Blurbs should be short and to the point. Hence the name “blurb.” Blurbs are a summary of what a book is about. But who says that the blurb has to be long. I’ve seen too many authors’ blurbs that tell too much of what their book is about, reaching the status of being more of a full length novel than an actual blurb. I’ve always written the blurbs for my books as short, to the point with an air of mystery. No more than one sentence or less. I think a lot of authors are going with the way we were taught in English class, in grade school, when summarizing a story, basically paraphrasing the entire story making it book length.
My most recent novel “Weeping Well” (Vol. 1) I took an original excerpt/quote I wrote in my book and instead of writing the whole thing which was only one sentence entirely. I decided to write a portion of the quote and left off with the ellipsis. My book has several mixed genres and if I told you the exact amount of genres and you saw the blurb I wrote to my book, you’d be saying “how did she sum that entire book, which is quite lengthy, with all those genres into such a short blurb?” You’d think I was a magician. Seriously. No kidding.
But this is how I did it. I thought about what is the main theme I want to exploit, easy “mystery” also something that lacks in a lot of these blurbs. I thought about the main character what is the internal/ external conflict or the second theme/genre, easy “thriller,” “suspense” and I thought about the tragedy my character goes through involving a specific person and I came up with my blurb for my novel Weeping Well: “Fear is like a looking glass….” I’ve gotten rave reviews on my blurb, because of its mystery, which draws readers in to want to read the book and find out more. You have to find what are the consistent main themes or genres and build your short blurb from there.
As an avid reader and reviewer, I’m constantly turned off by blurbs that tell way too much about the book and due to that I’m turned off from reading or reviewing the book because I already know what it’s fully about. K.I.S.S. still applies, the old “Keep It Simple…. Well, you know the rest. The same for reviews. I don’t like reviews with spoilers. I have tips for writing reviews without spoilers and coming up with titles for a book, but that’s for another blog post that I’ll probably talk about on my Goodreads blog. Thanks for your listening ears! I hope this helps and makes your next blurb a lot easier to write.
Excellent article. My compliments!