Writing Blurbs That Sizzle and Sell by Karen S. Wiesner (Book Review)

You need this book! If you're a novelist, you need this book. If you're a self-published author, you need this book. If you're a memoir writer, you...Well, you get the point.

Writing Blurbs That Sizzle and Sell by Karen S. Wiesner will help you write copy for your query letter and your website, for Amazon and a book's back cover, for press releases and marketing emails. The advice in this book will even improve your writing--how you tell your story, how you plot your book, and how you think about your reader. It has plenty of helpful examples and resources, exercises and checklists.

So let's start at the beginning. Karen explains the term blurb and where it came from; but for this book's purposes, she refers to "the very short summary of the story plot" as a blurb. She says there is a "two-fold truth" when it comes to blurbs, and those are:

a) a blurb shouldn't tell the story: it only tells the potential buyer about the story in hopes that he or she will part with hard-earned money to read what's inside, and b) the purpose of a blurb is to sell the book. 

Then she goes on to explain how to write a blurb for many different types of books, including genre books, literary fiction, an entire series (you can have a blurb for each book and then for the entire series--and according to Karen, you should!), nonfiction books such as self-help or humor, anthologies (Karen is very detailed!), and children's books. She ends the how-to section of her book (part one) with a chapter on blurb dos and don'ts, which gives great advice for writing the best blurb you can and practical applications of this advice.

Did I mention there were plenty of examples? I love examples! This book is like a workshop. The value you will receive for the price of this book feels like you have found a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I'm not exaggerating here! (smiles) The appendices (or part two) of the book start on page 211 and go to page 382, and it is packed full of evaluations of blurbs that are already published, exercises for blurb crafting and revision, and worksheets and checklists she mentions during part one of the book.

So I used Karen's advice to write a blurb for the novel I've been going on about on The Muffin and on Facebook. (Today, I hit over 75,000 words on my WIP!) Since I talk about   overshare, people are often asking me: what's your book about? I didn't have a good answer and tried poorly to describe it, and then I was worried that maybe I didn't know what the novel was about. Maybe it was horrible and rambling, and no one would ever want to read it.

But Karen's blurb book and her advice saved the day. She says a blurb is made up of two parts: Who and What. For example, here's one she uses for the movie, Spectre:  "A cryptic message from M16 spy James Bond's past sends him on a trail to uncover a sinister organization." The who is James Bond and the what is he will follow a cryptic message and reveal this evil organization.

So here's the blurb I wrote for my WIP based on Karen's book. My main character's name is Gwen, but she's not well-known like James Bond, so I used descriptors instead of her name:

A 30-something single mom has no idea who she is after loving a narcissist and enabling her alcoholic sister since she was 18. Will she figure it out before she loses her career, her best friend, and--especially, the best guy ever? 

Then I didn't stop there--I wrote one for each of my already published books, which I plan to use on my website soon! Take this one for example for my historical fiction middle-grade, Finding My Place :

Before she's ready, a 13-year-old girl must take care of her younger brother and sister while living in a cave with a nosy, mean neighbor during the Siege of Vicksburg in 1863. 

I'm so lucky to have received this book in return for a review. I will be recommending this to all of my writer friends. So, check out Writing Blurbs That Sizzle and Sell! here. If you need a gift for a writer, this is perfect--or put it on your own holiday list!

Margo L. Dill is a writer, editor, and teacher, living in St. Louis, MO. She teaches a novel course for WOW! each month, which includes 4 critiques of your work-in-progress. To check out more about her, go to http://www.margoldill.com. To check out her next class starting December 7, go to the WOW! classroom. 

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5 comments book blurbs, book review, Karen Wiesner, Margo L. Dill, marketing your work, writing back cover copy

Are You Delivering?

While scrolling through my pile-up of emails last week, I screeched to a stop at a YA title. I don’t recall the writer, but this self-pubbed author had done the first right thing. She’d grabbed my attention immediately with an intriguing title. Yay!

In fact, she’d done several right things, from a marketing standpoint. She’d gotten her new and intriguing title out there in the right places, and, I noticed, she’d already garnered quite a few reviews.

Which is great from my standpoint. When I don’t know an author’s work, I’ll read a couple of reviews. And my favorite place to skim reviews is Goodreads. I feel like I get a fairly balanced bunch of reviews and the reviewers tend to be savvy readers. So when I saw a similar criticism showing up in several reviews, I passed on this YA novel.

The book had a great title, and it had a compelling blurb. But the book itself wasn’t what was promised in the title and the blurb. Time and time again, reviewers complained about expecting a story on a certain topic only to find that the book wasn’t really about this topic at all.

Unfortunately, this author had done one big wrong thing: she hadn’t delivered on what she’d promised.

It’s possible that the author made an innocent mistake; perhaps she didn’t really understand what her book was about. But it doesn’t matter. The bottom line is that she pulled the old bait-and-switch on her target audience. And in doing so, her readers felt duped, and she hurt her marketing strategy. And that was a shame, because she managed to get her book into the hands of an impressive number of readers.

You’re probably thinking that this doesn’t happen very often so you don’t need to worry about your book not delivering. But take it from someone who’s received way more than one critique along those lines. It’s pretty common. In fact, I’m avoiding a revision right now because I know that it requires a major rewrite. I didn’t write a story about what I promised in the title and first chapter.

So how to make sure that you are delivering on what you’ve promised? First, make sure you know what your story or novel is about. If you can sum it up in one good sentence, then you’re off to a decent start.

Next, read your story with that sentence in mind. When or if the story veers too far off the rails from where it began, it’s probably time to stop and get things back on track.

And last, get feedback, either from your critique group, beta readers, or a professional editor. If you hear, “I thought this book/story was going to be about…” then prepare to take notes. You haven’t delivered on your promise.

And please, do this work before you put your book out there. Revisions may not be fun, but they can fix a whole lot of problems. On the other hand, if you’re facing a whole slew of bad reviews? There’s no easy fix when you don’t deliver the goods.

Cathy C. Hall is a kidlit author and humor writer and she will get to that rewrite right after she finishes revising her latest middle grade novel. (She does finish stuff, honest, and you can find out what if you check out Cathy here! Um, check out her blog. Her blog!)

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6 comments book blurbs, book reviews, book titles, Cathy C. Hall, goodreads, novel revision