder case.

So the place is influenced by action, once Anna notices:

Reaching for the bedside lamp, she stopped and withdrew her hand. The photograph of her father had been turned out to face the room. She touched it every night before she went to sleep. It was always facing towards her, towards the bed, not away from it. … In the darkness, what had felt safe before now felt frightening: the way the dressing-table mirror reflected the street-light through the curtains and the sight of the wardrobe door left slightly ajar.

Here a comfy, nondescript flat becomes a frightening place, just because of what else is going on. Go for unfamiliar angles that add drama and excitement to your work.

Descriptions As Active Characters

You know the way that a place can turn on you? So (for example) a place that seems safe can suddenly reveal some other side, seem menacing, then almost try to harm the character.

That’s an incredibly powerful way to build descriptive writing into your text – because it feels mobile, alive and with a flicker of risk. You can use plotting techniques to help structure the way a reader interacts with a place: starting with a sense of the status quo, then some inciting incident that shifts that early stability, and so on. The inciting incident can be tiny – discovering that a photo frame has been moved, for example.

Having your characters voice their perceptions of a place in dialogue also adds to its dramatic impact, because now the reader sees place both through the eyes of a narrator and through the eyes of the characters themselves. Good, huh?

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An incredible course on Getting Published
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We’ve made the offer as rich as we know how to – and made it incredibly affordable too. You can find out more about our club here . Remember: we were founded by writers for writers – and we created this club for you. Do find out more … and we’d absolutely love it if you chose to join us.

Free Character Builder

This free worksheet will help you write multi-dimensional, believable characters that leap off the page.

Use Unfamiliar Locations

And smart research ALWAYS helps.

Using unfamiliar settings adds real mood and atmosphere.

Stephenie Meyer, when writing Twilight , decided she needed a rainy place near a forest to fit key plot elements.

Like protagonist Bella, she was raised in Arizona, but explained the process of setting Twilight in an unfamiliar setting on her blog :

For my setting, I knew I needed someplace ridiculously rainy. I turned to Google, as I do for all my research needs, and looked for the place with the most rainfall in the U.S. This turned out to be the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. I pulled up maps of the area and studied them, looking for something small, out of the way, surrounded by forest. … In researching Forks, I discovered the La Push Reservation, home to the Quileute Tribe. The Quileute story is fascinating, and a few fictional members of the tribe quickly became intrinsic to my story.

As her success has shown, it’s possible to write successfully about a place you don’t know, but you must make it your business to know as much as you can about it. (Or if you’re writing a fantasy or sci-fi novel, plan your world down to its most intricate details.)

And to be clear: you’re doing the research, not because you want that research to limit you. (Oh, I can’t write that, because Wikipedia tells me that the river isn’t as long / the forest isn’t as thick / or whatever else.)

On the contrary:

You are doing the research, because that research may inspire and stimulate a set of ideas you might not have ecountered otherwise .

The key thing is to do your research to nail specifics, especially if they are unfamiliar, foreign, exotic.

Just read how Tokyo is described in Ryu Murakami’s thriller In the Miso Soup :

It was still early in the evening when we emerged onto a street in Tsukiji, near the fish market. … Wooden bait-and-tackle shops with disintegrating roofs and broken signs stood next to shiny new convenience stores, and futuristic highrise apartment complexes rose skyward on either side of narrow, retro streets lined with wholesalers of dried fish.

There’s authenticity, grit to this description of Tokyo, as opposed to using ‘stock’ descriptions that could apply to many modern cities.

Note this same thing with foods: in Japan, your protagonist could well be eating miso soup, as per Ryu Murakami.

Or say if your story was set in Hong Kong, you might write in a dai pai dong (a sort of Chinese street kitchen), something very specific to that city if you’re describing a street there.

Alternatively, if you are setting something in the past, get your sense of place right by doing your research right, too.

In historical novel Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier, set in Holland in 1664, maid Griet narrates how artist Johannes Vermeer prepares her for her secret portrait, musing, to her horror, that ‘virtuous women did not open their mouths in paintings’.

That last is just a tiny detail, but Griet’s tears show us how mortified she is. Modern readers won’t (necessarily) think about seventeenth-century connotations like this, so if you’re writing a scene set in a very different era or culture to what you know, research so you’re creating a true sense of place.

Use Place To Create Foreshadowing

A brilliant technique – we love it!

Descriptions of place are never neutral.

Good writers will, in overt or gently subtle ways, introduce a place-as-character. If that character is dangerous, for example, then simply describing a place adds a layer of foreboding, foreshadowing, to the entire book.

Just read how J.R.R. Tolkien describes the Morannon in The Two Towers : ‘high mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blasted and poison-stained … like an obscene graveyard.’ It’s obvious from this description trouble lies ahead for Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee.

But even if you’re not writing this sort of fantasy, character psychology and plot (as we saw above) can also render seemingly harmless places suspect, too. A boring apartment in Above Suspicion becomes scary when it seems someone’s been inside.

In the same sense, we thrill to the sense of a place with excitement and promise, too, like when Harry makes his first trip to Diagon Alley (in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone ) to shop for Hogwarts equipment with Hagrid.

There were shops selling robes, shops selling telescopes and strange silver instruments Harry had never seen before, windows stacked with barrels of bat spleens and eels’ eyes, tottering piles of spell books, quills, and rolls of parchment, potion bottles, globes of the moon. … They bought Harry’s school books in a shop called Flourish and Blotts where the shelves were stacked to the ceiling with books as large as paving stones bound in leather; books the size of postage stamps in covers of silk.

Just weave place and action together like this to create atmosphere, excitement, tension, foreboding.

Think About Your Words – Nouns And Adjectives

Specific is good. Unexpected is great!

One final thought. When you’ve written a piece, go back and check nouns.

A bad description will typically use boring nouns (or things) in settings, i.e. a table, chair, window, floor, bar, stool, etc.

If you try to fluff up that by throwing in adjectives (i.e. a grimy table, gleaming window, wooden floor), the chances are you’ll either have (i) made the description even more boring, or (ii) made it odd.

Of course, this works for that first passage we looked over from Margaret Atwood.

We sense Offred counting the few things she has in the little room she calls hers, the window and chair, etc., in terse phrasing. We sense her tension, her dissociation, and we feel trapped with her.

All the same, play with nouns, with taking your readers to new surroundings. Give them a Moloko. Play with surroundings, how you can make them different, how you can render the ordinary extraordinary. With the right nouns in place, you’ll need fewer adjectives to jazz things up – and when you do use them, they’ll feel right, not over the top.

Happy writing!

About the author

Harry has written a variety of books over the years, notching up multiple six-figure deals and relationships with each of the world’s three largest trade publishers. His work has been critically acclaimed across the globe, has been adapted for TV, and is currently the subject of a major new screen deal. He’s also written non-fiction, short stories, and has worked as ghost/editor on a number of exciting projects. Harry also self-publishes some of his work, and loves doing so. His Fiona Griffiths series in particular has done really well in the US, where it’s been self-published since 2015. View his website , his Amazon profile , his Twitter . He's been reviewed in Kirkus, the Boston Globe , USA Today , The Seattle Times , The Washington Post , Library Journal , Publishers Weekly , CulturMag (Germany), Frankfurter Allgemeine , The Daily Mail , The Sunday Times , The Daily Telegraph , The Guardian , and many other places besides. His work has appeared on TV, via Bonafide . And go take a look at what he thinks about Blick Rothenberg . You might also want to watch our " Blick Rothenberg - The Truth " video, if you want to know how badly an accountancy firm can behave.

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How to write a book description: 8 steps with examples.

March 19, 2024
10 min read

Consider this: What draws you to a new book in a store? Beyond being a fan of the author, a striking title and captivating cover often catch your eye first. However, to judge whether the book is worth your time and investment, you instinctively turn to the back cover or browse the online description of a book .

Here lies the author’s or book writing services provider’s created “blurb,” providing just enough insight to spark a flurry of questions in your mind. A well-written description is key to luring readers. For authors, especially those self-publishing, creating an irresistible book blurb ensures that your hard work translates into book sales.

This article is your guide to constructing book descriptions that sell, deeply engage, and encourage readers to pick the book up.

The first sentence when you write a book description is like the opening act of a magic show. It’s your one chance to pull a rabbit out of the hat and make the audience gasp in awe. Here are some tips to craft a hook that’s impossible to ignore:

Ask a question: Starting with a question makes the reader’s brain tick. It’s like pressing a mysterious button – they just have to know what happens when they do.

Example: What would you do if you discovered your whole life was a lie written by someone you trusted?

Showcase a unique situation or setting: If your book has a setting or situation that’s out of the ordinary, flaunt it in the first sentence. It’s like showing a glimpse of a secret world.

Example: Clara is the only one stuck on the ground in a city where everyone can fly.

Remember, your hook should echo the soul of your book. Make it so intriguing that the reader can’t help but dive into your world headfirst.

After reeling in your reader with a stellar hook, it’s time to shine a spotlight on your protagonist and the stage of their story. This is where the book editors give a taste of who the reader will be rooting for and where the drama unfolds.

Highlight your character’s uniqueness: What makes your protagonist stand out? Even if they’re an ‘everyman’ or ‘everywoman,’ there’s something special about them. Find that spark and present it.

Example: Jake, a baker with the power to imprint emotions into his pastries, finds his quiet life upside down when…

Paint the setting with broad strokes: You don’t need to dive into deep detail but give a sense of where and when your story occurs. Is it in a bustling modern city, a distant planet, or a magic-filled ancient kingdom?

Example: In the neon-lit streets of Neo-Tokyo, where robots and humans are indistinguishable, lies a secret only she can uncover.

Introducing your protagonist when you write a book description helps the reader feel grounded in your story. The warm-up act before the main event sets the stage for everything that follows.

After you’ve set the stage with your hook and introduced your characters and their world, it’s time to reveal what shakes up their existence. Every writer knows conflict is important to incorporate to write a good story. The conflict or problem is the big storm heading their way, and your book is how they weather it.

When crafting this part of your description of a book :

Make it personal: The problem should hit your main character where it’s most painful. This conflict is their dragon to slay, their mountain to climb.

Example: When Annie finds the mysterious locket at the town fair, she never expected it to whisper her secrets back to her.

Dive into the emotions: Let the reader feel the weight of the problem. Is it fear? Anger? Desperation? Lace your words with the emotion that drives the narrative.

Example: With every whispered secret, Annie is drawn deeper into a labyrinth of memories she never knew she had—each one more frightening than the last.

Remember, the reader is here for the roller coaster ride of emotions, so make sure they can almost hear the tracks clanking and feel the anticipatory climb before the drop.

Now that you’ve introduced the conflict when you write a book description , it’s vital to show readers what’s at risk. What will happen if the protagonist fails to overcome their problem? The stakes are the fire beneath the plot’s boiling pot.

To turn up the heat:

Show what’s in jeopardy: The character’s life, love, sanity, or the world itself, make clear what could be lost. It’s like the moment in a movie when the hero hangs by a thread over a chasm—everyone’s breath is held.

Example: If Annie can’t silence the locket, her past may unravel her future and the fabric of reality itself.

Keep it relatable: Even if your story is set in a fantastical universe, the stakes must resonate on a human level. We all know what it’s like to fear losing something precious.

Example: As the locket’s grip tightens, Annie must fight for the truth and the essence of love and trust within her family before it’s shattered forever.

Raising the stakes heightens the tension and ensures your reader is invested enough to want to leap into the pages to join the protagonist in their battle against the odds.

With the stage set, characters introduced, and stakes established, it’s time to pull back the curtain just a bit more and offer a sneak peek at the journey ahead. You want to build a bridge of intrigue that the reader can’t help but cross.

Here’s how to tease the plot without revealing too much:

Outline the journey: Give a hint of the protagonist’s path. It’s like showing someone the start of a treasure map but keeping the X that marks the spot a mystery.

Example: To unlock the locket’s riddles, Annie is thrust into a scavenger hunt through her history, which will lead her to places she’s only seen in her dreams.

Mention the challenges: What hurdles must your character leap to succeed? It’s like hinting at the massive walls and treacherous rivers that lie ahead on an epic quest.

Example: From the hidden corners of her grandmother’s attic to the forgotten caves beneath the town, Annie will face puzzles that test her smarts and scares that test her courage.

Keep in mind that this part of your description of a book is about movement and momentum. Plant enough curiosity seeds so the reader can’t wait for them to sprout.

Every book has a heart that beats to the rhythm of its atmosphere. The feeling your story evokes can be just as important as the plot. When you write a book description , it should give a flavor of this to set the mood.

Here’s how to infuse atmosphere into your description:

Choose your words wisely: Your word choice sets the tone. Are your words dark and brooding, light and airy, or tense and quick? They’re not just explaining the story but painting the emotional landscape.

Example: In the shadows of the attic and the echoes of the caves, Annie’s journey is bated with breaths of suspense and washed with whistles of whimsy.

Reflect on the genre: Your atmosphere should nod to the genre. If it’s a mystery, weave in a sense of enigma. If it’s an adventure, the scent of distant shores should linger in your sentences.

Example: Every clue Annie unravels is a thread pulling her deeper into a tapestry of mystique and wonder, coloring her world with shades of danger and discovery.

Creating a vivid atmosphere not only shapes the reader’s expectations but also draws them deeper into the world of your story, ensuring they’re not just reading your words but living them.

If you’ve got glowing comments or reviews about your book, this step is your time to let it shine. Praise can be the golden word of approval that nudges a reader from consideration to purchase.

Here’s how to include praise effectively:

Be selective: Choose the most impactful and relevant praise you’ve received. It’s like picking the ripest, juiciest fruit from the tree — it will be the most satisfying for the reader.

Example: Hailed as “the summer’s must-read that will enchant and terrify in equal measure” by bestselling author Mary Thompson.

Keep it humble: While it’s important to showcase praise, make sure it doesn’t come off as bragging. Think of it as a friend recommending a great movie rather than a salesperson pushing a product.

Example: Readers call it “a journey marked by heart, heat, and the haunting whispers of an unforgettable heroine” – ShareYourStory Reviews.

Including praise helps build credibility and trust. It tells potential readers that this book has been on an adventure— through the hands and hearts of others who have loved it.

Like the final scene in a fireworks show, your closing sentence should leave readers with that ‘wow’ sensation that lingers. The encore has them clamoring for the full performance, which, in this case, is your book.

Here’s how to create a memorable closing:

Echo the hook: Bringing your description of a book full circle by echoing elements from your hook can be very satisfying for readers. It’s like ending a song with a gently familiar chorus that has everyone humming along.

Example: Will you unlock the secrets of Annie’s past? Step inside her tattered old book of life and turn the page.

Use powerful imagery or a call to action: Encourage the reader’s imagination to take flight or invite them to jump into the adventure. It’s like holding your hand and whispering, “Come with me.”

Example: Take the key to the past and discover what magic and monsters lie hidden in the pages waiting for you.

A robust closing ties everything up with an emotional bow and convinces the reader to take the next step — reading the book.

Remember, when you write a book description , each point entices and intrigues you. By building upon each step carefully, you’re not just presenting a product; you’re offering an escape, an experience, and an emotional journey.

Writing a book description isn’t easy, but don’t worry, these steps will guide you through, much like having ghostwriters by your side to demystify the process. Remember, like a magician’s reveal, the best descriptions lay out the show but keep the secrets. Now go on, shape your reader’s curiosity, and make them need to read your book like they need to hear the end of a mysterious tale.

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How to Write a Book Description That Attracts Readers: 8 Easy Tips

Learning how to write a book description that actually gets people interested in buying your book is important for increasing book sales and creating buzz.

Think about it. What makes you pick up or download a new book at the bookstore?

Unless you are a huge fan of the book’s author, you’re first drawn to a catchy title and cover appeal – a provocative illustration or that unique book cover design .

But when you want to know if the book is worth reading (and worth paying good money for), you flip to the back cover or read the description on the website.

There (or just inside the cover), the author has written a “blurb” or description about the book .

The book description includes just enough about what is going to happen in the book, to make the reader yearn for answers to all the questions flitting through his or her mind…if the author has succeeded in writing a captivating description . So how do you write a book description successfully?

For self-published authors, it’s even more important to craft the ultimate book description , so that when people land on your book’s site page, they will be drawn to purchase or download your book. You don’t want all the work you did writing the book to go to waste.

So how do authors do it, you ask? In this article, we’ll show you how to write a book description that sells, captivates, and entices the reader to keep reading.

This blog on how to write a book description will cover:

8 tips for how to write a book description that sells.

Whether you’re a fiction or nonfiction author, your book description is the reader’s first introduction to the pages beyond the cover. It’s important to capture interest, spark interest in the topic or theme, and give them just enough information that they can’t help but buy the book for the whole story.

Just follow these tips for how to write a book description, and no one will want to put your book down!

1. Start with a hook sentence

What is the critical issue in your book…the problem that demands to be solved? You need to know the answer before you can learn how to write a book description successfully.

With clever wording, a problem statement might be a great hook to catch potential readers’ attention. Then you can “reel” them in to purchase your book, using the rest of your well-worded blurb.

2. Write in the 3rd person point of view

When you write a book description, you should use the 3rd person point of view. That means using no “I’s” or “you’s”…only “he” or “she.” In fact, it shouldn’t even be written in your “author voice.” When learning how to write a book description, you should pretend to be someone else who is describing your book to potential readers.

3. Word your book description in a way that evokes emotion on-the-spot!

Does the main character greatly fear something? Make the reader feel a bit of that fear. Has the character suffered great loss?

Make the reader sympathize with the character’s distress. We want to understand the emotions the character is going through and what the character motivation is. This can help readers get hooked before they even turn the first page.

4. Tell enough about the plot to make people want to read the book

Introduce the main character and the problem of your story in a compelling way. Offer just enough hints about events in the story to pique reader interest without giving away any of the juicy details.

5. Focus on your book, not on yourself!

When learning how to write a book description, you shouldn’t make it about yourself. A brief author byline is fine, but readers want to know about the book! If you must mention yourself, remember to continue writing in the 3rd person point of view. Refer to yourself as he or she – you are merely acting as a reporter.

Place the byline last, with a definite space to separate it from the exciting book description.

In most book descriptions, you’ll find a short paragraph about the author only after the actual book teaser has been given.

Here is an example of how to write a book description that includes a concise, informational paragraph about the author.

6. Don’t give away the ending

This might be a no-brainer, but while practicing how to write a book description, you can’t give away the conclusion!

If you share the end of your book on your book cover, why will the reader bother to open the pages?

Give just enough information so that the reader can understand the story’s setting and context, but don’t give away the entire storyline. Leave the reader intrigued enough to want to purchase your book, so that they can discover the ending or any surprise twists on their own.

7. Add a brief testimonial or endorsement

Only use this feature if it enhances your book description.

The testimonial is a brief blurb by someone who has read the book and has found help or satisfaction by reading your book.
An endorsement is usually a succinctly-worded paragraph by someone, whose authority the reader will recognize, who reads your book and agrees that you are qualified to write this particular book.

8. Keep practicing!

The best way to learn how to write a book description is to write a bunch of them! Write multiple attempts of your book description. Revise your favorite version as many times as you need to, until you are satisfied with the results. Of course, sometimes, the only way to learn how to write a book description that actually sells is to get outside input. While you will make the final decision for the book description, it is important to listen to outside suggestions. After all, YOU are not the person buying your book!

Let several colleagues and potential readers (of the appropriate age level) look over your best attempts and offer their input.

BONUS: How to write a book description for nonfiction books

If you are trying to learn how to write a book description for a nonfiction book, it might be slightly different than a fiction book. After all, you aren’t evoking character emotions or teasing about a plot!

Use these questions to help you learn how to write a book description for nonfiction works:

Do you offer a unique point of view on a particular topic?
Do you have years of experience in research or practice?
Does your “author’s voice” appeal to the reader in a special way?
Do you bring new knowledge to the reader which other writers have not done?
Are the illustrations or photographs of exceptional quality and rarity?

How to write a book description, when the book is not yours…

If you’re writing a book description for someone else’s back cover, be sure to follow the suggestions above.

Several years ago, I was privileged to be a ghostwriter for a unique book of memoirs. You can read the book description I provided at Harbor Knight: From Harbor ‘Hoodlum’ to Honored CIA Agent .

When writing the back cover description for a book of memoirs that stretches over a lifetime, it can be challenging to pinpoint that single, most important thread that describes the path this person has trodden through life.

But that is precisely what you need to share with the reader. What made this person unique?

If this is a book of memoirs , you need to know the person’s story fairly well in order to learn how to write a book description about them. Do a brief interview to understand the person’s background. Make sure that you read the whole book manuscript. This will help you find common themes and personality traits that run from one decade into the next.

Use the person’s own words, when possible, so that his or her voice is heard. Be respectful with this task you’ve been asked to perform.

If (for some reason) you find the manuscript distasteful and feel that you are not able to offer a captivating description for the back cover, do the right thing. Turn down the request to write this particular book description.

Now that you have plenty of tips for how to write a book description, I’d like to show you a few examples of my own book descriptions so you can learn from them and from their writing process.

A few examples of how to write a book description

Here is an example of a back cover description from my first children’s chapter book .

Swimming brings back a nightmare that Rebecca Fishburn would much rather forget. So when the gym teacher announces plans to take the class swimming for the next two weeks, Reb can think of nothing else…and she is terrified! She must do whatever it takes to stay out of the water. Reb is convinced that she must lie…or she just might drown! Reb Fishburn: In Too Deep

I played around with the description for several weeks, before settling on the blurb (see above) for my back cover. I wanted to write “ Reb is convinced that she must lie or she just might die.” I wanted to help the reader experience the enormity of Reb’s fear.

But after sharing this rough draft with other elementary school teachers and parents, they felt that the sentence wording was too horrific for the young reader.

I took their advice and changed that single word. After all, the potential buyers of my book include teachers and parents. If they found the sentence offensive, so might many others.

For another children’s book I wrote, I used a simile to tease the reader’s curiosity :

You might not expect to discover gold on a country farm, but Grandpa knows just where to find this hidden treasure. Dig into Grandpa’s Hidden Gold Farm for a sweet and yummy treat! Grandpa’s Hidden Gold Farm

The cover illustrations and the title offer clues about the kind of hidden treasure tucked inside the book, but the description never mentions bees or honey!

Sophia and the Bully is a children’s book I wrote for Hameray Publishing’s Kaleidoscope series. The company chose the following description to sell this book (202 words) on their website:

It is the first day of school for a new student and she is faced with a bully. This book helps readers understand that sometimes the most bothersome people may just be needing a friend. Sophia and the Bully

The person writing this description chose to offer the reader a brief main idea paragraph , without revealing any of the events from the story. The book, written for beginning readers, contains only 12 pages. In that case, describing any single event would be to give away the whole story!

When deciding how to write a book description, you must think of who your audience will be, and make your book description appeal to those individuals.

A teacher, for example, is drawn in by the simple description of this little book for several reasons:

Throughout the school year in most teachers’ classrooms, new students come and go.
Just because a child can do annoying things to other students, that does not mean the child is a bully.
Students need to know the difference between a bully and a potential friend .
Bullying is a theme the school wants addressed in the classroom.
Reading a book aloud to the class or having a small group of beginning readers read the book together offers the teacher a non-threatening way to discuss bullying.

Obviously, the genre of your book will affect how to write a book description greatly.

Here is how to write a book description for other genres:

A cookbook may entice readers with delicious words and samplings from the specific type of recipes written between the covers.
A thriller might show the comparison between this book and a similar tale by a better-known author–with just enough details to send chills up the reader’s spine.
A romance will certainly tug on the reader’s heartstrings, divulging the names of the main characters and suggesting a problem that could keep the two from coming together!
A nonfiction book will provide an overview of what new and exciting concepts or facts the reader is going to learn. If any special chapters, illustrations or photos are included in the book, these should be mentioned in the book description.
A self-help book will describe the book’s layout and explain why the author is qualified to write a new book on this particular topic. A few details or a real-life example from the chapters within will show the reader that he or she may have finally found the answer to his or her problem.
A historical fiction book will place the fictional main character within an accurately depicted time and place, when an event of great magnitude (from actual history) is about to happen – and a captivating book description will include all of these details.

…and the list goes on.

The best way to know how much detail to include in your description is by traveling to the local library or bookstore and holding real books in your hand.

There, you’ll have thousands of books at your fingertips. You will quickly realize how one author works his or her magic, causing you to want to read more, and why another author’s book cover fails to pique your interest.

Become familiar with how other writers within your genre handle the back cover book description. See for yourself how the title, cover illustrations, and book description work together to make the reader want to know what lies within the pages.

Spread your book description far and wide!

The primary reason you have just spent so much time and energy writing this winning book description is to sell your book !

Write it. Rewrite it. Play with adjectives, phrases, and different literary techniques . Move sentences around to make it flow more easily.

Remember, if you must put your byline on the back cover, do so at the very end.

Set it apart from the book description…unless, of course, you’ve already written a popular book or you are famous in some other way. Then your name is almost as important as your book’s content.

Be clever. And give this book cover the most captivating description that you have ever read!

If your book description is clever enough, the “blurb” that you have just written can be used to promote your book in many places .

Here’s where to include your book description:

Newspaper press release (this is free advertisement, in most newspapers)
Your book launch event (this may be free if you agree to be interviewed)
Catalog item description for companies who will sell your book
Letter to potential storefronts wanting to sell your book
Brochure for groups wanting to use your book for book talk
Amazon listing
Your author website
Social media posts–personal and professional sites

Now you know exactly how to write a book description and what to do with it when you are done – so get your words out there and wow the world.

What type of book description will you write?

How to Write an Enticing Book Description

By Kyle A. Massa

A great book description is like a frozen yogurt sample: once you've gotten a taste, you crave more.

So, what's the best way for writers to write delicious book descriptions? Keep reading!

Start by Reading Existing Descriptions

Focus on the essentials, closing thoughts.

Before you wrote your book, I’m guessing you read a lot of other books. Likewise, you should read several book descriptions before writing your own. This will give you an idea of what good descriptions look like.

Note the components and how they’re sequenced. Highlight what you like. Mark details that don't compel you to read more.

To get you started, let's look at a few examples. We'll start with the description for A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan :

"Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs. With music pulsing on every page, A Visit from the Goon Squad is a startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption."

Concise, yet detailed. We get a glimpse of two key characters, plus a hint at the book's tone and underlying themes. I'd say the only thing we're missing here is setting. Nevertheless, the description accomplished its objective. I read the book! (It's outstanding, by the way.)

Next up, The Bone Clocks by English author David Mitchell :

"Following a terrible fight with her mother over her boyfriend, fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her family and her old life. But Holly is no typical teenage runaway: A sensitive child once contacted by voices she knew only as “the radio people,” Holly is a lightning rod for psychic phenomena. Now, as she wanders deeper into the English countryside, visions and coincidences reorder her reality until they assume the aura of a nightmare brought to life."

This is a nice start. Here we get character (Holly Sykes), plot (running away from home), and setting (the English countryside). In addition, this description does perhaps the most important function of all: it invites us to read more!

However, if you clicked the link above, you probably noticed how lengthy the full description is. I'd recommend against being that verbose. I love David Mitchell's work, but I'm not going to read a description that dense. Don't expect your readers to, either. Roughly three paragraphs is a good rule of thumb.

Finally, let's check out the description for Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (one of my favorite novels). I won't provide the full description here, but I'll hit the important points.

First, you'll notice the #1 New York Times Bestseller marker (is every book on every shelf a #1 New York Times Bestseller?). Then a quote from a Newsday reviewer, then a mention that the novel is the winner of the Whitbread Prize.

This lesson might not apply to all books, but I think it's worth mentioning: don't be afraid to brag. If your book earns a spectacular review, add it to your description. If it achieves outstanding sales, note it. If you or your novel won any kind of award, tell your readers. These details provide further proof of the quality of your work, so use them!

That said, unless you're a household literary name, I recommend against leading your description with reviews and such. It works for Rushdie because he's Rushdie. For the majority of other authors, readers care more about the book itself and less about who wrote it.

Now that we've examined a few descriptions, let's take a test. What am I missing from this description?

"Some coffee is strong. But only one coffee is strong enough to wake the dead." So begins the story of Revitalize , the new horror-thriller from Kyle A. Massa. Set in a world where FDA caffeine restrictions are a distant memory and Keurigs produce coffee in mere seconds, one new brand of coffee is taking the living world (and the undead one) by storm. The question is, will there be anyone left to enjoy it?

So, what am I missing?

You got it... character! (And setting, though that's a little less important.)

This is a problem I’ve noticed in my book descriptions, as well as those of my peers. Fantasy and science fiction writers are especially guilty of it, particularly when we’re writing a description for the first entry in a larger series. We tend to focus on the magic system, the overarching conflict, or the world of the story rather than the basic elements.

As you know, every story needs character, setting, and plot. Likewise, every book description should include these elements.

Yes, there are exceptions to every rule. As previously noted, the description of A Visit from the Goon Squad lacked any mention of setting. But generally speaking, you can only benefit by including it. Who, what, and where? Those are the questions readers want answered before they'll buy a book.

Finally, invite your reader to read more. Every book description needs some sort of intriguing tag at the end, one that readers will crave an answer for. You've probably noticed many descriptions end with a question—and that's because it works!

Will they arrive in time to thwart the dastardly plan?

Can two people still learn to love, even after death?

What will our hero learn about her family? And what will she learn about herself in the process?

Questions like these spark interest. As you've seen in the above descriptions, they need not always be questions. But that's a great place to start.

Read as many book descriptions as you can. Analyze what works and what doesn't, then practice writing your own.

Like your book, you probably won't get it exactly right on the first try. Write, revise, share with others, then revise more. A great book description is worth the time.

Be confident about grammar

Check every email, essay, or story for grammar mistakes. Fix them before you press send.

Kyle A. Massa

Kyle A. Massa is the author of the short fiction collection Monsters at Dusk and and the novel Gerald Barkley Rocks. He lives in upstate New York with his wife and their two cats. Learn more about Kyle and his work at his website, kyleamassa.com.

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Book Marketing & Publishing Tips

How to Write a Book Description: Tips from BookBub Editors

July 6, 2023 by Lauren Aldrich

I’ve included screenshots of examples for reference — click on each image to read the book description in a new tab.

1. Keep your target audience and genre in mind

To attract the right readers to your book, you need to use language that really calls out to them. You can do this by purposefully keeping your specific genre in mind as you write your promotional copy.

If you’re writing fantasy, for example, that’s a great start — but what kind? Readers will look for you to tell them whether your book is an urban fantasy, a historical fantasy, an epic fantasy, or something else altogether. Don’t muddle the description with genre jargon that may overwhelm curious searchers, but do call out elements of the genre that you know readers like. What types of characters does your hypothetical fantasy story revolve around? Are they discovering their own magical abilities or embarking on an arduous quest? Highlighting the elements you love about your genre of choice will alert readers to your expertise and passion for the stories you’re writing and show them that they’ve found the book they’re looking for.

Another way to approach this task is to think of how readers looking for a book like yours might search online for relevant titles. What keywords and descriptors would they use? Make sure those are right there in your book description so no one has to scroll through pages of search results before they find your work.

You can see that this book description calls out two tropes (enemies-to-lovers romance and a female private eye) and a subgenre (“a hilarious paranormal mystery”) in the second line of text, making it easy for readers to immediately know what they’re looking at and whether or not it’s for them.

This tip works for nonfiction, too! This description immediately calls out what the book is (“an essential self-help guide”) along with a few keywords (“chronic pain” and “myofascial release”), so the reader can understand the book’s genre and contents at a quick glance.

2. Strike the right balance in your content

Beyond beckoning to genre readers with clear descriptors, you’ll also need to decide how much of your plot to include in your book description. This can be a real dilemma — include too little detail, and your book will seem bland and vague, with little to motivate your potential audience to buy it. Give away the whole thing, though, and no one will need to read the book to find out what happens!

To approach this conundrum, we suggest focusing your description on a couple of main hooks and a twist or two. A hook can be anything that makes your characters or your story unique. What’s so special about your main character? How did they land in their current situation? Look for the unexpected elements of your story and characters and highlight them just enough to pique readers’ interest, without explaining too much of the why or how. And don’t forget to add your twist: Hint at the part of the plot that’s going to send the whole story sideways. Most readers love to be surprised, so use your book description to promise them you’ll do just that if they pick up your book.

In this description, we’re drawn in with a couple of hooks that leave us asking questions: An injured teen is hiding (why?). She disappears from the hospital when the detective helps her (where does she go?). And when the detective searches for her, we get the twist: The Mafia wants the teenage girl dead. Without spoiling the plot for us, this description has given us enough information to be intrigued and ready for more. We’re still left wondering where the girl went and how she came to be pursued by such powerful enemies, but we know enough about the book to decide whether it’s what we want to read or not.

Here the author sets the scene: A female main character who doesn’t believe in love meets a nice guy looking for happily ever after. These are already effective hooks for a romance reader, but with the twist — an unnamed threat from the past resurfaces, putting the new relationship at risk — the reader has even greater incentive to buy the book to find out what happens next.

3. Get creative

Okay, so you’re telling readers what your book is. You’re giving them enough detail about the plot to get them intrigued. How else can you draw them in? Get creative with your words!

You can do this in all sorts of ways: Use humor to demonstrate a character’s personality. Employ evocative language to make the sentiment of the book clear. Highlight engaging quotes from trade publications or reader reviews to show that your book is unique and compelling. And above all, use a distinctive voice to make readers feel like they’re getting to know you and your work. What you’re saying in your book description is important, but how you say it can make all the difference to a potential reader.

Samantha Irby’s book description goes heavy on the humor so readers can get a sense of what the book itself will be like. Placing an evocative quote near the top of the text and pulling out humorous anecdotes from the book show readers clearly what to expect — and might get them chuckling before they even buy it.

Writing in the first person can be a creative and effective way to catch a reader’s attention. In this description, the narrator launches straight into a description of her past before outlining her current circumstances, pulling the reader into the story and perhaps even into rooting for her as she enters an interstellar war. We immediately get a feel for the tone of the book as a result of this strategy.

4. Include realistic and recognizable comps

A common practice in writing promotional copy for books is to compare the book or author to others in the genre that readers might already be familiar with. I’m not talking about comparing yourself to the genre’s greatest, most famous authors — but rather about finding the writers your future readers already flock to for their favorite books. If you’re not well acquainted with other authors writing in your lane, it’s time to do a little research!

Search for books in your genre with similar themes, plots, and covers to yours. Look for the authors with bigger ratings counts and followings and dive a little deeper. If the comparison stands up, consider mentioning that your book is great for fans of that author in your book description. It’s a helpful signal to readers that they’re on the right track when they’re looking for new content, and the familiar names will show you’re on top of trends in your subgenre.

This description smartly offers three relevant comps to other authors, so readers who recognize those names will understand that they’ve found a book in the same wheelhouse as an author they already know.

In this description, the book is compared not just to another author but to a popular series. This is a way to offer an even more specific clue to readers about the type of book you’re offering!

5. Use formatting to your advantage

Retailers allow you to use all kinds of formatting — from bolded and italic text to changing the font size — so it may be overwhelming to think about what you can and should do with your book description to make it stand out.

I think it’s great to keep it simple — too much formatting will make the text look scattered or hard to read — but using something like a simple bolded sentence at the top of your description can help catch a reader’s attention and draw them in, either by telling them about the book’s plot and genre or by putting forth a main hook. Use line breaks or paragraphs to make your text readable and approachable. Just remember, any formatting you use should make the description look clean, crisp, and easy to read.

Here, the author uses a single bolded sentence at the top of the description to tell the reader exactly what they’re getting in terms of author, plot, and genre.

Formatting can be especially helpful for descriptions of box sets. This author’s use of line breaks, bolded text, and italics helps potential readers easily see all the content they’re getting and parse out each book’s plot, a couple of reader quotes, and a discount offer. The description is long, but it’s broken up in a way that looks clear and easy to read.

6. Proofread!

Last but never least, all this hard work can go to naught if you don’t proofread. Don’t go to the trouble of researching, writing, and formatting your book description without making sure you get a couple of sets of trusted eyes on your work to make sure it’s free of typos, spelling and grammar errors, and incorrect formatting. Potential readers want to know they can trust you to write and edit well, and your book description is your first and best chance to prove that to them. Pay close attention to detail and have a friend or editor look over your copy before you publish it.

You’ve worked long and hard on your book, and you deserve for it to do as well as it possibly can with readers. Focusing your energy and attention on creating a stellar book description will only help you on your way to your goal of reaching your perfect audience and getting your book into their hands. I hope these tips have given you food for thought and will help you create an impactful, enticing book description that spurs readers to buy your book!

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The Creative Penn

Writing, self-publishing, book marketing, making a living with your writing

Writing Hooks And Improving Your Fiction Book Description With Michaelbrent Collings

posted on December 6, 2021

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:09:04 — 56.1MB)

Subscribe: Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | More

Readers buy or borrow your book based on your cover and book description, so how can we make sure the description is the best it can be? How can we make readers want to click Buy Now and start reading immediately?

Michaelbrent Collings provides useful tips — and tough love! — for authors who struggle with book descriptions (which includes me!)

In the intro, I talk about being back in Auckland and reflect on the passing of time.

This episode is sponsored by Publisher Rocket , which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at www.PublisherRocket.com

Michaelbrent Collings is an internationally best-selling novelist, and the only author to be a finalist for a Dragon Award, Bram Stoker Award, and RONE Award. A Ranker survey recently named Michaelbrent one of the top 100 Greatest All-Time Horror Writers, but he's written bestsellers in a dozen different genres. His latest book, Malignant , debuted on Amazon's bestseller lists all over the world.

Michaelbrent is also a screenwriter — and helps authors with their book descriptions over on Fiverr Pro/mbcollings .

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Why is an effective book description so important?
What authors get wrong with book descriptions
Thinking about your book like a movie — what are the high points of the trailer?
Tips for writing a great hook
How a good book description can help with advertising

You can find Michaelbrent Collings at WrittenInsomnia.com and on Twitter @mbcollings. You can hire Michaelbrent on Fiverr Pro here .

Transcript of Interview with Michaelbrent Collings

Joanna: Welcome back to the show, Michaelbrent.

Michaelbrent: Hello, I'm so happy to be here.

Joanna: It's great to have you back on the show. And you have been on the show a number of times.

Michaelbrent: Yes.

Joanna: So we're not going to go into your backstory, we're going to get straight into the topic today, which is all about book descriptions. And this is a very interesting topic. You have a ton of books, I have quite a lot of books, and I still feel this is an issue.

Why is an effective book description so important, and why are they so difficult?

Michaelbrent: Oh, my gosh, okay. Well, I think, first of all, the reason they're super important. There's the obvious; it's one of the first things people see . So like, your cover, as much as authors hate to admit it, because we're like, ‘My book should sell this book.'

People are shallow. If I go on to an Amazon book page, and the cover looks like it was done by like a five-year-old using Windows Paint on a Commodore 64, or some godawful combination like that, people are just going to be turned off, because they know you're not operating at a level of professionality.

I compare book purchases to dating. But it's almost worse because with a date, you're committing to a couple of hours with a person and it goes badly, and you never have to see or think of them again. With a book, you're committing to potentially a lifetime with that thing because if it's good, it's going to live in you forever .

And if it's bad enough, you will always remember. I can tell you exactly the one book I hurled across the room because I was so upset. And that happened when I was 16, so, these things stay with you. And so the cover is a big deal .

Then the next big deal, assuming you've gotten them to your book page because most people buy books electronically, we just have to face that, is the book description. The difference there is you're like, now I'm starting my job because most authors, the book cover is going to be outsourced, which is a wise thing to do.

For most authors, you get to that book description, and it's like, here's me, I'm appearing for the first time.

And so it's super important because if you're reading a book description, and it's terrible, well, you already know the author is not a wordsmith. Because they have failed to accomplish their primary objectives in this first couple of paragraphs. Or even the first couple sentences.

I have a couple of book descriptions that are five or six sentences short. And if you can't do that, why am I going to let you into my brain for 100,000 words?

Joanna: It just seems so unfair . It's unfair that we have to sell ourselves, our book, not ourselves, we don't attach ourselves to the book, obviously.

Michaelbrent: It's not that kind of book.

Joanna: It's so unfair that we have to write a whole thing. And then we have to come up with a pithy, whatever, book description that is the thing that represents us.

It feels so hard to me because I have written a book and it's all this massive thing in my head, and it's full of cool characters and great plot, loads of great writing, obviously. And now I have to boil it down to a catchy description.

So, what is a terrible book description? You pitched me with this idea, because you said you'd seen a lot of them.

What do people get wrong? What is a terrible description?

Michaelbrent: Honestly, most of them.

If you open Amazon up to a random author, you don't know. If it's Stephen King, and you're buying Stephen King, you don't really even read the book description, you've already decided it. So I'm not talking about your favorite author.

Go to some rando, and read the description and you're just like, ‘Oh, this kind of sucks,' because most of them do. And the problem is, well, first of all, most authors hate the book description , they're like you, ‘This is unfair, I already did all this work. And now I have to do another thing.' But that's life.

Unlike this date analogy, if I go on a date, and we've all had that thing where I don't date anymore, except for my wife, I date her regularly. But you have this thing where you're putting on the perfect tie, or the perfect dress, and you spend 45 minutes, and I would always get there. But ultimately, in the back of my mind, I'm like, ‘But I still look like me. So there's that chance gone.'

That's okay though, you're ultimately on the date. It's you. And that's what the book description really is. Don't think of it as now I have to try on a million dresses. It's now I get to show them upfront you can have confidence in me.

And you can do that. If you are a good enough author to write all of these words that make sense and keep all the plots together, have a little confidence. You can do a good book description .

The biggest mistake that most authors make is exactly something you said; I have it full of all these cool characters and cool ideas. And you have these fun complicated plots, and you want to put it all down .

Joanna: I really do.

Michaelbrent: You're like I spent so much time, people should know —

The only job of a cover and description is to create a question. Take notes, people: create a question that can only be answered by reading the book.

A great cover description creates a question that the reader has to have answered, and can only get an answer by reading the book. So most authors want to put everything and the reality is the best cover descriptions for a new author for someone you're unfamiliar with, tells you very little.

It will give you a sense of the genre , you want them to know that, and then it will give them a basic setup , and then it will leave them with some questions in their head. You don't have to actually ask questions, although I do in a lot of my book descriptions, I find it effective. But you want them to go, ‘Wait, then what happens?' And, of course, they have to read it.

Joanna: I completely agree with you, and then it's really hard to actually put into action. So we're going to try and talk about the actual process of doing it because, we're going to take it from two angles.

The first angle is the person like me, who is a discovery writer, doesn't really know what they're writing . Knows it's a thriller, for example, knows the genre, writes the book, and then has to come up with the book description. Or someone who already has a book, and they have a book description, and they want to rewrite it or write it from scratch.

If we are someone who already has the book and has to now write this description, how do we go about it? Do we just write everything down we possibly can and then narrow it down? How do we go about it if we have the book already?

Michaelbrent: That's a super good question. I'm going to back it up even a step before that and encourage people.

You can be a discovery writer and still have a great hook in mind.

So I'm going to use one of my books that's really easy is ‘Strangers.'

I didn't know where it was going to lead or how it was going to end or anything when I started writing it. But I knew the hook, which is a family wakes up in their own home, discovers that all the doors have been jammed closed from the outside. And all the windows are covered with sheet metal, and there's a killer inside with them who wants some alone time.

I still got to discover everything. But I started from a point where I was like, ‘Okay, that would make a cool movie poster.' And that's where I encourage people to start with when they're beginning, think, ‘Is this a cool movie poster?'

Movie posters encapsulate all of the basic elements of a good cover description for me. They have a central image that tells you like, ‘Oh, it's a slasher, or oh, this is a romance.'

It gives you that sense, here's what I'm getting into, and then it shows you enough cool imagery that you see a few money shots. You know Kylo Ren is going to fight with Rey because they're standing next to each other with their lightsabers crossed.

So you can discovery write, but it's not mutually exclusive from saying when you start, think to yourself, is there a hook here? Because audiences really like hooks, it excites them .

One of the easiest sells in a movie was ‘Underworld,' which was a vampire movie 20 years ago, and I was working in Hollywood at the time. And it was like Romeo and Juliet with vampires and werewolves and everyone went, ‘Oh,' immediately, obviously, that's going to make a million dollars. And now there's been five movies in that series.

So you want to hopefully start and if you can't figure out that hook, maybe rethink your project , maybe think, ‘Okay, is there something else I could do?' Because it's just the reality, if you want to be selling books, you have to do things that sell books.

Joanna: You've jumped into my alternate thing, which is coming up with the hook early. So let's stay on that then and we'll come back to the other one.

Because I feel like you're completely right, I would love to come up with a hook before I write something. And I feel like that answers the question of what to do with the book description. But the fact is that most of us can't come up with hooks beforehand.

What are some of your tips for coming up with those hooks?

Michaelbrent: First of all, don't fight it. So many writers and artists, in general, feel like, my universe should be boundless. My universe should be without rules, but no, your universe functions within rules. And if you want to be an artist and make things that are aesthetically pleasing to your muse, that's cool.

I'm not knocking that but that's very different from I want to be a published author and make enough money to put food on the table for me and my family. And in that case, you have to go in it from that mindset.

I don't mind that. At first, I was like everybody else, why should I have to do that? But now I really enjoy it. It's a process that I get a kick out of.

So, if you want to write something with a hook, basically, you want to be able to explain it in that sentence or two . I put like a 50 or 60 word limit on myself. And if I can't explain it to my nine-year-old…or seven-year-old and have him get stoked about it, I'm going, ‘This probably isn't great.'

And it's not because I'm saying that the average market has a seven-year-old mental capacity. But kids are great litmus tests for cool. They see Disneyland and know it's cool. They see school and immediately there is nothing here that I'm going to be excited about.

There are quirks and irregularities and exceptions, Disneyland has terrible lines, the school has recess and lunchtime, they discover, but they are good. They can tell, overall, I'm going to like this, overall, I'm not.

So I will pitch my kids, I'll say, ‘Here's some thoughts.' And they're like, ‘Oh, that one's great and that one's not.' So find a disinterested person who's enthusiastic and say, ‘I've got 50 words.' and look at them. And at the end, if they're not going like, ‘Yeah, and?' Then go back to the drawing board.

That's hard because people come up with an idea and they're really excited. And that's the easiest part to write for every writer. It's like, I came up with the beginning and I'm 20 pages in because that's exciting and that's fun, and then the work starts .

And here, Michaelbrent is saying only now throw away the fun part because you're going to do work right at the beginning. But you have to do it if you're going to write to your market, you're thinking, ‘What do they like?' And then you're thinking, ‘How can I grab them quickly?'

So I try desperately not to go into a book unless I can have 60 words that explain the overarching concept , not the theme, because themes are subtle, and themes tease out over time, and not all the characters and not all their interactions. But the basic idea, strangers, a family is trapped in their own home with a serial killer, boom. And everyone's like, ‘Okay, I know what that is.'

Joanna: So, in that situation, this hook needs to have some idea of the character, it doesn't need to be their name, or whatever.

We need to have a person or an alien, whatever that character is, and then we need to have a setting, and then we need to have a situation.

Michaelbrent: Yes. And that's it, Joanna, those are the things. And they should all three come together enough that you're like, ‘That is going to be exciting.' And the way you get there, people will sit there and go, ‘Hooks and hook writing is really difficult.'

It is and it isn't. You can go into any part of writing, saying, ‘Well, this part's really difficult.' Or you can go into it and say, ‘But it's writing and I love writing .'

So hooks are part of your writing. And that's part of standing out from the market. There are at least 10 million books on Amazon now. So you want to stand out, you want to have that hook immediately.

It's a process of asking questions. You want to ask, ‘What's my situation? What's my setting? What are the characters?' And the way you can go about that is just say, start with the one that's interesting.

I wrote a book called The Loon with the process.

Joanna: I read that one. It's great!

Michaelbrent: Oh, good. Okay. So the process for that was really a matter of questions. I literally sat down and went, ‘What's a scary place? A haunted house? No, I did one of those recently. Okay, what else? Prison. Oh, those are scary.' And then I went, ‘What is scarier? A prison full of crazy people. What's scarier than that? Mental health institution with the lights out. Oh, What's scarier than that? What if there's a monster in the basement that wants to eat everyone?'

Now I have a really fun setting that grew into a situation . And my last question becomes, ‘Who would that hurt the most? The staff. Who in particular in the staff? The guy in charge because he feels responsible. Why does he feel responsible? Oh, he actually lost a child, like through his own self-perceived negligence, his own son was killed.'

And that was literally what I did. It took about a day and a half. I was walking tight little circles in the middle of the living room. I'm not exaggerating, super inconvenient for my wife. She's like, ‘Get out of the way I'm trying to watch TV,' and I'm just mumbling to myself.

It boiled down to those questions. And it ends up in The Loon , which is the pitch. A maximum-security penitentiary for the criminally insane gets hit by a blizzard so severe all communications with the outside world is cut off. And the inmates are able to escape but cannot leave, which is a problem for the staff. But the bigger problem is the monster in the basement that wants to eat all of them.

And at this point, what have I told you about the main character? Nothing really. What have I told you about the monster? Nothing really. What about the details of the layout of The Loon , which is the facility itself, which is a cool facility, like I could tell you all the research and stuff I did about that, and it was super fun. But you don't know anything about it. I haven't told you the cool things.

So that's the tough thing for any writer trying to design their cover description, you have to be able to say, ‘I'm not going to tell them all the cool things. If I did that, why would they read my book?'

So that you get to the end of the pitch and the person who's reading the cover description of The Loon is like, ‘What kind of prison is that? Wait, what? A monster? Who's in the basement? Tell me more.'

You've created those questions that must be answered. These are serious questions.

A really good analogy for cover descriptions is we've all had that co-worker who comes up to us and pulls out baby photos. And I love babies. But as important as babies are, your random baby has no place in my heart.

So as soon as they pull out the pictures, you're like, ‘Oh, baby with no relationship to me, no importance in my life, no real impact. I'm going to sit here and try and look interested because all babies that aren't mine kind of look alike.'

That's how most people tell their cover descriptions. They intrude into your life and tell you a long series of facts that don't matter to you .

If the same person walks up and grabs his wallet, and as he's opening it, says, ‘So, little Timmy's face caught fire yesterday.' ‘What?' And now he can open or she can open their wallet and they're like, ‘Okay, we're going to start, he was as an egg cell.

It doesn't matter you're totally in because you're like, I know there's value at the end of this story. There's a kid with his face on fire, and that's terrible but awesome. What's the story here?

That's your cover description. You don't want to walk up and tell them all your baby facts about your baby that they don't know and don't care about yet. You want to give them something huge that slams into them, ‘Hey, Little Timmy's face caught on fire.'

Joanna: So obviously, this is genre-specific. You write horror, which has plot and character and setting, it has the same as everything else. But I also feel like, with series descriptions, it's also slightly different because you're addressing new readers, but you're also addressing readers who already know who your characters are.

What about series descriptions?

Joanna: So you always need to mention your character names or what they do, because they want to know those characters back and kind of doing their thing. Can we go back to this question?

I absolutely think your process is the best process. But the truth is a lot of us don't do that.

Michaelbrent: We are already there.

Joanna: We've already got the book. What is the trick then to find the key place where things get excited and focus on that. But also, in action-adventure books like mine or a thriller, that's what we're searching for, and that might be part of a mystery.

How do we do it when we need to keep the coolest things hidden rather than emphasize them?

Michaelbrent: That's a great question. And the answer is, look at a movie trailer.

In the movie trailers, they give you all the money shots.

You go to a movie and you realize that the movie trailer showed the climax. But you don't know that in the movie trailer because you're giving it without super amounts of context as to what's happening.

You can do that in a book description. So, as far as like reintroducing new readers and keeping old readers, your main character in a thriller or in any series, they should be somebody who's interesting and likable to everybody.

In the Stranger book, which is actually a series, the bad guy in that evolves and is over time actually becoming a good guy who's hunting down bad guys. His name is Legion. And so you can say for your old readers, ‘Legion is back.'

They know they know who Legion is. And for the new readers, you can say, ‘A psychopath on the hunt for other psychopaths with his two dead brothers calling the shots.' My old readers know exactly what I'm talking about now, and the new readers should be going, ‘Wait, what the what? He's a killer hunting killers? That's cool. And his two dead brothers are involved, so what's…?' And now you've noticed they've already got those questions.

So you can update the new readers very quickly. And if your character was cool enough to pitch in that first book, you can pitch them again every book. Because you're going to do it so quickly and efficiently that your old readers aren't going to have to spend a page on it. They're like, ‘Yeah, yeah, I'm stoked. Oh, it's still Legion.'

And then you get into the next question. You're going to be showing big moments . Again, bear in mind, if every one of your big moments can fit into a 2 or 3 or 10 paragraph description, you already are in trouble because you don't have enough cool moments for a 100,000-word book, or even a 50,000 or 30,000 word novella.

Cool moments don't have to be explosions , or stabs, or anything like that, again, you think of the romantic melodrama trailers. ‘He's standing in the rain, pleading, I love you, and you complete me.' They're all these moments that are enough to get the watcher invested.

And also go, ‘That's so cool. Oh, I'm in love again'. But when you get to the movie, the movie isn't about those big moments, it becomes about how they are threaded together, and the same as with any book.

So of course, if you're writing about a romance, it's going to be a different tack on the book cover. You're not going to write, spend quite so much time on the action necessarily, as on the melodrama between the two.

I write Western romances under a pen name, Angelica Hart . ‘Grace Isabella is a woman on the run, haunted by her past, and the only man she loved still after her.'

I'm making that up kind of off the top of my head off of a very old memory. But you see we've been told there's loving in this, Grace Isabella is on the run from the only man she loves and it's created, again, these questions.

It's told a really cool thing, which is, the guy that she married is still after her. And he's trying to make her life miserable. He's doing all these awful things. And then you say, ‘But Paul, a lonely ranch hand with secrets of his own.' ‘What secret?' says the reader at this point. You're creating these compelling questions within the framework of your book.

So if you are done with your book, just look at it and go, ‘What are the awesomest parts of my book?'

Well, there's a fight with Ninja robots on top of the Eiffel Tower. That's cool. The Earth blows up, that's an interesting moment. Oh, yeah, it turns out the main character is half a snake. And those are your three big huge moments.

Can you tell them in the book cover without revealing your story? Yeah, I mean, just right now, if I told you those three things, nobody listening to that, I bet you, aren't going, ‘Oh, yeah, I see exactly how those three things tie together. I totally know this story.'

You're like, ‘Wait, what? There's robot ninja fighting and there's a guy who's a snake and…? Wait, wait, back up. Tell me more.' And that's where I'm like, ‘Ha-ha, I refuse, click Buy now. One click.' And that's your job.

You haven't given away the awesomeness of your story. Because the genius of your story isn't the cool moments, it's the fact that you, the author, have come up with so very many cool moments, and then made them all make sense together .

Joanna: And that can also apply to literary fiction that don't have massive plot details.

Joanna: Just to be clear, people!

Michaelbrent: Yes, anything, whatever it is, there's a framework, and for your audience, they're going to go, ‘This is the coolest moment. This is the second coolest moment. This is the third coolest moment.'

You've got 20 cool moments, you can pull three out of them, and mention them quickly. And you should still have enough left over that your audience is enraptured every page. Do you want to be the author who's like, ‘I am great at coming up with one idea. And I spent a page on that and the other 399 are just boring and crappy.'

No, of course not. You are an awesome author, especially like Joanna Penn, folks, I'm serious. Like the Mapwalker series is just so much fun, I tell people about it all the time.

Joanna: Thank you.

Michaelbrent: And, oh, so good.

Joanna: We'll come into that. So basically what you're saying is, if we've written the book already, we get the coolest things in the book, and instead of having a more sort of introductory paragraph, which is what a lot of people do, including myself. We put the coolest things on and then we also make sure we've put questions into the heads of the reader. Whether or not it's an actual question or not is fine.

The reader should read it and have just a ton of questions that now need to be answered by reading the book, essentially.

Michaelbrent: Yeah. Pitching ‘Mapwalkers,' I would say, I would not talk about all the depth of character, there's tons of characters. It's a cool fantasy, but I'd be like, ‘Okay, I'm talking to Ralph.' I'm using that name because nobody's named Ralph anymore. My grandpa was Ralph though, so it's still a cool name.

‘Ralph, have you read the Mapwalkers?' ‘No.' ‘Okay. Oh, my, gosh, dude, what if you could draw maps and they came true. Okay? And oh, and what if like the most powerful maps you drew like they were tattooed on you, Ralph? And in human blood,' okay.

I'm not even telling accurately the story anymore, but I'm excited about it. And Ralph's going, ‘Wait, how does that work?'

Because and I've told him two big things about your series. Does anybody going into your series on page one go, ‘Oh, yeah, I know exactly what to expect?' No. But they've got this really cool framework. It's obviously fantasy because there's magic involved.

Things come to pass, kind of creatio ex-nihilo in some ways, but they don't know all these details. They don't know what happens to maps that are forgotten. They don't know the details of all the dark shadowlands that the characters will enter and the forgotten places and things. There's so many things that you can get into with ‘The Mapwalker' series I just touched on two big ones, they still don't have a context. And so you're not giving away a secret.

Now, in a mystery book, obviously, you're not going to want to start out with the whole point of the MacGuffin is finding out who did it. You're not going to want to say, ‘The Butler did it. But detective Max Stone doesn't know that yet.' That's not how you go about it.

You've actually just given a question away. And so you don't want to answer that. You're going to say, ‘A body was found in a car in a locked room, in a locked house that had been surrounded by concrete. Max Driver is on the case.' And people are already like, ‘Oh, okay, I know what I'm getting into. And wait, what? First of all, how did that happen? And second of all, what kind of person would encase an entire home in concrete?'

I've told some really bitchin' stuff that Max Driver is going to spend 200 pages even getting through the concrete. Like he's like, ‘Oh, we finally got to the house.' Twist, ‘The house is locked, what do we do?' And so Max is still having all these twists and also, you have to remember, here's one thing in a good book readers do, they read it and they get involved, and they forget about the world .

Here's one thing about the way people read books that no one ever does. Book open in the right hand, in the left the cover description. Me matching facts like, ‘Oh, okay, yeah, that happened? Okay, good. Good. I was waiting. Oh, I see.'

If you're doing your job, by page one, they've forgotten about the cover blurb and they're just all in on your book , even if you did tell them, ‘The Butler did it.' By page 10 they're going, ‘How, though? How did the butler do it, this is an impossible situation.'

No matter how much you've told them, they should still have more, you're only working with a page here. So have a little confidence in your own work.

But the shorter you can get it, the more respectful you are of them as well, of their time. You're saying, ‘You don't know me, I don't know you, here's three sentences, interested?' And they'll either walk on happy, or they'll buy your book.

But if you capture them and hold them against their will, like, I'm going to drag you through all of this, whether you want it or not. They're going to go away and say, not only, ‘Eh, not interested, but oh, stay away from that Amazon page, it's the worst.'

Joanna: You've obviously been writing for many years now.

If you were to go back to one of your older books, do you rewrite blurbs?

Michaelbrent: Oh, yeah.

Joanna: Do you take one and tinker with it? In my situation would you say start from a blank page, don't tinker with the one you've already written, come up with a blank page and start afresh?

I feel like many of us have tinkered with book descriptions in order to maybe put some genre-specific words in or we've just tinkered a little bit. Might a fresh page approach be better?

Michaelbrent: I used to be an attorney, so I will give you an attorney answer, which is, maybe you can do both things and try them both. And incidentally, you mentioned something about genre-specific wording, and we're talking now about Amazon's algorithm and things like that. I would counsel you, don't have that in mind at this point.

SEO search terms can always be added in, and if you've done your job describing it to market, they shouldn't be hard to add in. If you spend six pages talking about the love story on your cover description, and then you're like, ‘Oh, how do I work in the word serial killer?' Well, first of all, you've already screwed up the description. You're not even describing it as a serial killer book.

So I would say do both. There's some that I have looked at. And at the time, they are great. I'll tell you one of my shortest blurbs or cover descriptions I ever had was for a book called Run . And it did really well. It was the number one thriller and sci-fi and horror, a bunch of big categories.

The cover description was definitely part of it at the time, because it was, gosh, I can almost do it probably by heart, even though it was 10 years ago. ‘What do you do if everyone you know, family, friends, everyone, is trying to kill you? Answer, you run.'

I've created a lot of questions. I directly asked a question. But the questions that should spring to mind in the reader's head are like, ‘Wait, why would your friends and family and everyone want to kill you?' It was a very effective cover description to the point that I got a phone call from a major Hollywood studio. And he's like, ‘Are the rights for that available?'

I said, ‘Yeah, they are. So you are interested?' He said, ‘Yeah, it's kick-ass, man,' and I'm actually editing for content there. And I said, ‘Oh, what did you like about it?' He goes, ‘Oh, I've never read the book,' like, ‘Who has time for a 400-page book, the description was awesome. That's a total movie.'

But over time, it didn't work as well, because the market shifts . And now the description is more detailed. And it says basically, the main character is a man who has never left his little tiny hometown his entire life, except for once when he went overseas for war and saw a man graphically murdered, and 10 years later, that man shows up in the town. Everyone the main character asks about it tries to kill him. And by the end of the day, the whole town's after him.

So the new one is completely different, but if you look at it the same core elements are still there. It's about everyone he asks is trying to kill him. And by the end of the day, he's on the run. I've still kept those money shots from the trailer.

I've added information because audiences, A, like if you're going to one of my book pages, chances are now you've at least heard of me, just because my name shows up in horror lists a lot. If only subconsciously you are like, ‘Oh, yeah, I think I've seen this guy.' And so I can afford a little bit more time to show even more cool parts. But I'm not going to show all of them.

Joanna: On the sales page, I'm looking at Run now. So you…

Michaelbrent: Oh, no!

Joanna: As you said, now you are emphasizing something about yourself as a multiple Bram Stoker Award finalist . Because you know that your potential audience understand what that means and the quality of the book.

You've also included review quotes, which I also noticed on Malignant , which is one of your current ones. And this is a question that a lot of writers have, which is, there is this obsession in traditional publishing with asking other authors for blurbs or getting quotes to go on the cover.

Most authors are not Bram Stoker nominees, or multi-award-winning writers like yourself. Should we just leave all that stuff off and not worry about that until potentially later and just go with the book, actual book description?

How important are those accolades and awards?

Michaelbrent: Excellent question. Here's why I include them. And I do that with all my books. I include blurbs in the middle. I'm a fan of movies, I think in movie terms. And again, you think of that trailer, it's like the money shot, and the guy is walking away from the car as it explodes because he's so cool.

And then it goes, big words, ‘Jaw-dropping. Variety,' and then the next money shot. You don't get taken out of it. That's just social proof that they're injecting into the trailer itself .

You see this particularly on Oscar bait, it shows Tom Hanks, and Minnie Driver, and Michael Keaton and all these big names, standing, yelling at each other, ‘I will tell the truth, then you're fired.' ‘Fantastic, says the Hollywood Reporter.'

It doesn't pull you out of the storyline because people can take that kind of multiple, nonlinear storytelling. They're telling two stories. One is the story of the book, and one is the story of everyone's response to the book is amazing, folks. But if you don't have that, you don't need it.

You don't have to do it. It doesn't hurt it if you've done your job. So I will inject them if they're really good, or if they're important in some way. But they are primarily there for people who maybe have heard of me or seen one of my ads, and they're clicking. They don't know anything about me but they see, oh, ‘A Master, Scream Magazine,' and they're like, ‘Oh, well, this guy, okay, somebody likes him.'

If you don't have that, of course, don't put it, or if your only review is literally like, ‘I thought this book definitely had words in it, Mom and pops podcast, podcast number one for mom's basement,' that's not going to be a super helpful one, leave it out. But your cover blurb should still be super, super cool.

Joanna: I think that's important. I don't really seek out quotes at this point. But I can see why they're useful, something I might get into. You did mention ads there, the hook, or the one or two sentences.

Are you using that part of the description in more places than the book sales page? For example, in ads, in emails, and social media?

Michaelbrent: Definitely. And that's why it's important to get it short, too. Because you think about the average ad, how much you care about it. You don't, unless there's something incredibly compelling really, really fast. And you can complain about this if you want to.

I find it kind of funny when authors complain about reality. It's like, well, we're really glad no one has to write like Dickens anymore, because Dickens writing is really hard. But I'm going to be upset, because along with all of this freedom comes the reality that people expect some interesting stuff to happen right away .

Dickens could lay out 472 character names, and then be like, ‘And now page 87, we begin the setting description,' and you're like, ‘Oh, my gosh.' We get to jump right into stuff, we're much more immediate. It starts out with, ‘The bullet tore through her forearm, entering her radius, exiting her ulna, and really screwing up her day.'

That's so fun, we get to have a cool opening. But that also means we're training our readers to want stuff fast . So like a good example is, I wrote a book called Terminal and it did really well. The hook is, and I would do this on a Facebook ad. ‘Ten strangers in a bus terminal are forced by a supernatural entity to choose one among them to survive, all the others will be murdered. The vote must be unanimous.'

At this point, they should be like, ‘What?' And then I hit the kicker, which is, ‘And they quickly realized the best way to get a unanimous vote is to kill everyone else.'

I've said two sentences. The opening was strangers in a bus terminal, which is kind of evocative. It might not be of interest to you, but a lot of people found it evocative. And I front-loaded everything awesome about the setup there. Did I front-load all the awesome details? No, I couldn't have, I had two sentences.

These descriptions show up everywhere. And again, if you can winnow them out and find that description, it's going to help your ads because, instead of having to figure out some new, compelling copy every time, you've already got all the elements.

It doesn't matter if it's Facebook, if it's Amazon, if it's a TikTok ad. It doesn't matter. You know the basic elements, and you're going to be able to get them in a single sentence, two sentences, or a 10-second video ad, you're going to be able to do that.

It makes marketing much more compelling, and much easier because I can port everything.

My Amazon description for Terminal – Amazon ads are very short. And it's like, ‘Ten strangers in a bus terminal, forced to decide who lives. Let the killing begin,' something like that. It's super fast and super easy because I've already created it at a base level very short.

Joanna: I think the overarching message here is to try and spend some time upfront coming up with a good hook . I think it's because I like spending time on research, for example, is how to spend the time. And I also think the amount of time is exactly the point, it sounds like you spend, as you said, you spent like a day and a half walking around in circles, thinking about the hook.

Even if it's after the book is written, it's the amount of time you spend on it, I have to admit to just doing my descriptions as a sort of, they just have to be done. Whereas, I think what you're really saying is to spend time on that.

It might take a day and a half to write two lines, but so be it.

Michaelbrent: Yes. And think of it this way; a day and a half. Who here, I say, you're going to spend two solid days, you're going to spend a week, eight hours a day thinking of nothing but your description? I'm going to make you do it kind of to your head and everybody goes, ‘Oh, forget it.'

Alternate situation. You don't have to, but if you do, at the end of the week, you get $30,000.

Everybody does it now.

And that's kind of the mindset that's more helpful to have because your book description is so important.

Again, I had one of the people who produce ‘The Matrix' call me up based on a book description. It really impressed upon me the importance of this. And then also, when I go to new pages, even with authors I do know, I look at that book description. And I'm like, ‘Wow, this is a muddled mess. I am going to pass on this one. I'm too busy.'

Joanna: I think your analogy there of, it's basically spend the time and get the money.

The reader is actually buying the book description. They don't know what's in the book, they're buying the cover plus the book description.

And like you say, I think a lot of us outsource the cover. And some people do outsource the book description. But when you do outsource it, you still have to tell people the gist of it because they won't read the book either. So I think it's a very interesting challenge.

I have one more question for you, because last year, you came on the show, and you talked about rebooting an author career. And that was pretty much, COVID had only really just started. Also, traditional publishing had not really discovered digital. They'd started to.

I feel like in the last year, things have really changed in that traditional publishers have really muscled in on a lot of things that indie authors have been doing for years , for example, ads and all of these things.

What do you think has changed in the last year? And in terms of what you're doing now has anything changed? Or are you finding things more challenging?

What does the reboot your author career look like this year?

Michaelbrent: Oh, I'm rebooting it again. Luckily, it's not at the same place I rebooted it last time, but I had to reboot then and I'm still rebooting.

The biggest changes I've noticed with traditional muscling in is, number one, ads are much more expensive . So it used to be the way Amazon works is there's kind of a bidding war that goes on behind the scenes digitally. Instead of an auctioneer you're going, ‘Oh, give me 5 by 5, 4,' it's just their computer going zap, you've got the high bid. Traditional publishing is doing a lot more of digital ads and so it makes the bids higher.

The biggest problem I found in the last year has actually not been issues with traditional publishers, but the privacy rules on platforms like Facebook, and Twitter, and even Google and things like that. They've really tightened up on privacy, which is a good thing for everybody except someone trying to sell an ad to a specific person.

So I'm going for somebody who reads Stephen King, and Dean Koontz, and Clive Barker, and likes these seven things, and lives in this area. I used to be able to winnow it down really specifically and get inexpensive ads to the right people. And now it's a lot harder. So that's the biggest difference.

I continually reboot, so you have to get more creative.

It is difficult, I don't want to paint a picture like, ‘Oh, but no matter what, I'm smiling.' Because one of my other podcasts with you is about depression, I have severe depressive disorder and a couple of other fun little mental things. And so this isn't easy, but it can also be kind of, I want to say joyous in a way because you are coming up with new ideas that nobody else has ever thought of in your books.

Now you get to do the same thing as a marketer, you're still engaging your creativity, which in a way is really fun. So what are new creative ideas I can come up with?

There's definitely a lot more what can I do that's different? Thought, versus, what is everyone doing that works? Because if everyone's doing it and it works, it's probably too expensive for an indie . So, once again, as authors, as artistic, creative, awesome people, it stands to us to go, ‘All right, I'm going to do something different, something fun. I'm going to do a video, I'm going to do giveaways for this and that and the other thing.'

The fun part of it is, it does engage your audience and it makes it really delightful. I had a fan reach out and say it was something like, ‘You know what I like? I like that your books are good, but I love that I go to your Facebook page and everyone is nice and happy.' And that was a really cool thing. I was like, ‘Oh, rad, screw being a writer, I made somebody's day good.'

Joanna: I think what is important also, and I think you're very good at this, is nurturing your existing fans , and I feel like that's something that a lot of people forget.

The fact is you don't need to do Amazon ads necessarily to the people who already are on your email list because you can email them.

Or people will get that pushed into their recommendation list, for example. And with your emails, you do talk quite openly about some of your challenges, and also the books and also the giveaways.

I feel like that nurturing your existing fan base actually generates more word-of-mouth, it generates podcast opportunities, it generates them to buy your next book.

And perhaps that's what we're coming back to, perhaps we're coming back to word-of-mouth and nurturing our existing fan base. The basics that have always worked, email marketing, all have always worked.

Michaelbrent: Yes. And here's an important thing too that I really encourage, especially since I had that reboot. You reached out and I like to think part of why you reached out to me and a couple of other people did.

I like to think part of it's because like, you were going, ‘You're a good author, you should still write,' but I know part of it too is we're just friends, and you're a nice person. When you're friends with nice people, and they view you as a nice person, you help each other through the tough times.

That's something that I do encourage as far as marketing, you cannot say to yourself, ‘I'm going to be the most successful person in my field.' You can't, you'll be lying because there's always someone who's more successful on some level. And there's just too many variables.

It's impossible to predict that or to demand it of yourself. But you can say, ‘ I am going to strive every day to be the nicest and most professional acting person in my field'. And that reaps benefits , not just with your peers, but with your fans.

Joanna: I think that's super important.

If people want to try your books, or check out what you do online, where can people find you and everything you do?

Michaelbrent: First of all, just enter my first name in Google. Michaelbrent is actually my first name. I'm the only Michaelbrent in the world. You can go to my website, writteninsomnia.com . Written Insomnia, stories that keep you up all night, or novelthrills.com.

If you go there, you can get one of my books for free, sign up for my newsletter. I try and keep my newsletters entertaining, there are commercials in them, but I try and make them not the main thing, because I'm a writer, so I should entertain you.

And if you want help on this particular subject, I'm actually what's called a Fiverr Pro. So if you go to fiverr.com/mbcollings , which is like an outsourcing thing, they have certain people that they actually reach out to and say, ‘You're a professional in this field, would you be interested in working through us?'

So if you want help with your cover description, you can find me on fiverr.com and reach out to me there and I can give you some assistance.

Joanna: Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time as ever, Michaelbrent, that was great.

Michaelbrent: Thank you, Joanna. You are awesome.

Reader Interactions

December 9, 2021 at 2:36 am

It was a great resource! I have been trying to write fiction again, and I am sure all of these tips will help me a lot. I gained a lot of inspiration and valuable information from this resource, and I can’t wait to apply them to my process. I really liked how you shared information about a terrible description. It will help people stay away from mistakes and avoid common issues as well. Thanks a lot for sharing this resource. I really enjoyed reading it.

February 15, 2022 at 4:46 pm

An excellent book description is both a business ad and the book’s mountain-top scenes and experiences: Both should be reflected in the question that opens up the book’s description. For example, book descriptions treating books that are meant to show people how to do life, the hook statement can be as simple as this: If you would like to continue living your mediocre–or even drama-driven–life; do not read this book. However, if you would like to soar into the outer reaches of boundless human potentials; put away everything else that you are doing and read this book; it will unlock the dark mysteries of life to you and show you how to life the life that you’ve always wanted .

[…] Voor een andere kijk op de flaptekst, luister naar deze interessante (en bij vlagen hilarische) Engelstalge podcast aflevering van Joanna Penn: Writing Hooks And Improving Your Fiction Book Description with Michaelbrent Collings […]

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Descriptive Writing: Definition, Tips, Examples, and Exercises

Descriptive writing is about using the power of words to arouse the imagination, capture the attention, and create a lasting impact in the mind of the reader. In this article, you'll learn how to employ descriptive elements in your writing, tips to enhance your descriptive writing skills, and some exercises to better yourself at it.

Descriptive writing is about using the power of words to arouse the imagination, capture the attention, and create a lasting impact in the mind of the reader. In this article, you’ll learn how to employ descriptive elements in your writing, tips to enhance your descriptive writing skills, and some exercises to better yourself at it.

Read the two sentences given below:

I felt tired at work today.
As the day wore on at work, I felt a cramp beginning to form at the nape of my neck, my eyes began to feel droopy, and the computer screen in front of me began blurring.

Which one of the two do you find more interesting to read? Most definitely the second one. This is because, while the first sentence merely tells you directly that ‘you felt tired at work today’, the second one explains the same experience in a much more vivid and relatable manner.

From this you can see that even something as simple as the above sentence can be transformed using literary devices that aid visualization, into something that someone can relate to. This is what descriptive writing is all about: heightening the sense of perception and alluring your reader to read ahead, because you have so much more to say.

Good Examples of Descriptive Writing

Given below are a couple of good pieces of descriptive writing from authors who know their business.

‘But the door slid slowly open before Lupin could reach it. Standing in the doorway, illuminated by the shivering flames in Lupin’s hand, was a cloaked figure that towered to the ceiling. Its face was completely hidden beneath its hood. Harry’s eyes darted downwards, and what he saw made his stomach contract. There was a hand protruding from the cloak and it was glistening, greyish, slimy-looking and scabbed, like something dead that had decayed in water…’ – Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling

‘I don’t know what I’d expected but it was something different than I saw. She looked unexpectedly young. Or, I suppose said better, she looked unexpectedly “not old”. Her hair, which was completely white, had a yellowish cast that could almost have been mistaken for a pale blond, and it was loose around her shoulders. And long. Longer than mine. No doubt she normally wore it pulled up in a bun, and such a style would have given her a more predictable little-old-lady look, but the way it was here now, parted on the side – long, loose, and straight – she seemed ageless as an ancient sculpture. This sense was enhanced by her skin. Though it had the fragile crepeyness of age, she had few wrinkles, especially across her forehead, which was smooth to a point of being almost waxy looking. She was of obvious northern Germanic heritage, with pale eyes and prominent features. Although she was not overweight, her bones were big and blunt, giving the impression of a tall, sturdy woman.’ – Twilight Children by Torey Hayden

Why be Descriptive While Writing?

The purpose of descriptive writing is to inspire imagination. When you put your mind into making a piece of writing more descriptive, you automatically begin to pay attention to detail and refine your perception about things. You begin to imagine them as much more than, say a party hat or a hard-bound book . You begin to look at them as a tall, pink, pointed paper hat with tassels , and a book that had a gleaming golden spine, and weighed a few good pounds .
The next, and probably the most important benefit of descriptive writing is that in the process of trying to make the reader visualize what you want to say, you tend to use more interesting words. You want to convey a mental picture to your reader. So you’re bound to use words that might be unconventional or less-used. You will want to find words that exactly describe what you want to say, and will look for different words that mean the same. This will help you suitably build your vocabulary.
The success of descriptive writing lies in the details. The more detailed your depiction of a plot or a character or a place is, the more you engross your reader. You become a keen observer and minder of details. You pay attention to the tiniest bits of information and appearance, which in turn helps you transfer the details into your writing.
Since you have picked something to describe and have observed all its details, you are sure to understand the subject better. You may even come across bits and pieces that you may have missed the first time you looked at the object/subject in question. Thoroughly understanding what you’re going to write about is exceedingly important to the process of writing about it.

Tips you Can Use Identify what you’re about to describe

As you start with descriptive writing, identify exactly what you are setting out to describe. Usually, a descriptive piece will include the depiction of a person, a place, an experience, a situation, and the like. Anything that you experience or perceive about your subject can be the focal point of your descriptive writing. You build a backdrop by identifying an aspect of a subject that you want to describe.

Decide why you’re describing that particular aspect

While it can be a wonderful creative exercise to simply describe anything you observe, in descriptive writing, there is often a specific reason to describe whatever you have set out to describe. Tapping this reason can help you keep the description focused and infuse your language with the particular emotion or perspective that you want to convey to your readers.

Maintain a proper chronology/sequence Sometimes, you may get so caught up in making your work colorful and creative that you may end up having a mash-up of descriptions that follow no particular order. This will render the effort of writing useless as the various descriptions will simply confuse the reader. For instance, if you want to describe characters in a particular situation, begin by describing the setting, then proceed to the most important character of that particular situation, and then to the least important one (if necessary).

Use Imagery Imagery is the best tool you can employ in descriptive writing. Since you cannot show your reader what you are imagining, you need to paint a picture with words. You need to make the depiction of your imagination so potent that your reader will instantly be able to visualize what you are describing. However, don’t go overboard. Make sure that the focus does not dwindle stray. Keep your descriptions specific to the subject in question. The writing must be able to draw in the reader; hence, the writer should say things that the reader can relate to or empathize with. An introductory backdrop can often provide an effective setting for the remaining part of the piece. Great descriptive writing has the ability to lure the reader, enticing him or her to continue reading right to the end. While giving the details is important, it is how they are presented that makes the difference.

Hone the senses One of the most effective ways to make the experience you are describing vivid for your reader is to use the five senses: smell, sight, sound, taste, and touch. When the descriptions are focused on the senses, you provide specific and vivid details in such a way that it shows your reader what you are describing. So, when you describe a subject, depict it in such a manner that it involves the reader’s possible sensory interpretations. It must make the reader imagine what he would see, hear, smell, taste, or feel when he reads what you have written.

She gently squeezed the juice out of the plump, red tomato. She blended this juice into the simmering mix of golden-brown onions and garlic in the pan, and watched as they melded into each other. She then added the spice mixture that she had prepared, and the air was permeated with a mouth-watering aroma.

Use strong nouns and verbs effectively, adjectives intelligently It is true that the purpose of adjectives is to describe a subject, but overuse of adjectives in descriptive writing can render the piece shallow and hollow. Hence, make it a point to use other parts of speech to express the same sentiment. You’ll be surprised how effectively nouns, verbs and adverbs can be used to describe something, sometimes even better than adjectives alone. For instance, look at the two sentences below.

The flowers were as fresh as the morning dew.
The flowers had a freshness that could only equal that of the glistening morning dew.

The first sentence has used an adjective (fresh) to describe the flowers. It is a good description too, because the comparison to morning dew is something that will immediately put the reader in the sense of mind that you want. The second sentence too has compared the freshness to morning dew, but has used a noun (freshness) and a verb (equal) to do so, and in the process has probably enticed the reader to continue reading, more than the first sentence.

Pick related words Before you actually begin writing, it is always a good idea to build a word bank of related words and ideas. For instance, if you are going to be describing a flower arrangement, you could jot down a few ideas before you start describing it, like: vase, color, types of flowers, leaves, stem, style, shape, fresh, etc. Once you have these basic words, you could start descriptive sentences for each one. Then, carry on from there.

Display passion Impact is what you’re looking to create in the minds of your readers. You want your readers to relate and empathize with what you’re writing. This will be close to impossible if your work does not reflect the passion that you feel for it. Make them feel what you feel with the words you write. Language that relates to powerful emotions such as love, hatred, admiration, disgust, etc., can convey the range and intensity of the sentiment that you are trying to express. Use them to your favor and get the desired effect.

Exercises to Enhance Descriptive Writing

Given below are some simple, yet effective exercises that you can use to better yourself at descriptive writing.

Exercise 1 Decide on an everyday action, say ‘making a pot of coffee’ and write about it in a descriptive manner. Give yourself 3 words that you’re not allowed to use while writing about it. You’ll see yourself reaching for the thesaurus, which will help improve your vocabulary.

Exercise 2 Pick random objects like a hat, a burger, a chair, etc., and place them before you. Enlist the different names that these objects can be called. Describe each of the objects in sentences that have more than 15 words each. Be as imaginative as you can.

Get your ‘assignments’ read by an objective person to see if they can relate to and understand properly what you have tried to convey.

Make descriptive writing a rewarding experience, both for your reader and yourself. If you like what you write, chances are that your reader will too. As is evident, having a comprehensive vocabulary is the key to good descriptive writing. But mere vocabulary will fall short if your piece lacks passion, logic and interest. The trouble is that it can easily become an incoherent rambling of senses and emotions. To avoid that, present what you are writing about in a logical and organized sequence of thoughts, so that the reader comes away from it with a cogent sense of what you have attempted to describe.

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A Guide to Descriptive Writing

by Melissa Donovan | Jan 7, 2021 | Creative Writing | 9 comments

What is descriptive writing?

Writing description is a necessary skill for most writers. Whether we’re writing an essay, a story, or a poem, we usually reach a point where we need to describe something. In fiction, we describe settings and characters. In poetry, we describe scenes, experiences, and emotions. In creative nonfiction, we describe reality. Descriptive writing is especially important for speculative fiction writers and poets. If you’ve created a fantasy world, then you’ll need to deftly describe it to readers; Lewis Carroll not only described Wonderland (aff link); he also described the fantastical creatures that inhabited it.

But many writers are challenged by description writing, and many readers find it boring to read — when it’s not crafted skillfully.

However, I think it’s safe to say that technology has spoiled us. Thanks to photos and videos, we’ve become increasingly visual, which means it’s getting harder to use words to describe something, especially if it only exists in our imaginations.

What is Descriptive Writing?

One might say that descriptive writing is the art of painting a picture with words. But descriptive writing goes beyond visuals. Descriptive writing hits all the senses; we describe how things look, sound, smell, taste, and feel (their tactile quality).

The term descriptive writing can mean a few different things:

The act of writing description ( I’m doing some descriptive writing ).
A descriptive essay is short-form prose that is meant to describe something in detail; it can describe a person, place, event, object, or anything else.
Description as part of a larger work: This is the most common kind of descriptive writing. It is usually a sentence or paragraph (sometimes multiple paragraphs) that provide description, usually to help the reader visualize what’s happening, where it’s happening, or how it’s happening. It’s most commonly used to describe a setting or a character. An example would be a section of text within a novel that establishes the setting by describing a room or a passage that introduces a character with a physical description.
Writing that is descriptive (or vivid) — an author’s style: Some authors weave description throughout their prose and verse, interspersing it through the dialogue and action. It’s a style of writing that imparts description without using large blocks of text that are explicitly focused on description.
Description is integral in poetry writing. Poetry emphasizes imagery, and imagery is rendered in writing via description, so descriptive writing is a crucial skill for most poets.

Depending on what you write, you’ve probably experimented with one of more of these types of descriptive writing, maybe all of them.

Can you think of any other types of descriptive writing that aren’t listed here?

How Much Description is Too Much?

Classic literature was dense with description whereas modern literature usually keeps description to a minimum.

Compare the elaborate descriptions in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy with the descriptions in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (aff links). Both series relied on description to help readers visualize an imagined, fantastical world, but Rowling did not use her precious writing space to describe standard settings whereas Tolkien frequently paused all action and spent pages describing a single landscape.

This isn’t unique to Tolkien and Rowling; if you compare most literature from the beginning of of the 20th century and earlier to today’s written works, you’ll see that we just don’t dedicate much time and space to description anymore.

I think this radical change in how we approach description is directly tied to the wide availability of film, television, and photography. Let’s say you were living in the 19th century, writing a story about a tropical island for an audience of northern, urban readers. You would be fairly certain that most of your readers had never seen such an island and had no idea what it looked like. To give your audience a full sense of your story’s setting, you’d need pages of detail describing the lush jungle, sandy beaches, and warm waters.

Nowadays, we all know what a tropical island looks like, thanks to the wide availability of media. Even if you’ve never been to such an island, surely you’ve seen one on TV. This might explain why few books on the craft of writing address descriptive writing. The focus is usually on other elements, like language, character, plot, theme, and structure.

For contemporary writers, the trick is to make the description as precise and detailed as possible while keeping it to a minimum. Most readers want characters and action with just enough description so that they can imagine the story as it’s unfolding.

If you’ve ever encountered a story that paused to provide head-to-toe descriptions along with detailed backstories of every character upon their introduction into the narrative, you know just how grating description can be when executed poorly.

However, it’s worth noting that a skilled writer can roll out descriptions that are riveting to read. Sometimes they’re riveting because they’re integrated seamlessly with the action and dialogue; other times, the description is deftly crafted and engaging on its own. In fact, an expert descriptive writer can keep readers glued through multiple pages of description.

Descriptive Writing Tips

I’ve encountered descriptive writing so smooth and seamless that I easily visualized what was happening without even noticing that I was reading description. Some authors craft descriptions that are so lovely, I do notice — but in a good way. Some of them are so compelling that I pause to read them again.

On the other hand, poorly crafted descriptions can really impede a reader’s experience. Description doesn’t work if it’s unclear, verbose, or bland. Most readers prefer action and dialogue to lengthy descriptions, so while a paragraph here and there can certainly help readers better visualize what’s happening, pages and pages of description can increase the risk that they’ll set your work aside and never pick it up again. There are exceptions to every rule, so the real trick is to know when lengthy descriptions are warranted and when they’re just boring.

Here are some general tips for descriptive writing:

Use distinct descriptions that stand out and are memorable. For example, don’t write that a character is five foot two with brown hair and blue eyes. Give the reader something to remember. Say the character is short with mousy hair and sky-blue eyes.
Make description active: Consider the following description of a room: There was a bookshelf in the corner. A desk sat under the window. The walls were beige, and the floor was tiled. That’s boring. Try something like this: A massive oak desk sat below a large picture window and beside a shelf overflowing with books. Hardcovers, paperbacks, and binders were piled on the dingy tiled floor in messy stacks. In the second example, words like overflowing and piled are active.
Weave description through the narrative: Sometimes a character enters a room and looks around, so the narrative needs to pause to describe what the character sees. Other times, description can be threaded through the narrative. For example, instead of pausing to describe a character, engage that character in dialogue with another character. Use the characters’ thoughts and the dialogue tags to reveal description: He stared at her flowing, auburn curls, which reminded him of his mother’s hair. “Where were you?” he asked, shifting his green eyes across the restaurant to where a customer was hassling one of the servers.

Simple descriptions are surprisingly easy to execute. All you have to do is look at something (or imagine it) and write what you see. But well-crafted descriptions require writers to pay diligence to word choice, to describe only those elements that are most important, and to use engaging language to paint a picture in the reader’s mind. Instead of spending several sentences describing a character’s height, weight, age, hair color, eye color, and clothing, a few, choice details will often render a more vivid image for the reader: Red hair framed her round, freckled face like a spray of flames. This only reveals three descriptive details: red hair, a round face, and freckles. Yet it paints more vivid picture than a statistical head-to-toe rundown: She was five foot three and no more than a hundred and ten pounds with red hair, blue eyes, and a round, freckled face.

10 descriptive writing practices.

How to Practice Writing Description

Here are some descriptive writing activities that will inspire you while providing opportunities to practice writing description. If you don’t have much experience with descriptive writing, you may find that your first few attempts are flat and boring. If you can’t keep readers engaged, they’ll wander off. Work at crafting descriptions that are compelling and mesmerizing.

Go to one of your favorite spots and write a description of the setting: it could be your bedroom, a favorite coffee shop, or a local park. Leave people, dialogue, and action out of it. Just focus on explaining what the space looks like.
Who is your favorite character from the movies? Describe the character from head to toe. Show the reader not only what the character looks like, but also how the character acts. Do this without including action or dialogue. Remember: description only!
Forty years ago we didn’t have cell phones or the internet. Now we have cell phones that can access the internet. Think of a device or gadget that we’ll have forty years from now and describe it.
Since modern fiction is light on description, many young and new writers often fail to include details, even when the reader needs them. Go through one of your writing projects and make sure elements that readers may not be familiar with are adequately described.
Sometimes in a narrative, a little description provides respite from all the action and dialogue. Make a list of things from a story you’re working on (gadgets, characters, settings, etc.), and for each one, write a short description of no more than a hundred words.
As mentioned, Tolkien often spent pages describing a single landscape. Choose one of your favorite pieces of classic literature, find a long passage of description, and rewrite it. Try to cut the descriptive word count in half.
When you read a book, use a highlighter to mark sentences and paragraphs that contain description. Don’t highlight every adjective and adverb. Look for longer passages that are dedicated to description.
Write a description for a child. Choose something reasonably difficult, like the solar system. How do you describe it in such a way that a child understands how he or she fits into it?
Most writers dream of someday writing a book. Describe your book cover.
Write a one-page description of yourself.

If you have any descriptive writing practices to add to this list, feel free to share them in the comments.

Descriptive Writing

Does descriptive writing come easily to you, or do you struggle with it? Do you put much thought into how you write description? What types of descriptive writing have you tackled — descriptive essays, blocks of description within larger texts, or descriptions woven throughout a narrative? Share your tips for descriptive writing by leaving a comment, and keep writing!

Further Reading: Abolish the Adverbs , Making the Right Word Choices for Better Writing , and Writing Description in Fiction .

Ready Set Write a Guide to Creative Writing

I find descriptions easier when first beginning a scene. Other ones I struggle with. Yes, intertwining them with dialogue does help a lot.

I have the opposite experience. I tend to dive right into action and dialogue when I first start a scene.

I came across this article at just the right time. I am just starting to write a short story. This will change the way I describe characters in my story.

Thank you for this. R.G. Ramsey

You’re welcome!

Great tips and how to practise and improve our descriptive writing skills. Thank you for sharing.

You’re welcome, Bella.

Hello Melissa

I have read many of your articles about different aspects of writing and have enjoyed all of them. What you said here, I agree with, with the exception of #7. That is one point that I dispute and don’t understand the reason why anyone would do this, though I’ve seen books that had things like that done to them.

To me, a book is something to be treasured, loved and taken care of. It deserves my respect because I’m sure the author poured their heart and soul into its creation. Marking it up that way is nothing short of defacing it. A book or story is a form of art, so should a person mark over a picture by Rembrandt or any other famous painter? You’re a very talented author, so why would you want someone to mark through the words you had spent considerable time and effort agonizing over, while searching for the best words to convey your thoughts?

If I want to remember some section or point the author is making, then I’ll take a pen and paper and record the page number and perhaps the first few words of that particular section. I’ve found that writing a note this way helps me remember it better. This is then placed inside the cover for future reference. If someone did what you’ve suggested to a book of mine, I’d be madder than a ‘wet hen’, and that person would certainly be told what I thought of them.

In any of the previous articles you’ve written, you’ve brought up some excellent points which I’ve tried to incorporate in my writing. Keep up the good work as I know your efforts have helped me, and I’m sure other authors as well.

Hi Stanley. Thanks so much for sharing your point of view. I appreciate and value it.

Marking up a book is a common practice, especially in academia. Putting notes in margins, underlining, highlighting, and tagging pages with bookmarks is standard. Personally, I mark up nonfiction paperbacks, but I never mark up fiction paperbacks or any hardcovers (not since college).

I completely respect your right to keep your books in pristine condition. And years ago, when I started college, I felt exactly the same way. I was horrified that people (instructors and professors!) would fill their books with ugly yellow highlighting and other markips. But I quickly realized that this was shortsighted.

Consider an old paperback that is worn and dog-eared. With one look, you know this book has been read many times and it’s probably loved. It’s like the Velveteen Rabbit of books. I see markups as the same — that someone was engaging with the book and trying to understand it on a deeper level, which is not disrespectful. It’s something to be celebrated.

Sometimes we place too much value on the book as a physical object rather than what’s inside. I appreciate a beautiful book as much as anyone but what really matters to me is the information or experience that it contains. I often read on a Kindle. Sometimes I listen to audio books. There is no physical book. The experience is not lessened.

I understand where you’re coming from. I used to feel the same way, but my mind was changed. I’m not trying to change yours, but I hope you’ll understand.

You’ve provided some great information and advice. One thing I might add–it is helpful to consider the POV character. For example, what will they notice in a restaurant? A police officer may notice the placement of the exits, the tattooed man carrying a side-arm, the security cameras on the ceiling, etc. The descriptive items he would notice would be very different from those of an elderly grandmother or a fifteen-year-old teenaged girl.

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The Gigantic List of Character Descriptions (70+ examples)

The vast majority of character descriptions are simply lazy.

They recycle typical ideas about hair, eye color, and build, giving you more information about the character’s fitting for a dress or suit than the type of information you need to know them intimately.

The first thing you should do when describing a character is to pick a category that isn’t so overused. Such as trying to describe:

Describing your character in an innovative way will help retain the reader’s interest. You want your reader to be asking questions about this character, to not only learn something about them but to create mystery. What made them like this? How long have they been this way? Is there someone currently after them or is this paranoia because of a past experience? Questions like these are what keeps the reader reading.

Not only physical descriptions are needed. Consider: “How is this person viewed by another character?” Do they seem dangerous, alluring, secretive, suspicious? The way another character views someone else gives insight about them as well. Are they attracted? Repulsed? Curious?

Another thing to take notice of is the type of person they are, despite their appearance.

How do they think?
What do they feel?
How do they view/react to certain situations compared to how others would?
What is their mental state?

Here is a list of examples of brilliant character descriptions to give you an idea and help you come up with your own:

3 Categories: Modern Literary, Literature, Popular

Modern Literary

1. vladimir nabokov, lolita.

” … Her skin glistening in the neon light coming from the paved court through the slits in the blind, her soot-black lashes matted, her grave gray eyes more vacant than ever.”

2. Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

” … in the last years she continued to settle and began to shrink. Her mouth bowed forward and her brow sloped back, and her skull shone pink and speckled within a mere haze of hair, which hovered about her head like the remembered shape of an altered thing. She looked as if the nimbus of humanity were fading away and she were turning monkey. Tendrils grew from her eyebrows and coarse white hairs sprouted on her lip and chin. When she put on an old dress the bosom hung empty and the hem swept the floor. Old hats fell down over her eyes. Sometimes she put her hand over her mouth and laughed, her eyes closed and her shoulder shaking.”

3. Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“Phyllida’s hair was where her power resided. It was expensively set into a smooth dome, like a band shell for the presentation of that long-running act, her face.”

4. China Miéville, This Census-Taker

“His hand was over his eyes. He looked like a failed soldier. Dirt seemed so worked into him that the lines of his face were like writing.”

5. Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“And then the hot air congealed in front of him, and out of it materialized a transparent man of most bizarre appearance. A small head with a jockey cap, a skimpy little checked jacket that was made out of air … The man was seven feet tall, but very narrow in the shoulders, incredibly thin, and his face, please note, had a jeering look about it.”

6. Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Mama BekwaTataba stood watching us—a little jet-black woman. Her elbows stuck out like wings, and a huge white enameled tub occupied the space above her head, somewhat miraculously holding steady while her head moved in quick jerks to the right and left.”

7. John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs. In the shadow under the green visor of the cap Ignatius J. Reilly’s supercilious blue and yellow eyes looked down upon the other people waiting under the clock at the D.H. Holmes department store, studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste in dress. Several of the outfits, Ignatius noticed, were new enough and expensive enough to be properly considered offenses against taste and decency. Possession of anything new or expensive only reflected a person’s lack of theology and geometry; it could even cast doubts upon one’s soul.”

8. A.S. Byatt, Possession

“He was a compact, clearcut man, with precise features, a lot of very soft black hair, and thoughtful dark brown eyes. He had a look of wariness, which could change when he felt relaxed or happy, which was not often in these difficult days, into a smile of amused friendliness and pleasure which aroused feelings of warmth, and something more, in many women.”

9. Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“He did not look like anything special at all.”

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10. Henry Lawson, The Bush Girl

“ Grey eyes that grow sadder than sunset or rain, f ond heart that is ever more true F irm faith that grows firmer for watching in vain — She’ll wait by the sliprails for you.”

11. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I am an invisible man.  No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe:  Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms.  I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - - and I might even be said to possess a mind.  I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me.”

12. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced–or seemed to face–the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor.”

13. Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel

“My brother Ben’s face, thought Eugene, is like a piece of slightly yellow ivory; his high white head is knotted fiercely by his old man’s scowl; his mouth is like a knife, his smile the flicker of light across a blade. His face is like a blade, and a knife, and a flicker of light: it is delicate and fierce, and scowls beautifully forever, and when he fastens his hard white fingers and his scowling eyes upon a thing he wants to fix, he sniffs with sharp and private concentration through his long, pointed nose…his hair shines like that of a young boy—it is crinkled and crisp as lettuce.”

14. Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Books

“A black shadow dropped down into the circle. It was Bagheera the Black Panther, inky black all over, but with the panther markings showing up in certain lights like the pattern of watered silk. Everybody knew Bagheera, and nobody cared to cross his path, for he was as cunning as Tabaqui, as bold as the wild buffalo, and as reckless as the wounded elephant. But he had a voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree, and a skin softer than down.”

15. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“[Miss Havisham] had shut out infinitely more; that, in seclusion, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that, her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker…”

16. John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“For such and extraordinary athlete—even as a Lower Middler Phineas had been the best athlete in the school—he was not spectacularly built. He was my height—five feet eight and a half inches…He weighed a hundred and fifty pounds, a galling ten pounds more than I did, which flowed from his legs to torso around shoulders to arms and full strong neck in an uninterrupted, unemphatic unity of strength.”

17. Ambrose Bierce, Chickamauga

“-the dead body of a woman—the white face turned upward, the hands thrown out and clutched full of grass, the clothing deranged, the long dark hair in tangles and full of clotted blood. The greater part of the forehead was torn away, and from the jagged hole the brain protruded, overflowing the temple, a frothy mass of gray, crowned with clusters of crimson bubbles—the work of a shell.”

18. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“…your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.”

19. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“He was most fifty, and he looked it. His hair was long and tangled and greasy, and hung down, and you could see his eyes shining through like he was behind vines. It was all black, no gray; so was his long, mixed-up whiskers. There warn’t no color in his face, where his face showed; it was white; not like another man’s white, but a white to make a body sick, a white to make a body’s flesh crawl – a tree-toad white, a fish-belly white. As for his clothes – just rags, that was all. He had one ankle resting on t’other knee; the boot on that foot was busted, and two of his toes stuck through, and he worked them now and then. His hat was laying on the floor – an old black slouch with the top caved in, like a lid.”

20. William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“Inside the floating cloak he was tall, thin, and bony; and his hair was red beneath the black cap. His face was crumpled and freckled, and ugly without silliness.”

21. Jane Austen, Persuasion

“Vanity was the beginning and end of Sir Walter Elliot’s character: vanity of person and of situation. He had been remarkably handsome in his youth, and at fifty-four was still a very fine man. . . .”

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22. Andrew Lang, The Crimson Fairy Book

“When the old king saw this he foamed with rage, stared wildly about, flung himself on the ground and died.”

23. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“He was commonplace in complexion, in feature, in manners, and in voice. He was of middle size and of ordinary build. His eyes, of the usual blue, were perhaps remarkably cold, and he certainly could make his glance fall on one as trenchant and heavy as an axe… Otherwise there was only an indefinable, faint expression of his lips, something stealthy — a smile — not a smile — I remember it, but I can’t explain.”

24. Anne Bronte, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

“His heart was like a sensitive plant, that opens for a moment in the sunshine, but curls up and shrinks into itself at the slightest touch of the finger, or the lightest breath of wind.”

25. Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson

“He followed with his eyes her long slender figure as she threaded her way in and out of the crowd, sinuously, confidingly, producing a penny from one lad’s elbow, a threepenny-bit from between another’s neck and collar, half a crown from another’s hair, and always repeating in that flute-like voice of hers: “Well, this is rather queer!””

26. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“He had a long chin and big rather prominent teeth, just covered, when he was not talking, by his full, floridly curved lips. Old, young? Thirty? Fifty? Fifty-five? It was hard to say.”

27. Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“Her skin was a rich black that would have peeled like a plum if snagged, but then no one would have thought of getting close enough to Mrs. Flowers to ruffle her dress, let alone snag her skin. She didn’t encourage familiarity. She wore gloves too. I don’t think I ever saw Mrs. Flowers laugh, but she smiled often. A slow widening of her thin black lips to show even, small white teeth, then the slow effortless closing. When she chose to smile on me, I always wanted to thank her.”

28. D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

“But her will had left her. A strange weight was on her limbs. She was giving way. She was giving up…”

29. Henry James, The Aspern Papers

“Her face was not young, but it was simple; it was not fresh, but it was mild. She had large eyes which were not bright, and a great deal of hair which was not ‘dressed,’ and long fine hands which were–possibly–not clean.”

30. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni Book One: The Musician

“She is the spoiled sultana of the boards. To spoil her acting may be easy enough,—shall they spoil her nature? No, I think not. There, at home, she is still good and simple; and there, under the awning by the doorway,—there she still sits, divinely musing. How often, crook-trunked tree, she looks to thy green boughs; how often, like thee, in her dreams, and fancies, does she struggle for the light,—not the light of the stage-lamps.”

31. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“Living among those white-faced women with their rosaries and copper crosses…”

32. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“Though every vestige of her dress was burnt, as they told me, she still had something of her old ghastly bridal appearance; for, they had covered her to the throat with white cotton-wool, and as she lay with a white sheet loosely overlying that, the phantom air of something that had been and was changed, was still upon her.”

33. Rudyard Kipling, Many Inventions

“He wrapped himself in quotations – as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.”

34. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“He was sunshine most always-I mean he made it seem like good weather.”

35. Hugh Lofting, The Story of Doctor Dolittle

“For a long time he said nothing. He kept as still as a stone. He hardly seemed to be breathing at all. When at last he began to speak, it sounded almost as though he were singing, sadly, in a dream.”

36. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.”

37. Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

“He is himself his own World, his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no conception; he knows not Length, nor Breadth, nor Height, for he has had no experience of them; he has no cognizance even of the number Two; nor has he a thought of Plurality, for he is himself his One and All, being really Nothing.”

38. Jamie McGuire, Beautiful Oblivion

“Her long platinum blond hair fell in loose waves past her shoulders, with a few black peekaboo strands. She wore a black minidress and combat boots.”

39. N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

“His long, long hair wafted around him like black smoke, its tendrils curling and moving of their own volition. His cloak — or perhaps that was his hair too — shifted as if in an unfelt wind.”

40. M.L. LeGette, The Orphan and the Thief

“A creature–a frightfully, awful creature–was mere feet from her. Its eyes were enormous, the size of goose eggs and milky white. Its gray, slippery skin was stretched taut upon its face. Its mouth was wide and full of needle teeth. Its hands rested on the rock, hands that were webbed and huge with each finger ending in a sharp, curved nail. It was as tall as a human man, yet oddly shrunken and hunched.”

41. Amber Dawn, Sub Rosa

“When he did appear his eyes were as brown as I remembered, pupils flecked with gold like beach pebbles.”

42. Julia Stuart, The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise

“His hair had been grown to counteract its unequivocal retreat from the top of his head, and was fashioned into a mean, frail ponytail that hung limply down his back. Blooms of acne highlighted his vampire-white skin.”

43. James Lee Burke, The Neon Rain

“His khaki sleeves were rolled over his sunburned arms, and he had the flat green eyes and heavy facial features of north Louisiana hill people. He smelled faintly of dried sweat, Red Man, and talcum powder.”

44. Stephenie Meyer, Twilight

“I vividly remembered the flat black color of his eyes the last time he glared at me – the color was striking against the background of his pale skin and his auburn hair. Today, his eyes were a completely different color: a strange ocher, darker than butterscotch, but with the same golden tone.”

45. Brian Malloy, Twelve Long Months

“Whith her hair dyed bright red, she looks like Ronald McDonald’s post-menopausal sister. Who has let herself go.” (This is one of my favorites, because I find it ridiculously funny)

46. Joan Johnston, No Longer A Stranger

“Actually, Reb had the same flawless complexion as her sister– except for the freckles. Her straight, boyishly cut hair fell onto her brow haphazardly and hid beautiful arched brows that framed her large, expressive eyes. She had a delicate, aquiline nose, but a stubborn mouth and chin.”

47. Brian Morton, Breakable You

“Without her glasses Vivian did look a little frightening. She had tight sinewy strappy muscles and a face that was hardened and almost brutal – a face that might have been chiseled by a sculptor who had fallen out of love with the idea of beauty.”

48. Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“I saw my Master had adorned himself in a thick tunic and beautiful dark blue doublet which I’d hardly noticed before. He wore soft sleek dark blue gloves over his hands, gloves which perfectly cleaved to his fingers, and legs were covered by thick soft cashmere stockings all the way to his beautiful pointed shoes.”

49. Becca Fitzpatrick, Black Ice

“His brown hair was cropped, and it showed off the striking s ymmetry of his face. With the sun at his back, shadows marked the depressions beneath his cheekbones. I couldn’t tell the color of his eyes, but I hoped they were brown…The guy had straight, sculptured shoulders that made me think swimmer …”

50. E.C. Sheedy, Killing Bliss

“He stood, which put him eye to eye with the dark-haired woman whose brilliant, burning gaze poured into his worthless soul like boiling tar, whose mouth frothed with fury–and whose hand now curled, knuckles white, around a steak knife.” (The author gives a lot of details about the characters emotions, but there is not one specific detail about neither of their appearances. Use this as an example of how physical appearances aren’t always the most important thing.)

51. James Lee Burke, The Neon Rain

“His wiry gray and black hair was dripping with sweat, and his face was the color and texture of old paper. He looked up at me from where he was seated on his bunk, and his eyes were hot and bright and moisture was beaded across his upper lip. He held a Camel cigarette between his yellowed fingers, and the floor around his feet was covered with cigarette butts.”

52. Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

“She has bright, dark eyes and satiny brown skin and stands tilted up on her toes with arms slightly extended to her sides, as if ready to take wing at the slightest sound.”

53. Becca Fitzpatrick, Hush, Hush

“He was abominable…and the most alluring, tortured soul I’d ever met.” (This isn’t describing him physically, but it is giving insight to how the main character views him)

54. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

“A giant of a man was standing in the doorway. His face was almost completely hidden by a long, shaggy mane of hair and a wild, tangled beard, but you could make out his eyes, glinting like black beetles under all the hair.”

55. Anne Rice, Violin

“I deliberately thought of him, my violinist, point by point, that with his long narrow nose and such deep-set eyes he might have been less seductive to someone else–perhaps. But then perhaps to no one. What a well-formed mouth he had, and how the narrow eyes, the detailed deepened lids gave him such a range of expression, to open his gaze wide, or sink in cunning street.”

56. Kevin Brooks, Lucas

“As I’ve already said, the memory of Lucas’s walk brings a smile to my face. It’s an incredibly vivid memory, and if I close my eyes I can see it now. An easygoing lope. Nice and steady. Not too fast and not too slow, Fast enough to get somewhere, but not too fast to miss anything. Bouncy, alert, resolute, without any concern and without vanity. A walk that both belonged to and was remote from everything around it.”

57. Anne Rice, Violin

“And she looked the way he had always hated her–dreamy and sloppy, and sweet, with glasses falling down, smoking a cigarette, with ashes on her coat, but full of love, her body heavy and shapeless with age.”

58. Kevin Brooks, Lucas

“As we drew closer, the figure became clearer, It was a young man, or a boy, dressed loosely in a drab green T-shirt and baggy green trousers. He had a green army jacket tied around his waist and a green canvas bag slung over his shoulder. The only non-green thing about him was the pair of scruffy black walking boots on his feet. Although he was on the small side, he wasn’t as slight as I first thought. He wasn’t exactly muscular, but he wasn’t weedy-looking either…there was an air of hidden strength about him, a graceful strength that showed in his balance, the way he held himself, the way he walked….”

59. Iris Johansen, The Face of Deception

“Kinky tousled curls, only a minimum of makeup, large brown eyes behind round wire-rimmed glasses. There was a world of character in that face, more than enough to make her fascinating-looking instead of just attractive.”

60. Dennis Lehane, A Drink Before the War

“Brian Paulson was rake thin, with smooth hair the color of tin and a wet fleshy handshake…. His greeting was a nod and a blink, befitting someone who’d stepped out of the shadows only momentarily.”

61. Gena Showalter, The Darkest Night

“Pale hair fell in waves to his shoulders, framing a face mortal females considered a sensual feast. They didn’t know the man was actually a devil in angel’s skin. They should have, though. He practically glowed with irreverence, and there was an unholy gleam in his green eyes that proclaimed he would laugh in your face while cutting out your heat. Or laugh in your face while you cut out his heart.”

62. Sam Byers, Idiopathy

“Now here he was: sartorially, facially and interpersonally sharpened; every inch the beatific boffin.”

63. Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys

“As always, there was an all-American war hero look to him, coded in his tousled brown hair, his summer-narrowed hazel eyes, the straight nose that ancient Anglo-Saxons had graciously passed on to him. Everything about him suggested valor and power and a firm handshake.”

64. J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

“The face of Elrond was ageless, neither old nor young, though in it was written the memory of many things both glad and sorrowful. His hair was dark as the shadows of twilight, and upon it was set a circlet of silver; his eyes were grey as a clear evening, and in them was a light like the light of stars.”

65. Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“People said Ove saw the world in black and white. But she was color. All the color he had.”

66. Frank Herbert, Dune

“…a girl-child who appeared to be about four years old. She wore a black aba, the hood thrown back to reveal the attachments of a stillsuit hanging free at her throat. Her eyes were Fremen blue, staring out of a soft, round face. She appeared completely unafraid and there was a look to her stare that made the Baron feel uneasy for no reason he could explain.”

67. Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“Ender did not see Peter as the beautiful ten-year-old boy that grown-ups saw, with dark, tousled hair and a face that could have belonged to Alexander the Great. Ender looked at Peter only to detect anger or boredom, the dangerous moods that almost always led to pain.”

68. Caitlin Moran, How to Build a Girl

“He had his head in his hands, and his tie looked like it had been put on by an enemy, and was strangling him.”

69. Graham Joyce, Some Kind of Fairy Tale

“Peter was a gentle, red-haired bear of a man. Standing at six-four in his socks, he moved everywhere with a slight and nautical sway, but even though he was broad across the chest there was something centered and reassuring about him, like an old ship’s mast cut from a single timber.”

70. Brad Parks, The Girl Next Door

“…in addition to being fun, smart, and quick-witted—in a feisty way that always kept me honest—she’s quite easy to look at, with never-ending legs, toned arms, curly brown hair, and eyes that tease and smile and glint all at the same time.”

71. Dennis Lehane, A Drink Before the War

“Sterling Mulkern was a florid, beefy man, the kind who carried weight like a weapon, not a liability. He had a shock of stiff white hair you could land a DC-10 on and a handshake that stopped just short of inducing paralysis.”

72. Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

“Lord Asriel was a tall man with powerful shoulders, a fierce dark face, and eyes that seemed to flash and glitter with savage laughter. It was a face to be dominated by, or to fight: never a face to patronize or pity. All his movements were large and perfectly balanced, like those of a wild animal, and when he appeared in a room like this, he seemed a wild animal held in a cage too small for it.”

73. Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

“I thought she was so beautiful. I figured she was the kind of woman who could make buffalo walk on up to her and give up their lives. She wouldn’t have needed to hunt. Every time we went walking, birds would follow us around. Hell, tumbleweeds would follow us around.”

29 comments

woowwwwwwwwie

Love the compilation. Thank you for doing this

This is a great compilation! My students are working on writing characters right now, so I’m having them look through your list to see examples of a job well done 🙂 Thanks!

Thanks I’m using these for students to make character drawings from

This is really helpful ! Love it !

Do you have a way, where you could put the characters physical traits in this website?

Thank you for the awesome list. You should add this one; it’s from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: “Mr. Utterson, the lawyer, was a man of rugged countenance, that was never lightened by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary, and yet somehow lovable.” There’s more after, but I thought this was a good description.

And this one: “Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering, and somewhat broken voice: all these were points against him, but all of them together could not describe the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing, and fear with which Mr. Utterson regarded him.”

The quote that stood out to me the most was the quote from ‘The Census Taker’. That quote captured the characters feelings so well. The author was able to compare in self worth by saying it was as dirt, so much so that the dirt was written in his skin. I have never seen self worth and failure described as part of a person’s face.

Thank you. I echo Chris’s comment Wowwwwww and add a few!!!!

Wonderful! Reading these enabled me to rewrite the descriptions for my two leading characters.

Thank you for this, very helpful! I don’t know if this is really related, but I’m writing a story including a mean girl who bullies the main character (also a girl). I’m struggling to write what the mean girl uses to bully the main character – what I end up coming up with is way too mean or unreal, etc.

Blinded by tears, she could hear the haze of pink shout, “See, poor baby cries. Great actress, dear. Why do you waste your talent on us, here?”

great great any book for description of physical appearance in narrative

Great list. And I have one to add. It’s from Michael Moorcock, riding the new wave of British sci-fi back in the 1960s. He’s been a favorite of mine for decades. The passage is from “Elric of Melniboné:”

“It is the colour of a bleached skull, his flesh; and the long hair which flows below his shoulders is milk-white. From the tapering, beautiful head stare two slanting eyes, crimson and moody, and from the loose sleeves of his yellow gown emerge two slender hands, also the colour of bone, resting on each arm of a seat which has been carved from a single, massive ruby.”

Thanks for this – very useful compilation for teaching – makes life so much easier! And helps in my writing, to look at expressions and word arrangements… I notice how some writers seem so good in visual description, and some others seem to be much better at character expressions..

wowzers!!! this is so cool!

I planned to just read a few, but I couldn’t stop reading. These are awesome! Thank you.

“Character Description” on The John Fox’s blog is a treasure trove of valuable tips and techniques for crafting compelling characters. The blog explores the art of painting vivid and multi-dimensional personas, adding depth to storytelling. Aspiring writers will find this guide indispensable for creating memorable characters that resonate with readers.

holy MOLY, thank you!

I liked them

wow thanks you have really helped me but can you put something to describe a character that is a tyrant please? that would really help

Absolutely remarkable. So very helpful in every since of the word.

OH HELLL YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

A killer set of fine examples! Thanks for compiling it!

Please, add sentences that can apply to more characters.

Love it but should be more single sentences

Every writer NEEDS this book.

It’s a guide to writing the pivotal moments of your novel.

Whether writing your book or revising it, this will be the most helpful book you’ll ever buy.

Learn how to:

Nail chapter endings
Surprise your reader with plot twists
Describe a character for the first time
Write a killer ending

Some text in the Modal..

The Ultimate Guide to Professional Book Descriptions

Updated 2020/11/17

A professional book description gives literal meaning to judging a book by its cover. You might’ve learned about attracting people with the best book titles , and you probably took our advice on designing the best cover too.

You might even have polished your Amazon author’s page to maximize your sales, but your book is still missing a key element. The book description is the final piece of the puzzle that allows the reader to judge the story, writer, and quality.

Your cover is what sells the book, whether it’s an ebook or a printed version. Visual effects are certainly a form of magic on their own, but the words you place in the description is what makes a reader purchase the book.

Being a successful author means that you must market your book in every way possible. An expert description can add one more marketing tool that helps readers decide to choose your book above all the hundreds available in the Amazon ocean.

The description tells us about the person whose words we’re about to submerge ourselves into and gives us insight into the beautiful mind of a writer.

You can either hook your readers from the first word and make them click on read more, or you can bore them senselessly with utter jumble. This guide will help you differentiate your description from the robotic ensemble people avoid.

How to Use Professionalism to Sell Your Books

A book description serves two main purposes: it is a major part of your marketing strategy, but it also says a lot about you as a writer. As much as it introduces your book, it also introduces your author brand .

The synopsis provides your reader with an answer to a question without revealing the entire solution before they buy your book. It can also show them that you’re a respected authority on the subject, which helps to build the trust relationship before your readers part with their dollars.

Readers, of course, know that your description is a sales pitch. They liked your cover and want you to convince them to buy your book. Your description is the tool you use to convince them.

Randall Beard, a marketing guru, explains that we have a 20-second window to convince our readers to buy our book. Online shoppers look for convenience and speed, because their lives are too busy to take the slow-thinking road.

Of course, there is a fine line between intriguing copy and overselling your book to the point that readers fear you may be hiding something. To achieve that delicate balance, follow this guide to take your work from amateur marketer to talk of the town.

Writing a Professional Book Description for Amazon Kindle Publishing

You can call this a recipe of sorts. We’ll teach you what secret ingredients to add to your marketing campaign to make your readers’ jaws drop in the crucial-window phase.

1. Keep it short and concise to prevent readers from running for the hills when they see an essay.

A book description should be no less than 200 words. The sweet spot is 500 words. This can be broken into short paragraphs for easier reading. You can also add bullet points where you give a brief insight into some questions. Be sure to use bold lettering for the more important bullet points.

2. Open with a headline that screams “extra, extra, read all about it!”

The first line of your description is your hook. You’re guaranteed to lose your reader’s attention if your hook is as plain as transparent wallpaper on a white background.

Open your description with a bold statement, famous quote, relatable question, or compelling sentence. It might be difficult to compare to the “wife-stealing horse,” but you can certainly give the horse a run for its money.

What is the critical problem your book solves? The answer can give you a one-liner that knocks people’s socks off. Browsing on Amazon will show you one or two sentences where you get to click on “read more” if you choose.

No one’s going to click to read more when the first sentence says: “Hi, I’m Amy and I’d like to help you.” What does this even say? What can Amy help me with? Instead, let’s look at some simple opening sentences. Think about a dieting book.

“Learn how to lose 20 pounds in your sleep!” Honestly, who wouldn’t want to lose weight in their sleep? Let’s think about a psychology book. “Licensed therapist, Amy Collins, shares her unique secrets to overcoming your deepest fears.”

An entrepreneur could use a different approach. “Mike Jones, the pioneering founder of #suitsup , winner of the Rags to Riches Foundation Award, shares his guaranteed techniques for success.”

That first line is the hook that will bait your ideal audience. Strike a chord in your reader with the first line, and leave them with no choice but to read more.

More examples:

"Learn 100+ delicious vegetarian recipes for your keto fasting."

All you did was mention the solution in a brief point. Now you have the reader curious. They want to know more about these 100+ recipes that you have.

But what if you could add more? Here’s another example:

"Discover easy-to-prepare and healthy muffins, pizzas, salads, and so much more!"

You have now introduced another hook. You have revealed that they are now able to prepare healthy muffins and pizza with this information. Who doesn’t want to do that? Who thought they could? While at the same time, you added in the word "salads" to let your reader know that you are not only discussing fast food and snacks in your book.

3. Utilize keywords to bring more traffic to your description.

Keywords are used as a marketing ploy to allow search engines to find our articles online. Amazon is also a search engine and prioritizes keywords among other things. Learn about keywords to turn your description into a sales conversion for browsers.

4. Learn how to turn words into art.

Your headline alone isn’t going to keep someone reading to the end. You need to convert a regular pitch to an art form of words that hit the emotional and subconscious cores of your readers.

Imagine reading a killer headline and the second sentence is “I stubbed my toe on Monday morning at eight sharp.” The reader will move along and won’t even feel bad for the stubber of said toe, who actually sounds like a stick in the mud.

Learn to write with emotions in mind. We can use certain words and sequences to keep people on the edge of their seats. This is one of the foundations of an excellent book description.

Cristina Gutierrez-Brewster is an English teacher who helps us understand the connection between writing and emotions.

5. Use plain language for readability.

It’s tempting to spruce up our descriptions with a thesaurus at our fingertips, but this reduces our overall readability. The first word a reader doesn’t understand will make them skip your book. Th language you use in your description should also be a reflection of the language you use in your book.

6. Give your readers confirmation that they’ll find an answer in your book.

Break your story up by promising to solve a problem by the end of the book. We recommend using bullet points where you list questions the reader will typically ask about a certain issue.

Give readers insight without providing the solution. Why would they need to pay for a book when the solution is on the cover? Stir curiosity and interest by showing them how you asked the same questions.

By the same token, be sure not to overpromise. Words like "guaranteed" or "instantly" have no place in a book description unless you can stand by them being applicable to everyone.

7. Introduce yourself in third-person mode.

“Toe stubber” was a little arrogant to talk about his typical Monday morning experience; however, explaining that the author is all too familiar with how Monday mornings are as blue as the sky for many people is a better start.

You want to relate to the reader, but you also don’t want to focus on yourself. Readers’ intentions are to find answers from someone who has been there, done that, but they don’t know you personally.

Chances are that they don’t care too much about your particular story. They just want the content in a practical and easy-to-read format. Reading first-person descriptions sends the wrong message.

Your focus should be on your content and not yourself.

8. Legitimize your authority.

Keep the third-person mode in mind as you show the reader how you relate to their story. “Mike Jones wasn’t happy with his lack of wealth and knew that it was a viral problem in society. His vision was to uplift himself and thousands of people he met.”

This businessman has legitimized himself as an authority figure in the industry without using the word ‘I’ once. Authors with a degree could mention this as the reason why readers can trust them.

People without authority of their own can also use numbers, figures, studies, and statistics to lay their claim. They can show readers that their information isn’t thumb-sucked, and they rely solely on authoritative data to compile their books.

Add a testimonial or endorsement from someone who has read your book at the end if it’s been available for a while. Make sure you add someone who praises your book.

9. Hit your reader with a cliffhanger of sorts.

You want jaws on the floor as the reader nears the end of your description. Their desire to know more must leave them hanging from a cliff. For example: “You won’t believe the lengths Mike went to, to put crisp suits on these ambitious, young gentlemen.”

10. End with a call-to-action to entice readers to purchase your book.

The truth is that some people need a push, and calls-to-actions can do this. You could say: “You’ve visualized the wealth, now all that’s left is to take the leap of faith!” You can also say: “Click on ‘buy now’ if you have what it takes.”

Meeting the Technical Requirements

Amazon Kindle publishing has a few requirements for their professional book descriptions. These aren’t hard to meet if we learn how to write in HTML format.

Amazon expects us to use HTML guidelines to insert italics, bold, and certain characters if we wish to have a statement stand out. You can learn all about HTML writing in this video tutorial.

The second option is to use a book description generator . It becomes as simple as copy and paste when you need the right format.

Calling on the Experts

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If you prefer to leave this task to expert copywriters with years of experience in writing descriptions for bestselling books , The Urban Writers should be your next stop.

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Final Thoughts

After spending so much time writing your masterpiece, the last thing you want to do is turn readers off with a dull, poorly-written book description.

Follow this guide step-by-step and get ready to watch your sales numbers climb!

The Art of Close Reading: Enhancing Your Literary Analysis Skills

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Last updated on Feb 14, 2023

10 Types of Creative Writing (with Examples You’ll Love)

About the author.

Reedsy's editorial team is a diverse group of industry experts devoted to helping authors write and publish beautiful books.

About Savannah Cordova

Savannah is a senior editor with Reedsy and a published writer whose work has appeared on Slate, Kirkus, and BookTrib. Her short fiction has appeared in the Owl Canyon Press anthology, "No Bars and a Dead Battery".

About Rebecca van Laer

Rebecca van Laer is a writer, editor, and the author of two books, including the novella How to Adjust to the Dark. Her work has been featured in literary magazines such as AGNI, Breadcrumbs, and TriQuarterly.

A lot falls under the term ‘creative writing’: poetry, short fiction, plays, novels, personal essays, and songs, to name just a few. By virtue of the creativity that characterizes it, creative writing is an extremely versatile art. So instead of defining what creative writing is , it may be easier to understand what it does by looking at examples that demonstrate the sheer range of styles and genres under its vast umbrella.

To that end, we’ve collected a non-exhaustive list of works across multiple formats that have inspired the writers here at Reedsy. With 20 different works to explore, we hope they will inspire you, too.

People have been writing creatively for almost as long as we have been able to hold pens. Just think of long-form epic poems like The Odyssey or, later, the Cantar de Mio Cid — some of the earliest recorded writings of their kind.

Poetry is also a great place to start if you want to dip your own pen into the inkwell of creative writing. It can be as short or long as you want (you don’t have to write an epic of Homeric proportions), encourages you to build your observation skills, and often speaks from a single point of view .

Here are a few examples:

“Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The ruins of pillars and walls with the broken statue of a man in the center set against a bright blue sky.

This classic poem by Romantic poet Percy Shelley (also known as Mary Shelley’s husband) is all about legacy. What do we leave behind? How will we be remembered? The great king Ozymandias built himself a massive statue, proclaiming his might, but the irony is that his statue doesn’t survive the ravages of time. By framing this poem as told to him by a “traveller from an antique land,” Shelley effectively turns this into a story. Along with the careful use of juxtaposition to create irony, this poem accomplishes a lot in just a few lines.

“Trying to Raise the Dead” by Dorianne Laux

A direction. An object. My love, it needs a place to rest. Say anything. I’m listening. I’m ready to believe. Even lies, I don’t care.

Poetry is cherished for its ability to evoke strong emotions from the reader using very few words which is exactly what Dorianne Laux does in “ Trying to Raise the Dead .” With vivid imagery that underscores the painful yearning of the narrator, she transports us to a private nighttime scene as the narrator sneaks away from a party to pray to someone they’ve lost. We ache for their loss and how badly they want their lost loved one to acknowledge them in some way. It’s truly a masterclass on how writing can be used to portray emotions.

If you find yourself inspired to try out some poetry — and maybe even get it published — check out these poetry layouts that can elevate your verse!

Song Lyrics

Poetry’s closely related cousin, song lyrics are another great way to flex your creative writing muscles. You not only have to find the perfect rhyme scheme but also match it to the rhythm of the music. This can be a great challenge for an experienced poet or the musically inclined.

To see how music can add something extra to your poetry, check out these two examples:

“Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen

You say I took the name in vain I don't even know the name But if I did, well, really, what's it to ya? There's a blaze of light in every word It doesn't matter which you heard The holy or the broken Hallelujah

Metaphors are commonplace in almost every kind of creative writing, but will often take center stage in shorter works like poetry and songs. At the slightest mention, they invite the listener to bring their emotional or cultural experience to the piece, allowing the writer to express more with fewer words while also giving it a deeper meaning. If a whole song is couched in metaphor, you might even be able to find multiple meanings to it, like in Leonard Cohen’s “ Hallelujah .” While Cohen’s Biblical references create a song that, on the surface, seems like it’s about a struggle with religion, the ambiguity of the lyrics has allowed it to be seen as a song about a complicated romantic relationship.

“I Will Follow You into the Dark” by Death Cab for Cutie

If Heaven and Hell decide that they both are satisfied Illuminate the no's on their vacancy signs If there's no one beside you when your soul embarks Then I'll follow you into the dark

You can think of song lyrics as poetry set to music. They manage to do many of the same things their literary counterparts do — including tugging on your heartstrings. Death Cab for Cutie’s incredibly popular indie rock ballad is about the singer’s deep devotion to his lover. While some might find the song a bit too dark and macabre, its melancholy tune and poignant lyrics remind us that love can endure beyond death.

Plays and Screenplays

From the short form of poetry, we move into the world of drama — also known as the play. This form is as old as the poem, stretching back to the works of ancient Greek playwrights like Sophocles, who adapted the myths of their day into dramatic form. The stage play (and the more modern screenplay) gives the words on the page a literal human voice, bringing life to a story and its characters entirely through dialogue.

Interested to see what that looks like? Take a look at these examples:

All My Sons by Arthur Miller

“I know you're no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father.”

Arthur Miller acts as a bridge between the classic and the new, creating 20th century tragedies that take place in living rooms and backyard instead of royal courts, so we had to include his breakout hit on this list. Set in the backyard of an all-American family in the summer of 1946, this tragedy manages to communicate family tensions in an unimaginable scale, building up to an intense climax reminiscent of classical drama.

💡 Read more about Arthur Miller and classical influences in our breakdown of Freytag’s pyramid .

“Everything is Fine” by Michael Schur ( The Good Place )

“Well, then this system sucks. What...one in a million gets to live in paradise and everyone else is tortured for eternity? Come on! I mean, I wasn't freaking Gandhi, but I was okay. I was a medium person. I should get to spend eternity in a medium place! Like Cincinnati. Everyone who wasn't perfect but wasn't terrible should get to spend eternity in Cincinnati.”

A screenplay, especially a TV pilot, is like a mini-play, but with the extra job of convincing an audience that they want to watch a hundred more episodes of the show. Blending moral philosophy with comedy, The Good Place is a fun hang-out show set in the afterlife that asks some big questions about what it means to be good.

It follows Eleanor Shellstrop, an incredibly imperfect woman from Arizona who wakes up in ‘The Good Place’ and realizes that there’s been a cosmic mixup. Determined not to lose her place in paradise, she recruits her “soulmate,” a former ethics professor, to teach her philosophy with the hope that she can learn to be a good person and keep up her charade of being an upstanding citizen. The pilot does a superb job of setting up the stakes, the story, and the characters, while smuggling in deep philosophical ideas.

Personal essays

Our first foray into nonfiction on this list is the personal essay. As its name suggests, these stories are in some way autobiographical — concerned with the author’s life and experiences. But don’t be fooled by the realistic component. These essays can take any shape or form, from comics to diary entries to recipes and anything else you can imagine. Typically zeroing in on a single issue, they allow you to explore your life and prove that the personal can be universal.

Here are a couple of fantastic examples:

“On Selling Your First Novel After 11 Years” by Min Jin Lee (Literary Hub)

There was so much to learn and practice, but I began to see the prose in verse and the verse in prose. Patterns surfaced in poems, stories, and plays. There was music in sentences and paragraphs. I could hear the silences in a sentence. All this schooling was like getting x-ray vision and animal-like hearing.

This deeply honest personal essay by Pachinko author Min Jin Lee is an account of her eleven-year struggle to publish her first novel . Like all good writing, it is intensely focused on personal emotional details. While grounded in the specifics of the author's personal journey, it embodies an experience that is absolutely universal: that of difficulty and adversity met by eventual success.

“A Cyclist on the English Landscape” by Roff Smith (New York Times)

These images, though, aren’t meant to be about me. They’re meant to represent a cyclist on the landscape, anybody — you, perhaps.

Roff Smith’s gorgeous photo essay for the NYT is a testament to the power of creatively combining visuals with text. Here, photographs of Smith atop a bike are far from simply ornamental. They’re integral to the ruminative mood of the essay, as essential as the writing. Though Smith places his work at the crosscurrents of various aesthetic influences (such as the painter Edward Hopper), what stands out the most in this taciturn, thoughtful piece of writing is his use of the second person to address the reader directly. Suddenly, the writer steps out of the body of the essay and makes eye contact with the reader. The reader is now part of the story as a second character, finally entering the picture.

Short Fiction

The short story is the happy medium of fiction writing. These bite-sized narratives can be devoured in a single sitting and still leave you reeling. Sometimes viewed as a stepping stone to novel writing, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Short story writing is an art all its own. The limited length means every word counts and there’s no better way to see that than with these two examples:

“An MFA Story” by Paul Dalla Rosa (Electric Literature)

At Starbucks, I remembered a reading Zhen had given, a reading organized by the program’s faculty. I had not wanted to go but did. In the bar, he read, "I wrote this in a Starbucks in Shanghai. On the bank of the Huangpu." It wasn’t an aside or introduction. It was two lines of the poem. I was in a Starbucks and I wasn’t writing any poems. I wasn’t writing anything.

Creative Writing Examples | Photograph of New York City street.

This short story is a delightfully metafictional tale about the struggles of being a writer in New York. From paying the bills to facing criticism in a writing workshop and envying more productive writers, Paul Dalla Rosa’s story is a clever satire of the tribulations involved in the writing profession, and all the contradictions embodied by systemic creativity (as famously laid out in Mark McGurl’s The Program Era ). What’s more, this story is an excellent example of something that often happens in creative writing: a writer casting light on the private thoughts or moments of doubt we don’t admit to or openly talk about.

“Flowering Walrus” by Scott Skinner (Reedsy)

I tell him they’d been there a month at least, and he looks concerned. He has my tongue on a tissue paper and is gripping its sides with his pointer and thumb. My tongue has never spent much time outside of my mouth, and I imagine it as a walrus basking in the rays of the dental light. My walrus is not well.

A winner of Reedsy’s weekly Prompts writing contest, ‘ Flowering Walrus ’ is a story that balances the trivial and the serious well. In the pauses between its excellent, natural dialogue , the story manages to scatter the fear and sadness of bad medical news, as the protagonist hides his worries from his wife and daughter. Rich in subtext, these silences grow and resonate with the readers.

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Perhaps the thing that first comes to mind when talking about creative writing, novels are a form of fiction that many people know and love but writers sometimes find intimidating. The good news is that novels are nothing but one word put after another, like any other piece of writing, but expanded and put into a flowing narrative. Piece of cake, right?

To get an idea of the format’s breadth of scope, take a look at these two (very different) satirical novels:

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

I wished I was back in the convenience store where I was valued as a working member of staff and things weren’t as complicated as this. Once we donned our uniforms, we were all equals regardless of gender, age, or nationality — all simply store workers.

Creative Writing Examples | Book cover of Convenience Store Woman

Keiko, a thirty-six-year-old convenience store employee, finds comfort and happiness in the strict, uneventful routine of the shop’s daily operations. A funny, satirical, but simultaneously unnerving examination of the social structures we take for granted, Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman is deeply original and lingers with the reader long after they’ve put it down.

Erasure by Percival Everett

The hard, gritty truth of the matter is that I hardly ever think about race. Those times when I did think about it a lot I did so because of my guilt for not thinking about it.

Erasure is a truly accomplished satire of the publishing industry’s tendency to essentialize African American authors and their writing. Everett’s protagonist is a writer whose work doesn’t fit with what publishers expect from him — work that describes the “African American experience” — so he writes a parody novel about life in the ghetto. The publishers go crazy for it and, to the protagonist’s horror, it becomes the next big thing. This sophisticated novel is both ironic and tender, leaving its readers with much food for thought.

Creative Nonfiction

Creative nonfiction is pretty broad: it applies to anything that does not claim to be fictional (although the rise of autofiction has definitely blurred the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction). It encompasses everything from personal essays and memoirs to humor writing, and they range in length from blog posts to full-length books. The defining characteristic of this massive genre is that it takes the world or the author’s experience and turns it into a narrative that a reader can follow along with.

Here, we want to focus on novel-length works that dig deep into their respective topics. While very different, these two examples truly show the breadth and depth of possibility of creative nonfiction:

Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward

Men’s bodies litter my family history. The pain of the women they left behind pulls them from the beyond, makes them appear as ghosts. In death, they transcend the circumstances of this place that I love and hate all at once and become supernatural.

Writer Jesmyn Ward recounts the deaths of five men from her rural Mississippi community in as many years. In her award-winning memoir , she delves into the lives of the friends and family she lost and tries to find some sense among the tragedy. Working backwards across five years, she questions why this had to happen over and over again, and slowly unveils the long history of racism and poverty that rules rural Black communities. Moving and emotionally raw, Men We Reaped is an indictment of a cruel system and the story of a woman's grief and rage as she tries to navigate it.

Cork Dork by Bianca Bosker

He believed that wine could reshape someone’s life. That’s why he preferred buying bottles to splurging on sweaters. Sweaters were things. Bottles of wine, said Morgan, “are ways that my humanity will be changed.”

In this work of immersive journalism , Bianca Bosker leaves behind her life as a tech journalist to explore the world of wine. Becoming a “cork dork” takes her everywhere from New York’s most refined restaurants to science labs while she learns what it takes to be a sommelier and a true wine obsessive. This funny and entertaining trip through the past and present of wine-making and tasting is sure to leave you better informed and wishing you, too, could leave your life behind for one devoted to wine.

Illustrated Narratives (Comics, graphic novels)

Once relegated to the “funny pages”, the past forty years of comics history have proven it to be a serious medium. Comics have transformed from the early days of Jack Kirby’s superheroes into a medium where almost every genre is represented. Humorous one-shots in the Sunday papers stand alongside illustrated memoirs, horror, fantasy, and just about anything else you can imagine. This type of visual storytelling lets the writer and artist get creative with perspective, tone, and so much more. For two very different, though equally entertaining, examples, check these out:

Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson

"Life is like topography, Hobbes. There are summits of happiness and success, flat stretches of boring routine and valleys of frustration and failure."

A Calvin and Hobbes comic strip. A little blond boy Calvin makes multiple silly faces in school photos. In the last panel, his father says, "That's our son. *Sigh*" His mother then says, "The pictures will remind of more than we want to remember."

This beloved comic strip follows Calvin, a rambunctious six-year-old boy, and his stuffed tiger/imaginary friend, Hobbes. They get into all kinds of hijinks at school and at home, and muse on the world in the way only a six-year-old and an anthropomorphic tiger can. As laugh-out-loud funny as it is, Calvin & Hobbes ’ popularity persists as much for its whimsy as its use of humor to comment on life, childhood, adulthood, and everything in between.

From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell

"I shall tell you where we are. We're in the most extreme and utter region of the human mind. A dim, subconscious underworld. A radiant abyss where men meet themselves. Hell, Netley. We're in Hell."

Comics aren't just the realm of superheroes and one-joke strips, as Alan Moore proves in this serialized graphic novel released between 1989 and 1998. A meticulously researched alternative history of Victorian London’s Ripper killings, this macabre story pulls no punches. Fact and fiction blend into a world where the Royal Family is involved in a dark conspiracy and Freemasons lurk on the sidelines. It’s a surreal mad-cap adventure that’s unsettling in the best way possible.

Video Games and RPGs

Probably the least expected entry on this list, we thought that video games and RPGs also deserved a mention — and some well-earned recognition for the intricate storytelling that goes into creating them.

Essentially gamified adventure stories, without attention to plot, characters, and a narrative arc, these games would lose a lot of their charm, so let’s look at two examples where the creative writing really shines through:

80 Days by inkle studios

"It was a triumph of invention over nature, and will almost certainly disappear into the dust once more in the next fifty years."

Named Time Magazine ’s game of the year in 2014, this narrative adventure is based on Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne. The player is cast as the novel’s narrator, Passpartout, and tasked with circumnavigating the globe in service of their employer, Phileas Fogg. Set in an alternate steampunk Victorian era, the game uses its globe-trotting to comment on the colonialist fantasies inherent in the original novel and its time period. On a storytelling level, the choose-your-own-adventure style means no two players’ journeys will be the same. This innovative approach to a classic novel shows the potential of video games as a storytelling medium, truly making the player part of the story.

What Remains of Edith Finch by Giant Sparrow

"If we lived forever, maybe we'd have time to understand things. But as it is, I think the best we can do is try to open our eyes, and appreciate how strange and brief all of this is."

This video game casts the player as 17-year-old Edith Finch. Returning to her family’s home on an island in the Pacific northwest, Edith explores the vast house and tries to figure out why she’s the only one of her family left alive. The story of each family member is revealed as you make your way through the house, slowly unpacking the tragic fate of the Finches. Eerie and immersive, this first-person exploration game uses the medium to tell a series of truly unique tales.

Fun and breezy on the surface, humor is often recognized as one of the trickiest forms of creative writing. After all, while you can see the artistic value in a piece of prose that you don’t necessarily enjoy, if a joke isn’t funny, you could say that it’s objectively failed.

With that said, it’s far from an impossible task, and many have succeeded in bringing smiles to their readers’ faces through their writing. Here are two examples:

‘How You Hope Your Extended Family Will React When You Explain Your Job to Them’ by Mike Lacher (McSweeney’s Internet Tendency)

“Is it true you don’t have desks?” your grandmother will ask. You will nod again and crack open a can of Country Time Lemonade. “My stars,” she will say, “it must be so wonderful to not have a traditional office and instead share a bistro-esque coworking space.”

An open plan office seen from a bird's eye view. There are multiple strands of Edison lights hanging from the ceiling. At long light wooden tables multiple people sit working at computers, many of them wearing headphones.

Satire and parody make up a whole subgenre of creative writing, and websites like McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and The Onion consistently hit the mark with their parodies of magazine publishing and news media. This particular example finds humor in the divide between traditional family expectations and contemporary, ‘trendy’ work cultures. Playing on the inherent silliness of today’s tech-forward middle-class jobs, this witty piece imagines a scenario where the writer’s family fully understands what they do — and are enthralled to hear more. “‘Now is it true,’ your uncle will whisper, ‘that you’ve got a potential investment from one of the founders of I Can Haz Cheezburger?’”

‘Not a Foodie’ by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell (Electric Literature)

I’m not a foodie, I never have been, and I know, in my heart, I never will be.

Highlighting what she sees as an unbearable social obsession with food , in this comic Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell takes a hilarious stand against the importance of food. From the writer’s courageous thesis (“I think there are more exciting things to talk about, and focus on in life, than what’s for dinner”) to the amusing appearance of family members and the narrator’s partner, ‘Not a Foodie’ demonstrates that even a seemingly mundane pet peeve can be approached creatively — and even reveal something profound about life.

We hope this list inspires you with your own writing. If there’s one thing you take away from this post, let it be that there is no limit to what you can write about or how you can write about it.

In the next part of this guide, we'll drill down into the fascinating world of creative nonfiction.

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How to Describe a Library in a Story

By Rebecca Parpworth-Reynolds

Has a search for how to describe a library in a story brought you this post? Below are 10 words you use to write a library setting that readers will find enthralling.

1. Bewitching

Possessed of such beauty it is distracting.

“The library was bewitching with towering shelves, dim lighting, and the musty scent of aged books that seemed to transport its visitors to a different time and place.”

“The bewitching allure of the library proved to be too much for her. She knew she needed to do other things today but the thought of getting lost in a book was far too tempting.”

How it Adds Description

Libraries can often seem like magical places, or seem to hold people as if they are under some sort of spell. To help to illustrate the power it has, try describing it as being “bewitching”!

2. Extensive

Covering a wide area.
Having a large range.

“The extensive library at the college had towering shelves filled with countless volumes, spanning every topic imaginable. It was a scholar’s paradise.”

“The library was so extensive that it took almost 20 minutes to walk from wall to wall.”

“Extensive” is a fantastic word to use for a library in a story as it can help you to illustrate two factors to your reader: both the size of the library, and the sheer amount of information it may contain on different topics.

Impressive or important.
Attractive in style and appearance.
Large in scale.

“The library was a grand example of architecture, with its majestic marble columns, intricate frescoes adorning the ceiling, and rows upon rows of beautifully bound books.”

“The grand expanse of the library was covered with ornate wooden shelves, and the tables between them were studded with readers from all ages and backgrounds.”

Libraries are often celebrated halls of knowledge, and as a result can often be built in a way that reflects this. If this is true of the library in your story, consider describing it as “grand” to illustrate not only its majesty but its impact on your characters and reader.

Extremely large .

“The immense library was a winding mass of bookshelves that seemed to stretch on endlessly, with thousands upon thousands of books in every imaginable language.”

“Exploring the immense library was an adventure in itself, with hidden nooks and crannies filled with ancient tomes, rare manuscripts, and forgotten works waiting to be discovered.”

Sometimes a library can be so vast that it can be hard to find a word to describe it, especially for bookworm characters who could easily get lost within one for days on end. To describe how large a library literally is, or at least how it might seem to some of your characters, try using the word “immense”.

5. Imposing

Appearing important and inspiring admiration.

“The imposing library was a formidable sight, with its towering Gothic architecture, arched windows, and heavy wooden doors that seemed to guard the knowledge within.”

“Entering the imposing library felt like stepping into a funeral service, with the solemn silence broken only by the sound of pages turning and the occasional whisper of a scholar deep in study.”

Although some characters might see a library as a paradise, others might see it as a formidable obstacle to overcome. You can illustrate the power that the library holds over your characters by describing it as “imposing”.

6. Labyrinth

A maze-like assortment of passages that is easy to get lost in.

“The library was a labyrinth of sprawling shelves and displays. She could easily see how someone could get lost for hours here.”

“The labyrinthine library was as full of unexpected twists and turns as the books on its shelves.”

Describing a library as a “labyrinth”, or being “labyrinthine” helps you to show to your reader how characters can get lost within its walls. It may be that they become physically lost amongst the shelves, or they may become trapped by their own curiosity to read and learn more and more!

7. Municipal

Belonging to a town or city .

“It was clear to see that little love had been placed into the library by the town. Instead of being a municipal hub for everyone of all walks of life, it was a depressing concrete shell that was barely visited.”

“Despite the rise of digital media, the municipal library remained a popular destination for those seeking a quiet space to read, study, or simply escape the hustle and bustle of the city.”

Most libraries are owned by the town or city they are found in, making them “municipal” buildings. They can therefore be great insights for your reader as to how the place your characters are in treats things such as learning, public resources, and its people.

8. Prestigious

Respected and admired , usually due to its importance.

“The grand library was so prestigious that access was limited to a select few scholars and researchers.”

“Just as prestigious as the university itself was its library, which was revered the world over for not just its architecture but also the rare texts contained within.”

Some libraries hold such valuable pieces of knowledge that they are well respected and almost worshipped! Describe your library as “prestigious” to show just how privileged your characters and your reader are to be allowed access.

Dark and filled with shadows.
Something mysterious that not much is known about.

“The shadowy library, hidden away in a forgotten corner of the city, was rumored to hold dark and forbidden texts from long ago.”

“The dimly lit and shadowy corridors of the library were lined with ominous-looking tomes, and the only sounds to be heard were the soft rustling of pages and the occasional whisper of an unseen librarian.”

If you need to describe a dark and sinister library, try using the word “shadowy”. This can imply not only darkness or evil but also the fact that it may contain unknown knowledge that may be pivotal for your characters’ journeys.

10. Welcoming

Friendly and making someone feel welcome.

“The library was always a welcoming friend after school, helping to whisk her away to other worlds that weren’t as chaotic as home.”

“The warm fire, cozy armchairs, and friendly librarian made the library a truly welcoming space for readers of all ages.”

Libraries can often end up as safe havens, especially for characters who may be experiencing problems or may not feel like they fit in. By describing your library as “welcoming” you can illustrate to your reader how it helps your characters to escape.

The 20+ Best Books on Creative Writing

If you’ve ever wondered, “How do I write a book?”, “How do I write a short story?”, or “How do I write a poem?” you’re not alone. I’m halfway done my MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts , and I ask myself these questions a lot, too, though I’m noticing that by now I feel more comfortable with the answers that fit my personal craft. Fortunately, you don’t need to be a Master’s of Fine Arts in Writing candidate, or even a college graduate, in order to soak up the great Wisdom of Words, as I like to call it. Another word for it is craft . That’s because there are so many great books out there on writing craft. In this post, I’ll guide you through 20+ of the most essential books on creative writing. These essential books for writers will teach you what you need to know to write riveting stories and emotionally resonant books—and to sell them.

I just also want to put in a quick plug for my post with the word count of 175 favorite novels . This resource is helpful for any writer.

Now, with that done… Let’s get to it!

What Made the List of Essential Books for Writers—and What Didn’t

So what made the list? And what didn’t?

Unique to this list, these are all books that I have personally used in my journey as a creative and commercial writer.

That journey started when I was 15 and extended through majoring in English and Creative Writing as an undergrad at UPenn through becoming a freelance writer in 2014, starting this book blog, pursuing my MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults at Vermont College of Fine Arts , and publishing some fiction and nonfiction books myself . My point here is not to boast, just to explain that these books have all helped me better understand and apply the craft, discipline, and business of writing over the course of more than half my life as I’ve walked the path to become a full-time writer. Your mileage my vary , but each of these books have contributed to my growth as a writer in some way. I’m not endorsing books I’ve never read or reviewed. This list comes from my heart (and pen!).

Most of these books are geared towards fiction writers, not poetry or nonfiction writers

It’s true that I’m only one human and can only write so much in one post. Originally, I wanted this list to be more than 25 books on writing. Yes, 25 books! But it’s just not possible to manage that in a single post. What I’ll do is publish a follow-up article with even more books for writers. Stay tuned!

The most commonly recommended books on writing are left out.

Why? Because they’re everywhere! I’m aiming for under-the-radar books on writing, ones that aren’t highlighted often enough. You’ll notice that many of these books are self-published because I wanted to give voice to indie authors.

But I did want to include a brief write-up of these books… and, well, you’ve probably heard of them, but here are 7 of the most recommended books on writing:

The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron – With her guided practice on how to rejuvenate your art over the course of 16 weeks, Cameron has fashioned an enduring classic about living and breathing your craft (for artists as well as writers). This book is perhaps best known for popularizing the morning pages method.

The Art of Fiction by John Gardner – If you want to better understand how fiction works, John Gardner will be your guide in this timeless book.

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott – A beloved writing book on process, craft, and overcoming stumbling blocks (both existential and material).

On Writing by Stephen King – A must-read hybrid memoir-craft book on the writer mythos and reality for every writer.

Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose – A core writing book that teaches you how to read with a writer’s eye and unlock the ability to recognize and analyze craft for yourself.

Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin – Many writers consider this to be their bible on craft and storytelling.

Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg – A favorite of many writers, this book takes an almost spiritual approach to the art, craft, and experience of writing.

I’m aiming for under-the-radar books on writing on my list.

These books are all in print.

Over the years, I’ve picked up several awesome books on creative writing from used bookstores. Oh, how I wish I could recommend these! But many of them are out of print. The books on this list are all available new either as eBooks, hardcovers, or paperbacks. I guess this is the right time for my Affiliate Link disclaimer:

This article contains affiliate links, which means I might get a small portion of your purchase. For more on my affiliate link policy, check out my official Affiliate Link Disclaimer .

You’ll notice a lot of the books focus on the business of writing.

Too often, money is a subject that writers won’t talk about. I want to be upfront about the business of writing and making a living as a writer (or not ) with these books. It’s my goal to get every writer, even poets!, to look at writing not just from a craft perspective, but from a commercial POV, too.

And now on to the books!

Part i: the best books on writing craft, the anatomy of story by john truby.

For you if: You want to develop an instinctive skill at understanding the contours of storytelling .

All I want to do as a writer, my MO, is tell good stories well. It took me so long to understand that what really matters to me is good storytelling. That’s it—that’s the essence of what we do as writers… tell good stories well. And in The Anatomy of Story , legendary screenwriting teacher John Truby takes you through story theory. This book is packed with movie references to illustrate the core beat points in story, and many of these example films are actually literary adaptations, making this a crossover craft book for fiction writers and screenwriters alike.

How to read it: Purchase The Anatomy of Story on Amazon and add it on Goodreads

The art of memoir by mary karr.

For you if: You’re writing a memoir book or personal essays .

Nobody is a better person to teach memoir writing than Mary Karr, whose memoirs The Liar’s Club and Lit are considered classics of the genre. In The Art of Memoir , Karr delivers a master class on memoir writing, adapted from her experience as a writer and a professor in Syracuse’s prestigious MFA program. What I love about this book as an aspiring memoirist is Karr’s approach, which blends practical, actionable advice with more bigger-picture concepts on things like truth vs. fact in memoir storytelling. Like I said in the intro to this list, I didn’t include many nonfiction and poetry books on this list, but I knew I had to make an exception for The Art of Memoir .

How to read it: Purchase The Art of Memoir on Amazon and add it on Goodreads

The emotional craft of fiction by donald maass.

For you if: Plot isn’t your problem, it’s character .

From literary agent Donald Maass, The Emotional Craft of Fiction gives you the skill set you need to master emotionally engaging fiction. Maass’s technique is to show you how readers get pulled into the most resonant, engaging, and unforgettable stories: by going through an emotional journey nimbly crafted by the author. The Emotional Craft of Fiction is a must-have work of craft to balance more plot-driven craft books.

How to read it: Purchase the The Emotional Craft of Fiction on Amazon and add it on Goodreads

How to Write Using the Snowflake Method by Randy Ingermanson

For you if: You need a quick-and-dirty plotting technique that’s easy to memorize .

I first heard of the “Snowflake Method” in the National Novel Writing Month forums (which, by the way, are excellent places for finding writing craft worksheets, book recommendations, and online resources). In How to Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method , the Snowflake Method is introduced by its creator. This quick yet thorough plotting and outlining structure is humble and easy to master. If you don’t have time to read a bunch of books on outlining and the hundreds of pages that would require, check out How to Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method for a quick, 235-page read.

How to read it: Purchase How to Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method on Amazon and add it on Goodreads

Meander, spiral, explode: design and pattern in narrative by jane alison.

For you if: You want to do a deep dive understanding of the core theory of story, a.k.a. narrative.

A most unconventional writing craft book, Meander, Spiral, Explode offers a theory of narrative (story) as recognizable patterns. According to author Jane Alison, there are three main narrative narratives in writing: meandering, spiraling, and exploding. This cerebral book (chock full of examples!) is equal parts seminar on literary theory as it is craft, and it will make you see and understand storytelling better than maybe any book on this list.

How to read it: Purchase Meander, Spiral, Explode on Amazon and add it on Goodreads

The modern library writer’s workshop by stephen koch.

For you if: You’re wondering what it means to be the writer you want to become .

This is one of the earliest creative writing books I ever bought and it remains among the best I’ve read. Why? Reading The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop echoes the kind of mind-body-spirit approach you need to take to writing. The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop doesn’t teach you the nuts and bolts of writing as much as it teaches you how to envision the machine. Koch zooms out to big picture stuff as much as zeroes in on the little details. This is an outstanding book about getting into the mindset of being a writer, not just in a commercial sense, but as your passion and identity. It’s as close as you’ll get to the feel of an MFA in Fiction education.

How to read it: Purchase The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop on Amazon and add it on Goodreads

Romancing the beat by gwen hayes.

For you if: You write or edit the romance genre and want a trusted plotting strategy to craft the perfect love story .

If you’re writing romance, you have to get Gwen Hayes’s Romancing the Beat . This book breaks down the plot points or “beats” you want to hit when you’re crafting your romance novel. When I worked as a romance novel outliner (yes, a real job), our team used Romancing the Beat as its bible; every outline was structured around Hayes’s formula. For romance writers (like myself) I cannot endorse it any higher.

How to read it: Purchase Romancing the Beat on Amazon and add it on Goodreads

Save the cat writes a novel by jessica brody.

For you if: You have big ideas for a plot but need to work on the smaller moments that propel stories .

Jessica Brody’s Save the Cat! Writes a Novel adapts Blake Snyder’s bestselling screenwriting book Save the Cat! into story craft for writing novels. Brody reworks the Save the Cat! methodology in actionable, point-by-point stages of story that are each explained with countless relevant examples. If you want to focus your efforts on plot, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel is an excellent place to go to start learning the ins and outs of what makes a good story.

How to read it: Purchase Save the Cat! Writes a Novel on Amazon and add it on Goodreads

Story genius by lisa cron.

For you if: You’re a pantser and are terrified at outlining yet also realize you might have a “plot problem .”

More than any other book, Lisa Cron’s Story Genius will get you where you need to go for writing amazing stories. Story Genius helps you look at plotting differently, starting from a point of characterization in which our protagonists have a clearly defined need and misbelief that play off each other and move the story forward from an emotional interior and action exterior standpoint. For many of my fellow MFA students—and myself— Story Genius is the missing link book for marrying plot and character so you innately understand the contours of good story.

How to read it: Purchase Story Genius on Amazon and add it on Goodreads

Wonderbook: the illustrated guide to creating imaginative fiction by jeff vandermeer.

For you if: You’re writing in a speculative fiction genre—like science fiction, fantasy, or horror—or are trying to better understand those genres.

Jeff VanderMeer’s Wonderbook is a dazzling gem of a book and a can’t-miss-it writing book for sci-fi, fantasy, and horror writers. This book will teach you all the skills you need to craft speculative fiction, like world-building, with micro-lessons and close-reads of excellent works in these genres. Wonderbook is also one to linger over, with lavish illustrations and every inch and corner crammed with craft talk for writing imaginative fiction (sometimes called speculative fiction). And who better to guide you through this than Jeff VanderMeer, author of the popular Southern Reach Trilogy, which kicks off with Annihilation , which was adapted into a feature film.

How to read it: Purchase Wonderbook on Amazon and add it on Goodreads

Writing picture books by ann whitford paul.

For you if: You’re looking to write picture books and/or understand how they work .

This book is the only one you need to learn how to write and sell picture books. As an MFA student studying children’s literature, I’ve consulted with this book several times as I’ve dipped my toes into writing picture books, a form I considered scary and intimidating until reading this book. Writing Picture Books should be on the shelf of any writer of children’s literature. a.k.a. “kid lit.”

How to read it: Purchase Writing Picture Books on Amazon and add it on Goodreads

Writing with emotion, conflict, and tension by cheryl st. john.

For you if: You need to work on the conflict, tension, and suspense that keep readers turning pages and your story going forward .

Mmm, conflict. As I said earlier, it’s the element of fiction writing that makes a story interesting and a key aspect of characterization that is underrated. In Writing with Emotion, Tension, and Conflict , bestselling romance author Cheryl St. John offers a masterclass on the delicate dance between incorporating conflict, the emotions it inspires in characters, and the tension that results from those two factors.

How to read it: Purchase Writing with Emotion, Tension, and Conflict on Amazon and add it on Goodreads

Part ii: the best books on the productivity, mfas, and the business of writing, 2k to 10k: writing faster, writing better, and writing more of what you love by rachel aaron.

For you if: You struggle to find the time to write and always seem to be a chapter or two behind schedule .

If you’re struggling to find time of your own to write with competing obligations (family, work, whatever) making that hard, you need Rachel Aaron’s 2k to 10k . This book will get you in shape to go from writing just a few words an hour to, eventually, 10,000 words a day. Yes, you read that right. 10,000 words a day. At that rate, you can complete so many more projects and publish more. Writers simply cannot afford to waste time if they want to keep up the kind of production that leads to perpetual publication. Trust me, Aaron’s method works. It has for me. I’m on my way to 10k in the future, currently at like 4 or 5k a day for me at the moment.

How to read it: Purchase 2k to 10k on Amazon and add it on Goodreads

The 3 a.m. epiphany by brian kitele.

For you if: You’re going through writer’s block, have been away from writing for a while, or just want to loosen up and try something new .

Every writer must own an an exercise or prompt book. Why? Because regularly practicing your writing by going outside your current works-in-progress (or writer’s block) will free you up, help you plant the seeds for new ideas, and defrost your creative blocks. And the best book writing exercise book I know is The 3 A.M. Epiphany by Brian Kiteley, an MFA professor who uses prompts like these with his grad students. You’ll find that this book (and its sequel, The 4 A.M. Breakthrough ) go beyond cutesy exercises and forces you to push outside your comfort zone and learn something from the writing you find there.

How to read it: Purchase The 3 A.M. Epiphany on Amazon and add it on Goodreads

The 4-hour workweek by timothy ferriss.

For you if: You think being a writer means you have to be poor .

The 4-Hour Workweek changed my life. Although not strictly about writing in the traditional sense, The 4-Hour Workweek does an excellent job teaching you about how passive income can offer you freedom. I first heard about The 4-Hour Workweek when I was getting into tarot in 2013. On Biddy Tarot , founder Brigit (author of some of the best books on tarot ) related how she read this book, learned how to create passive income, and quit her corporate job to read tarot full time. As a person with a total and permanent disability, this spoke to me because it offered a way out of the 9-to-5 “active” income that I thought was the only way. I picked up Ferriss’s book and learned that there’s more than one option, and that passive income is a viable way for me to make money even when I’m too sick to work. I saw this come true last year when I was in the hospital. When I got out, I checked my stats and learned I’d made money off my blog and books even while I was hospitalized and couldn’t do any “active” work. I almost cried.; I’ve been working on my passive income game since 2013, and I saw a return on that time investment when I needed it most.

That’s why I’m recommending The 4-Hour Workweek to writers. So much of our trade is producing passive income products. Yes, your books are products! And for many writers, this means rewiring your brain to stop looking at writing strictly as an art that will leave you impoverished for life and start approaching writing as a business that can earn you a real living through passive income. No book will help you break out of that mindset better than The 4-Hour Workweek and its actionable steps, proven method, and numerous examples of people who have followed the strategy and are living the lifestyle they’ve always dreamed of but never thought was possible.

How to read it: Purchase The 4-Hour Workweek on Amazon and add it on Goodreads

Before and After the Book Deal: A Writer’s Guide to Finishing, Publishing, Promoting, and Surviving Your First Book by Courtney Maum

For you if: You’re serious about making a living as a writer and publishing with a Big 5 or major indie publisher .

Courtney Maum’s Before and After the Book Deal addresses exactly what its title suggests: what happens after you sell your first book. This book is for ambitious writers intent on submission who know they want to write and want to avoid common pitfalls while negotiating terms and life after your debut. As many published authors would tell you, the debut is one thing, but following that book up with a sustainable, successful career is another trick entirely. Fortunately, we have Maum’s book, packed with to-the-moment details and advice.

How to read it: Purchase Before and After the Book Deal on Amazon and add it on Goodreads

Diy mfa: write with focus, read with purpose, build your community by gabriela pereira.

For you if: You’re stressed out wondering if you really need an MFA .

The MFA is under this header “business of writing” because it is absolutely an economic choice you make. And, look, I’m biased. I’m getting an MFA. But back when I was grappling with whether or not it was worth it—the debt, the time, the stress—I consulted with DIY MFA , an exceptional guide to learning how to enrich your writing craft, career, and community outside the structures of an MFA program. I’ve also more than once visited the companion site, DIYMFA.com , to find a kind of never-ending rabbit hole of new and timeless content on the writing life. On DIYMFA.com and in the corresponding book, you’ll find a lively hub for author interviews, writing craft shop talk, reading lists, and business of writing articles.

How to read it: Purchase DIY MFA on Amazon and add it on Goodreads

Mfa vs. nyc by chad harbach.

For you if: You’re wondering how far an MFA really gets you—and you’re ready to learn the realities of the publishing world .

About a thousand years ago (well, in 2007), I spent the fall of my sophomore year of college as a “Fiction Submissions and Advertising Intern” for the literary magazine n+1 , which was co-founded by Chad Harbach, who you might know from his buzzy novel, The Art of Fielding . In MFA vs NYC , Harbach offers his perspective as both an MFA graduate and someone deeply enmeshed in the New York City publishing industry. This thought-provoking look at these two arenas that launch writers will pull the wool up from your eyes about how publishing really works . It’s not just Harbach’s voice you get in here, though. The book, slim but mighty, includes perspectives from the likes of George Saunders and David Foster Wallace in the MFA camp and Emily Gould and Keith Gessen speaking to NYC’s writing culture.

How to read it: Purchase MFA vs. NYC on Amazon and add it on Goodreads

Scratch: writers, money, and the art of making a living – edited by manjula martin.

For you if: a) You’re worried about how to balance writing with making a living; b) You’re not worried about how to balance writing with making a living .

Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living is alternately one of the most underrated and essential books on writing out there. This collection of personal essays and interviews all revolve around the taboo theme of how writers make their living, and it’s not always—indeed, rarely—through writing alone. Some of the many contributing authors include Cheryl Strayed ( Wild ), Alexander Chee ( How to Write an Autobiographical Novel ), Jennifer Weiner ( Mrs. Everything ), Austin Kleon ( Steal Like an Artist ), and many others. Recently a young woman asked me for career advice on being a professional freelance writer, and I made sure to recommend Scratch as an eye-opening and candid read that is both motivating and candid.

How to read it: Purchase Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living on Amazon and add it on Goodreads

Write to market: deliver a book that sells by chris fox.

For you if: You don’t know why your books aren’t selling—and you want to start turning a profit by getting a real publishing strategy

So you don’t have to be an indie author to internalize the invaluable wisdom you’ll find here in Write to Market . I first heard about Write to Market when I first joined the 20Booksto50K writing group on Facebook , a massive, supportive, motivating community of mostly indie authors. Everyone kept talking about Write to Market . I read the book in a day and found the way I looked at publishing change. Essentially, what Chris Fox does in Write to Market is help you learn to identify what are viable publishing niches. Following his method, I’ve since published several successful and #1 bestselling books in the quotations genre on Amazon . Without Fox’s book, I’m not sure I would have gotten there on my own.

How to read it: Purchase Write to Market on Amazon and add it on Goodreads

And that’s a wrap what are some of your favorite writing books, share this:, you might be interested in.

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Sarah S. Davis is the founder of Broke by Books, a blog about her journey as a schizoaffective disorder bipolar type writer and reader. Sarah's writing about books has appeared on Book Riot, Electric Literature, Kirkus Reviews, BookRags, PsychCentral, and more. She has a BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania, a Master of Library and Information Science from Clarion University, and an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

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GCSE English Language Paper 1 - Section B Creative Writing (Sensory Description)

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IMAGES

How to Write a Book Description (+ Book Description Examples)
Creative Writing Coursebook by Julia Bell, Paperback, 9781509868278
How to Write a Book Description That Will Sell Your Book
Secrets of Writing a Book Description that Sells (With Examples & Templates)
How to Write a Book Description That Sells: 8 Easy Tips
How to Write a Book Description That Sells: 8 Easy Tips

VIDEO

How to Organically Describe POV Characters
Descriptive writing on the event international women's day || Class 9th descriptive writing
Picture Description
To Ne Dekha Hai Kabhi Ik Nazar Shaam Ke Baad
Level up your GCSE CREATIVE WRITING skills with these proven techniques ft. @FirstRateTutors
Worldbuilding: How to Write Fantasy Setting Descriptions

COMMENTS

The Best Descriptive Writing Examples From Books!
3 Descriptive Writing Examples. 1. "In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.
How to Write a Book Description (Examples + Free Template)
Top 2 book description examples. 1. The Firm by John Grisham. #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the master of legal thrillers, a page-turning classic of "suit-and-dagger suspense" (The New York Times): At the top of his class at Harvard Law, Mitch McDeere had his choice of the best firms in America.
How to Write a Great Book Description: Step-by-Step Guide
Writing a book description can also help authors hook a reader and get them invested before they've even read a single page. Writers promoting their first book have many marketing tools at their disposal, including a unique book cover design, a pithy title, strong critical reviews, a marketing campaign, certifications such as being a New York ...
Secrets of Writing a Book Description that Sells (With Examples
Book Description Template. To make the process of writing a book description easier, we have added below a couple of templates that you can use for your book, instead of creating one from scratch. Whether you need it as a fiction or a non-fiction book, we've got you covered. 1. Non-Fiction Book Description Template.
How To Write A Book Description That Sells [With Examples]
Be clear about the benefits, don't insinuate them. You are selling a result to the reader, not a process (even though your book is the process). Explain exactly what the book is about, in clear, obvious terms. 4. Legitimize Yourself To The Reader. This is about letting the reader know why they should listen to you.
How To Write Descriptions And Create A Sense Of Place
Set the scene early on - then nudge. It may sound obvious but plenty of writers launch out into a scene without giving us any descriptive material to place and anchor the action. Sure, a page or so into the scene, they may start to add details to it - but by that point it's too late. They've already lost the reader.
How to Write a Book Description That's Right for Your Book
Instead, you need to write the blurb that works best for your genre and your book. To dig deeper into writing a book description that's right for your book, I searched several bestsellers and recent releases in the Kindle store to analyze a few popular genres based on these four criteria: 1. Above the Fold. The area above the fold is what ...
How to Write a Book Description: 8 Steps with Examples
Step 1: Hook The Reader. The first sentence when you write a book description is like the opening act of a magic show. It's your one chance to pull a rabbit out of the hat and make the audience gasp in awe. Here are some tips to craft a hook that's impossible to ignore: Ask a question: Starting with a question makes the reader's brain tick.
How to Write a Book Description That Sells: 8 Easy Tips
Tell enough about the plot to make people want to read the book. Introduce the main character and the problem of your story in a compelling way. Offer just enough hints about events in the story to pique reader interest without giving away any of the juicy details. 5. Focus on your book, not on yourself!
How to Write Book Descriptions for Fiction and Non-Fiction
Writing a Good Headline for Your Book Description. A good headline needs to have four key qualities: 1. It's short. Bryan had a situation where he didn't realize the headline he was using on Amazon was getting cut off because it was too long. If your headlines are too long, you run the risk of losing people. 2.
How to Write Vivid Descriptions
It is advice on how to break free of cliche approaches to painting, but it applies almost just as well to writing. The first step to vividly describing a place, person, or thing is to imagine it in your mind's eye. Alternately, if it actually exists you may prefer to look at it or a photograph directly. Either way, you'll start with some ...
Book Descriptions: How to Do Them Right
Start by Reading Existing Descriptions. Before you wrote your book, I'm guessing you read a lot of other books. Likewise, you should read several book descriptions before writing your own. This will give you an idea of what good descriptions look like. Note the components and how they're sequenced. Highlight what you like.
How to Write a Book Description: Tips from BookBub Editors
Below are my best tips on how to write a compelling description for your book so it has a great chance of drawing in readers. I've included screenshots of examples for reference — click on each image to read the book description in a new tab. 1. Keep your target audience and genre in mind. To attract the right readers to your book, you need ...
Writing Hooks And Improving Your Fiction Book Description With
His latest book, Malignant, debuted on Amazon's bestseller lists all over the world. Michaelbrent is also a screenwriter — and helps authors with their book descriptions over on Fiverr Pro/mbcollings. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below.
Descriptive Writing: Definition, Tips, Examples, and Exercises
Descriptive writing is about using the power of words to arouse the imagination, capture the attention, and create a lasting impact in the mind of the reader. ... and a book that had a gleaming golden spine, and weighed a few good pounds. ... While it can be a wonderful creative exercise to simply describe anything you observe, in descriptive ...
A Guide to Descriptive Writing
Writing description is a necessary skill for most writers. Whether we're writing an essay, a story, or a poem, we usually reach a point where we need to describe something. In fiction, we describe settings and characters. In poetry, we describe scenes, experiences, and emotions. In creative nonfiction, we describe reality.
The Gigantic List of Character Descriptions (70+ examples)
23. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. "He was commonplace in complexion, in feature, in manners, and in voice. He was of middle size and of ordinary build. His eyes, of the usual blue, were perhaps remarkably cold, and he certainly could make his glance fall on one as trenchant and heavy as an axe….
How to Use Descriptive Writing to Improve Your Story
Written by MasterClass. Last updated: Sep 3, 2021 • 4 min read. In fiction writing, authors bring characters to life and create imaginative settings through descriptive writing—using vivid details, figurative language, and sensory information to paint a picture for readers. Well-crafted descriptive writing draws readers into the story.
Writing Professional Book Descriptions |The Urban Writers
A book description should be no less than 200 words. The sweet spot is 500 words. This can be broken into short paragraphs for easier reading. You can also add bullet points where you give a brief insight into some questions. Be sure to use bold lettering for the more important bullet points. 2.
How to Write Vivid Descriptions to Capture Your Readers: 7 Writing Tips
Writing vivid descriptions involves using specific language to help your own writing stand out and form a detailed mental picture for readers. Whether it's for a novel, formal essay, short story, or public speaking event, it's important to make sure your writing is memorable and interesting for your audience. Explore. Articles.
10 Types of Creative Writing (with Examples You'll Love)
A lot falls under the term 'creative writing': poetry, short fiction, plays, novels, personal essays, and songs, to name just a few. By virtue of the creativity that characterizes it, creative writing is an extremely versatile art. So instead of defining what creative writing is, it may be easier to understand what it does by looking at ...
How to Describe a Library in a Story
She knew she needed to do other things today but the thought of getting lost in a book was far too tempting." How it Adds Description. Libraries can often seem like magical places, or seem to hold people as if they are under some sort of spell. To help to illustrate the power it has, try describing it as being "bewitching"! 2. Extensive ...
The 20+ Best Books on Creative Writing
Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin - Many writers consider this to be their bible on craft and storytelling. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg - A favorite of many writers, this book takes an almost spiritual approach to the art, craft, and experience of writing.
GCSE English Language Paper 1
A lesson and resources to support low ability learners in planning creative writing using the senses to support their description. International; Resources; Education Jobs; Schools directory; News; ... Section B Creative Writing (Sensory Description) Subject: English. Age range: 14-16. Resource type: Lesson (complete) hellisBeds. Last updated ...