Want more help writing better book blurbs?
I hate writing them, but like most indie authors, I also don’t want to pay someone else to write them for me. Today we’re talking tips to make your book blurbs even better than before so you can sell more books!
Want to find out more about Stacy Juba’s Book Blurbs Made Simple course that I used? Check it out here: https://katcaldwell.com/blurbs-made-simple
Are you a writer looking for my weekly newsletter to writers? You can sign up here for free: https://katcaldwell.com/writers-newsletter
Want to join my reader’s newsletter and read my historical novella for free? Sign up here: https://katcaldwell.com/fans-of-good-stories
TRANSCRIPT BEGINS HERE:
Kat
Hey, everyone. Welcome to Episode 186 of Pencils & Lipstick. I’m Kat Caldwell. And today you have me talking to you about book blurbs. We’ll probably be back in July with one interview of Jeff Elkins, but the rest of them are just going to be short and sweet. And today we are going to talk about book blurbs, as I said, because I just finished writing a pretty satisfactory book blurb, and I hate book blurbs. So we’re going to talk through this. Book blurbs, for anyone who is new to writing, they are the back of the book. They are what entices the reader to read. Once they have picked up that book of yours. I always envision people in a bookstore. I know most of us buy books online, but it’s all right. So let’s say they pick up this book, Eleanor Elephant is completely fine, pretty good book, by the way. But what they’re going to see on the back is the book blurb. So you might get some quotes by people endorsing the book, but the book blurb is what it’s about. So a lot of times on a hardback or a nonfiction, it might be on the inner cover. So book blurbs are usually, for any indie writer, are usually written by the author, and most authors hate doing them. Maybe I’m just going to say that because I hate doing them. There are services. There are people who help you write them, but you really have to find a way to bring the entire story down into a couple of sentences. So whether or not you pay someone to write it or you write it yourself, you’re still going to have to do some work on it. And why do we find it so difficult? I think it’s because we spend so much time in this world that we’re building in our book that it’s really difficult to put it all into 150 words. What is the most important thing to tell your reader?
Kat
So let’s start with something fairly easy. I’m going to read a couple of book blurbs to you because the interesting thing about book blurbs is that they don’t really tell you a lot about the story. So if you have read The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, very good book if you haven’t read it, pretty popular. I assume a lot of you have read it. So this is the blurb. “It is France 1714. In a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever in his cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, in a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world. But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name.” Okay, has anyone read this book? Because that’s the very beginning of the book. I mean, sure, we see Addie quite a bit, but really, the thing that catapults the rest of the story is her meeting that young man. There is this set up. There’s a lot of set up. So the inciting incident, to get Addie into this moment is that night of a Faustian bargain. And then we have to see her walk through this curse that she’s living in. And then she meets the boy, I think his name is Henry, and he remembers her name. And he’s the only person that’s ever remembered her. So this is getting to maybe a third of the book. And I think that’s what really confuses us as writers and confused, I say confused lightly, it’s really difficult because we know the full book and we feel like we want to give people a bigger picture of that. I mean, don’t you almost want a bigger picture than that? But the whole point of a book blurb is to get you to want the full picture and get you to buy the book. Okay, so maybe you picked up The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue because it was so popular.
Kat
Have you ever read, well, I’m in my 40s, so I miss the kid Harry Potter time, but I read it with my kids. So here is the book number 4, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Now, remember, this is a YA, because I’m surprised at how blah this book blurb is. “The Triwizard Tournament is to be held at Hogwarts. Only wizards who are over 17 are allowed to enter. But that doesn’t stop Harry dreaming that he will win the competition. Then at Halloween, when the Goblet of Fire makes its in the election, Harry is amazed to find his name is one of those that the magical cup picks out. He will face death defying tasks, dragons, and dark wizards. But with the help of his best friend, Ron and Hermione, he might just make it through alive.” If you have read that book, or even seen the movie, but the book has even more information, it doesn’t talk about his and Ron’s fight. I really hope that’s the book. And how Ron is jealous of him. It doesn’t talk about the kid who’s dying. It doesn’t talk about the conspiracy that they discover. It doesn’t talk about any of that. First of all, this is written to entice technically 14-year-olds, although we know that Harry Potter is one of those books that has transcended age limits. So it’s really just getting them with the death defying tasks, the dragons, and the dark wizards, and then bringing in the friends that by book 4 everybody loves. That’s a really short book blurb. Now, imagine if you have written this huge book in which all these intricate details are happening, and Harry’s even continuing to find out who he is, right? And you want to tell everyone about this, and yet that is not the point of the book blurb. So really, the point of the book blurb is to not summarize, it is to tease.
Kat
Now, partly the problem with writers is that they want to summarize. So we have spent so much time writing this thing that we want to really give a good, juicy summary. And that’s usually too much. We want to put everything in there. And it’s not going to work as the book blurb. This is like your two-minute elevator pitch. I bet there are now conferences again after COVID. But before COVID, when I was living in Europe, I would always hear about these writer conferences where agents and publishers would be there, and you would get to five minutes to pitch your book and see if they would want to take it. That’s about all you have. You have a very small moment of time to hook a reader. So first thing that you want to think of is that you are teasing them. You are really teasing them into picking this book up. Now, usually people are going to know what genre the book is in. So if they pick up Harry Potter, they know it’s a YA fantasy. If they pick up… I mean, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is technically fantasy. I think it got put in women’s fiction quite a bit. It was also book club book. That’s not technically a genre, but that’s what some people categorize books as now. So you usually know what should be inside there. But let’s go with Outlander. One thing that you want to keep in mind as you’re writing your book blurb or about to write your book blurb is the genre. So you need to know what you need to tell people. If it is a fantasy with dragons, people are going to want to know that it’s a dragon fantasy because that is how you’re going to get the ideal reader to pick it up. So for women’s fiction, you’re going to want to lean into the emotion and all that. For historical fiction, you’re going to want to lean into the history. But let’s read Outlander as well. This is also a very short blurb. And technically, this would be a historical fantasy. It’s time traveling, right? So I guess it would also hit the book club. It’s interesting how things that become so famous, we don’t really put into certain categories anymore. But it’s definitely historical fiction. There’s a lot of history in there, that is true. It’s also a fantasy. It’s also a romance. So historical romance. “The year is 1945.” So we’re talking outline of the first book. “Claire Randell, a former combat nurse, is just back from the war and reunited with her husband on a second honeymoon when she walks through a standing stone in one of the ancient circles that dot the British Isles.” So there you go. She summed up the first 10 chapters into one, like two sentences. “Suddenly, she is a Sassenash, an outlander in a Scotland torn by war and raiding border clans in the year of our Lord, 1743.” Imagine, oh, my gosh. “Hurlded back in time by forces, she cannot understand, Claire is catapulted into the intrigues of lairds and spies that may threaten her life and shatter her heart. For here, James Fraser, a gallant young Scots warrior, shows her a love so absolute that Claire becomes a woman torn between fidelity and desire and between two vastly different men in two irreconcilable lives.” Okay, have you read Outlander? Because it doesn’t talk about how her husband’s great, great, great, great ancestor is there and how he looks like her husband, which is real creepy. And it doesn’t talk too much about the clan and how she’s trying to fit in with them and how she’s trying to learn the rules. And it doesn’t get into hardly anything. It really focuses on Claire and this inner struggle that she has, the overall inner struggle. So the intrigues, yes, there are spies, but more than anything, she really becomes torn between a young Scot warrior and the love that he’s willing to give her and possibly going home. We do end with between two vastly different men. So she is still married in 1945. So really focuses on her inner struggle. And interestingly enough, even though it is a historical romance, the book blurb doesn’t go into James Fraser’s point of view, which is interesting because these days, a lot of the modern romances will have a two point of view book blurb. So yes, you want to have this tease, right? That is a big tease. There is so much left out from this blurb. So when you’re looking at writing your book blurb, and I had to write mine like 1,500 times. I mean, that is a slight exaggeration, and I had to constantly be telling myself, I want to tease, I want to only put a little bit in there.
Kat
So we’re talking about the tease, and what we’re really talking about is the tease of the main character. Yes, there are other characters in the book, most likely, but what you want to do is only talk pretty much about what’s happening to the main character. You don’t really want to add too many characters in there because you have such a short space that you can start confusing the reader. With Harry Potter, it talks about Ron and Hermione way at the end, and that’s probably because it’s already the fourth book. Let’s see, with Meet Eleanor Elephant, the book blurb only mentions two people. So it says, “she struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life, where weekends mostly consist of frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with mommy.” Okay, there’s two. But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling IT guy from her office whose big heart will ultimately help Eleanor find a way to repair her own profoundly damaged one. So I didn’t see the mummy before, but pretty much you know that Eleanor and Raymond are going to be main characters, right? Now, have you read this book? Because from this, you almost get the idea that she’s like a mom’s girl. And she’s best friends with her mom, which couldn’t be further from the truth, right? So we’re really teasing it. And I don’t want to say that it’s okay that you give readers the wrong idea because that’s not what you’re trying to do. But you’re trying to not tell them everything. So we do know that her heart is profoundly damaged, but we’re not sure who damaged Eleanor the Elephant’s heart. I think I, like many people, probably assumed it was a man, but it’s not. So I don’t want to give too much away if you haven’t read hers, but you just won’t want to give them enough to pick it up.
Kat
So a big thing that you can also do that is becoming more and more popular is to have a hook or a tag line. This is really popular in romance books. You know how the movie posters have that one little hook thing that will tell you what the movie is about? You can do that in which you want to tell the reader right at the top what this book is about. And sometimes that is enough. Sometimes you can say dragons, romance, what more could a girl want? Something like that, right? But taglines can be pretty popular, especially in the romance section. So if we go to Happy Place, this is just something on the top of the Amazon charts. It says, “A couple who broke up months ago pretend to still be together for their annual long weekend vacation with their best friends in this glittering and wise new novel.” That’s a bit of a long tagline, but you could have the tagline being, “A couple who broke up months ago pretend to still be together for their annual weeklong vacation.” You can see right away that’s going to probably be an issue. So if you have a tagline, if you can figure out something that will already hook the reader, then do that. This is also a big thing in the thriller mystery world, like Death at Willbough, though, the hook is, “Would you risk your life to find a killer? Would you?” I don’t know. I’m going to have to read that book. So remember, it’s a tease, and you can start with a hook or a tagline. That’s not the beginning of the first chapter. This is just a separate tagline.
Kat
And then you really want to usually appeal to the emotion of the reader and what the ideal reader is going to like. Just like we talked about, Harry Potter is written more for YA. If you are writing a dark, gritty thriller, you’re going to want to use the appropriate words, dark and dangerous and thrilling and mystery baffling. Can they survive? Will they get there? Have these different questions there. A couple of years ago, the questions were a big way to write your book blurb. I don’t see them as much now, but I think it’s still a possibility to put questions in there as a way to entice or to bring in the reader. You also want to use very strong words. We can get really wordy when we start talking about what our book is about, which is interesting. We really want to bring in all of these different elements and long sentences. It’s almost like we don’t want to take a breath in case the reader interrupts us. So let’s just look back at Eleanor Elephant, so she struggles with appropriate social skills. She has a carefully timetabled life. Those three words right there really give you a sense of she’s very organized with every meeting in place and has a schedule for all. No, she has a carefully timetabled life. We know that she is probably obsessed about having her life very, very organized. And then she meets Raymond, who is described as the bumbling IT guy. Bumbling brings up a very strong image of who this Raymond might be. And then, of course, it ends with her profoundly damaged heart. Those are really good, strong words. This is probably 100 words as a book blurb. If we look at the Light on Farallon Island, we get really strong words like treacherous secrets, mysterious man who seems to recognize her name, embeds herself in the island’s community. Okay, so that embeds yourself in the island community is much more concise and stronger than she joins the club and seeks to volunteer and does all this, no, she’s embedded in the community. So you see how we might want to go into the details of how she embedded herself, as the writer. But really, what we want to do is just bring that down to as few words as possible. And then the other words in this book blurb are deadly cliffs, shark infested waters, disorienting fogs. We might need to read this book. In Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, we have the Faustian bargain. So right away, we know what the Faustian bargain is, right? You exchange your soul. The curse to be forgotten by everyone she meets, right? The extraordinary life of dazzling adventures played across centuries and continents. And then everything changes. And so there aren’t as many strong words here, but here we have the, she meets a young man in a hidden bookstore. So already we get the idea that perhaps the young man she meets is not really out there to be met. He’s hidden away. So it gives that connotation there. Claire Randall, she’s a former combat nurse, from World War II, 1945. So we assume she’s been doing something. She’s reunited with her husband on his second honeymoon. We understand right away what that is. They’re not going to get reacquainted with each other, which they are, but we’re not saying that. They’re going back. He’s also wants to go and study his family history and all this. No, second honeymoon. That’s what we’re doing. Those are strong words. We know what’s happening here. Now, then we use, Claire is catapulted into the intrigues of lords and spies. That may threaten her life and shatter her heart, very strong there. She is torn between fidelity and desire. See how we’re using these very strong words to not only describe the emotion, but to really to bring in concisely what is happening in the book. Now, I keep saying concisely because the general rule for a book blurb is 150 words. I didn’t want to say that right out because I know some people will just have a heart attack when I say that. It’s really nothing, 150 words is really short. And so that’s why I keep trying to say concise, concise, and bring it down.
Kat
So there are tons of articles out there and blog articles. There’s a great course by Stacy Juba that I actually bought. It’s nine dollars. She really brings it together and goes through pretty easy steps. And I have to say she made it more or less painless. I mean, not really painless because I still hate writing book blurbs, but it made a lot of sense. One of the things that she says, and I highly recommend her course, I’ll have the link in the show notes, to just go and read a lot of book blurbs. You just need to get that idea. It’s like anything that we do that we immerse ourselves in, we’re more easily able to do that thing right away. So the more you dance, the better you’re going to become. The more you read these book blurbs, and the more you write the book blurbs, the better you’re going to become. But you can take them and you can do this at home with Goodreads or with Amazon. Maybe even print a couple out and highlight these really strong words or these very concise little tidbits or just three, four words that are really giving you a strong idea of what’s happening. Now, I would look into book blurbs of books you’ve already read so that you can really get an idea of what actually happened in the book versus what they tell you on the back of the book. It doesn’t mean that you can’t read other book blurbs. Definitely go out there and read them as well. But I think that that will give you an idea of how much information you got at the beginning versus how much information you got once you read the book.
Kat
And then the last thing I have to say, which people might not want to hear is you’re probably going to have to write your book blurb several times. But I don’t want you to write your book blurb by yourself. What really helps in the book blurb writing world is feedback. And because it’s only 100 to 150 words, it’s pretty easy to get some feedback from people. Now, definitely you want feedback from people in the writing world, people who can help you make things more concise and bring sentences together. But you also want your book blurb read by readers in which you ask them, is this enticing? Is this exciting enough for you? Would you want to read this book? What questions do you have once you read this blurb? Because you actually want the reader to have questions because you want them to want so much to answer that question that they read the book. So it is good to get both feedback from writers and from readers on that. And just take everything, of course, with a grain of salt. And don’t trick your readers, but definitely tease your readers because that is what you are trying to do with a book blurb.
Kat
All right, so this was a really short episode. I know I’m just trying to get you encouraged to write a book blurb, but the whole reason I want to do this as well is even if you’re not done with your book, it’s summertime. You might not be getting as much writing done as you would hope you would get. If you have kids, especially, or if you’re just a very active person and you want to be outside, I am not getting as much writing done as I would like to get done. But a book blurb is something that you can research while you’re at the pool and the kids are busy. You can start trying to write it out or you can start highlighting strong verbs. It’s work that you can do on this side. So you can feel like you’re still working on your book and you’re going to need it. You’re going to need the book blurb. So it’s not time wasted, it’s not work wasted. So I wanted to get this to you at the beginning of the summer so that you don’t feel frustrated. Sometimes I feel frustrated in the summer that I’m not really working on the book. The book blurb you’re going to need, and you’re probably going to need it sooner than you think. So I encourage you to try to do this. If you’re not getting as much writing done, try to do work on your book blurb in the meantime, in those little pockets of time that you have. Maybe you can’t get back to your main characters and get back in your head, but you can work on the book blurb. So I also encourage you to check out Stacy Juba’s course. It’s only nine dollars. It has a lot of information in there for a nine-dollar course. I’ll have the link in the show notes below. I did the whole thing. I really think it was quite good. It was step by step. And so what I did was just follow her steps as well. But just remember, it is a tease, not a summary. It’s pretty short and you are using very strong words and you’re appealing to the reader’s emotion.
Kat
All right, that’s it for this week. Of course, if you can, please share this podcast with any other writer out there that you know who you think would benefit from this. We really appreciate it. If you’re listening on the podcast, please subscribe to the app that you listen to it on. Give us a review if you are so inclined, it would help us out. If you’re on YouTube, please subscribe there as well and share it with everyone that you think would like this. We’ll be back with another short episode next week, and then we’ll have Jeff Elkins a couple of weeks from now. So keep listening. Have a wonderful summer.