Blurb Writing

Time to talk about blurb and promotional writing.

After your work is accepted and the editorial summaries considered, a publisher, (his or her) editor and sales force decide where in their monthly sales lists the book will fit and approximately how many copies will sell. You may be shocked to learn (as a beginning writer only one person in a publishing house reads your book.) However, this in most cases, it’s true. There is just no budget or time to have more people read through and review the work.

So now, one bright, sunny morning, three or four months after the last time the editor read your book, there is a scheduled meeting with sales and cover design and your book is up on the docket as one they will discuss. But only the editor has read the book, so it’s the editor’s job to write the sales blurb and back cover copy and some of the catalog copy. And normally they do it in a rush to make the meeting, from memory of the book they read months before.

I kid you not.

They might on rare occasion glance back at the manuscript, reread at any promotional material the author sent in, and scan their notes. Then in a blinding snap of brilliance he or she writes, to the best of their ability the blurb before that morning’s deadline. Editors write cover copy and blurb copy. Why you might ask? The good members of the sales force are not writers and they haven’t read the book. They may have only read the editor’s summary of the book and maybe a first chapter. In today tough competitive publishing market there is not enough time or money in any line of books have a dedicated ad-copy writer. So in most houses, and for most book lines, the task falls to the editors.

And more times than not they do the writing mostly from memory of a book they read months before, usually going directly to the plot and often turning-point scenes that give away too much, because that’s what they remember. That’s one of the many reasons writers need to learn how to write good cover copy and back cover blurbs that will sell. And use tag lines, especially when you have a good one.

A good tag line is one like this from Lee Hoffman’s Caves of Karst. ‘Griffin was a breather, he was better off dead.’ That, along with the 60's cover art was enough to make a youthful Science Fiction reader (me) to buy the book,

And make sure the editors have what you wrote in case they wanted to use it. Most editors have zero issue accepting help on this from their authors, if their authors know how to write blurbs.

Sadly, most authors do not. Most authors selling to traditional publishing wouldn’t know a good blurb that would help sell their book if their life depended on it. And that’s the expectations of editors for their authors as well. Editors are always stunned and happily surprised when a writer helps them with quality ad copy. So the editors write the blurbs and back cover copy, usually at the last minute, often from memory of a book read long before.

Indie PublishingWith Indie publishing, everything falls to the author. And just as with traditionally published authors, that’s a bad thing. Most indie authors have no sense of business and the idea that an indie author being able write a blurb that is a sales tool to help sell their own book is just pretty funny. Sad, but comical. When you flat don’t understand business and have no desire to learn, you sure can’t begin to understand sales of anything.

I must remind everyone here, selling books is a business and only a business. The care, love, blood, sweat and tears you poured into your story are worthless if the book doesn’t sell.

Indie authors tend to write blurbs that go to far into the plot details. A bad thing. And they write blurbs that are filled with passive verbs, and often focus the subject on something that makes their own books unattractive to buyers.

Why? Because we wrote the thing. Therefore, that cool scene on page fifty should be mentioned in the blurb, even though it’s about the heroin cutting off her would-be killers hand in her new snow blower. Yeah, that will sell. Maybe to five people. But most indie author are in love with a special scene and that scene winds up in the blurb.

When the book doesn’t sell he or shew lowers the price to 99 cents. Trust me, a book with a bad blurb on it sells no better at 99 cents than it did at $7.95.

The lessons for blurb writing are far to detailed to put into this blog, try the links below.

http://www.bookproposalwriting.com/bookproposal/016-sample-book-blurbs.php

http://leslielsanders.hubpages.com/hub/Tips-on-Writing-an-Engaging-Book-Blurb

http://marilynnbyerly.com/blurb.html

Summary Traditional publishing writing ad copy and blurbs is bad at best for most first novelists and genre novels. It gets better, as most things do in traditional publishing, when the advance gets higher. Still for most writers, only luck can get you a good blurb.

However, on the indie side blurb writing sucks worse. In traditional at least there is a professional editor who has written a lot of blurbs writing the ad copy. And a sales force to say no if the copy is good or bad. In indie publishing, most writers spend little or no attention to writing a blurb. And don’t know how to do it well if they did pay attention.

Even though it is the third step in the selling process that a buyer goes through to buy a book, indie publishers ignore the ramifications of writing a bad blurb. They give the process only a moment’s thought, usually tossing off a blurb in a rush on the fly because writing it seems like a chore and they don’t want to get their hands dirty.

And they wonder why their books don’t sell. Some writers can’t even see a passive verb. If you have no idea what I am talking about when I say active language and sales copy, go watch a short video called "Five Guys in a Limo" on YouTube. Pay close attention you will not find one passive verb in the entire thing.

The skill can be learned with some focus and practice and help. If you learn it, you can help your editor in your traditional publishing company and you can help your indie books sell more copies. There are numerous site in the Internet you can refer to. I have included three but there are more. Invest the time and you’ll develop a useful skill you can pass on.

Enjoy, practice and have fun.

RRDraude