What's harder than writing a novel? Writing the blurb. (IWSG)
Posted on November 3, 2021


After submitting my manuscript to my editor for the first of several rounds of editing, I spent, possibly, a full week writing the blurb to my novel. The blurb is the back of the book cover, the text on your book page, the text that people will read when they are considering buying your book. I have never stressed over 100-200 words so much like I do when I write a book blurb. 

You want to summarize, but, also, you DON'T want to summarize. 

You want to give hints of suspense, but not too many hints because you don't want to give away the plots/sub-plots/plot-twists.

One, two, maybe seven crucial characters are included in the first round. After thinking about it, five are taken out, and then the whole thing is put through the wringer until you are only talking about the protagonist. 

If it's a series, then do you refer to past books/storylines/plots or just assume the reader is all caught up? This one is tricky.

First person? Third person? Omniscient? I find myself reading it out loud to see which one sounds the most natural. Surprisingly, it's not always the first-person voice.

And once you have a paragraph or two that seem adequate, and you walk away, maybe eat a sandwich or work on another project... after a bit of a breather you come back to your blurb and realize it's all wrong. You delete the whole mess (or back it up and create a new file) and start over. 

And that's just the first day!

Please tell me I'm not the only one.


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7 comments:

  1. yes! I totally agree. Writing the blurb is way harder for me as well. You'd think after an entire book where we *should* know the plot and characters well enough to summarize it's never that easy. hahaha

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Transforming 60k words (or whatever your word count) into 100-200 words?!?! It's never easy.

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  2. Great steps! I usually keep them all and read them in case I wrote something great in one place I can use on another try. Happy IWSG Day :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Absolutely. And sometimes I get a tagline out of the old ones. But sometimes I just delete them only so the older blurb versions don't distract me from creating better versions.

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  3. The blurb definitely intimidate me way more than the title. It's difficult to get the core idea/characters of the book down to only a few sentences AND grab the reader's interest.

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