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Quick Link: How to Write a (Romance) Blurb by Rosalind James

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Quick links, bringing you great articles on writing from all over the web.

Your book blurb is one of the best tools you have in marketing your book. You have gotten the potential reader interested enough to come look a little more at your title. This is where you can make a big impact on sales. While Rosalind James is writing specifically about Romance blurbs, the tips she provides at Romance University works for everyone. Also, as someone that prepares an ebook newsletter please please please start your blurb with a two to three sentence paragraph the captures the essence of your book. Then go deeper. Not only are you helping people like me who want to present your book in the best light possible, but you also give a good description for people who like your story to tell their friends. It puts you in control of your marketing message!

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How to Write a (Romance) Blurb by Rosalind James

by Rosalind James

Welcome Rosalind James in her first blog post for RU – and it’s a doozy! =)

As some folks know, I spent my misguided youth—all right, all right, my misguided middle age—as a copywriter. Which means that writing blurbs for my books was a piece of cake, right?

Wrong. I had to learn how to do it, because writing one type of copy isn’t the same as writing another. But maybe it was a little easier and less scary to learn. So, OK, here are my tips for Writing Your Kickass Romance Blurb.

Look at other blurbs. (You thought this was going to be some technical post, huh?) I learned to do it by going to the library and pulling down books in my genre from the paperback rack. Somehow, it was much easier to spot trends and pick out blurbs I liked from physical books. I read and took notes for an hour. I noticed what I hated as well as what I liked. Which blurbs made ME want to read the book? Because I write the kinds of books that I like to read. After I did my research, I came home, and . . .

Read the full post on Romance University

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If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.

Do's And Don'ts On Writing A Book Blurb

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This post by Nicholas C. Rossis originally appeared on his site on 5/2/15.

The inspiration for this post came from a little gem I found on the Passive Guy’s Newsletter (if you aren’t already a subscriber, what are you waiting for? It’s free!). After some heavy editing, it ended up as this post.

The original post came from the Self Publishing Review, if you wish to see it in its entirety.

 

Writing a Book Blurb
By far, the weakest part of many self-published books is the synopsis*. Writing a decent blurb is an art form totally separate from writing a book.

Authors, myself included, often feel this is their least favorite part of the process. It can make you feel icky writing superlatives about your own book. At the same time, too many superlatives can literally be icky (“A work of genius” comes to mind). A good blurb needs to strike a balance between being informative, but not too informative, salesy, but not too salesy, while somehow seducing a stranger into spending money. It’s difficult, to say the least.

That said, there are some very common errors that show up time and again, and are pretty easy to change.

 

Read the full post on The Power of Six.

 

Beating the Blurb Blues – Part One

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This post by Kat Sheridan originally appeared as a guest post on Sia Mckye Over Coffee on 1/14/15.

Last week Sia wrote an article on the trials and hair-tearing frustration of writing blurbs and pitches.

Since I have a business writing blurbs/cover copy, I offered to share some quick tips to make it less frustrating.

Your blurb is your most powerful tool for enticing readers to buy your book. All the good reviews or social media shouting isn’t going to work if a reader doesn’t get excited about the book’s content. You want to lure the reader in, hook them with an intriguing setup, and land the sale by leaving questions open that can only be answered by buying the book.

First, some terminology:

Tagline/Logline: This is the quick summary on the front cover that serves as a hook. It’s usually no more than twelve words, and is best at around six words.

Pitch: Also known as the “elevator pitch” because it needs to be short enough that you can recite it to an agent/editor in the duration of an elevator ride. Aim for no more than about two or three sentences and be able to recite it without blinking. My all time favorite pitch was from Judi Fennell pitching the romance In Over Her Head: “He’s a merman and she’s afraid of the water.” Fewer than ten words. She got the contract.

 

Read the full post, which includes a simple formula for writing a fiction blurb, on Sia Mckye Over Coffee.

 

Is Your Amazon 'Look Inside' Preview All In Italics?

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This post by Kimberly Hitchens originally appeared on Booknook.biz on 1/18/14.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, I received a panicked email from a long-time editing acquaintance of mine. Her award-winning book needed some updates, so, being über-competent in making her own ebooks, she made the changes and uploaded the book. She checked back a few hours later, and it was one of those, “good news, bad news” moments. The good news? The LITB (Look Inside The Book) had updated, almost immediately. The bad news?

Holy Typography, Batman! Her entire Look Inside The Book was in italics.

What happened? She asked me if I could very quickly fix the book, because she had recently received a prestigious award, and sales were brisk. She had had such a shock about the “all italics” that she’d taken the book off sale.

Now, I would love to say that I’m a genius, but the truth was the same thing had recently happened to another client of mine, who had not updated her book, a mobi file that she got from us. So: what the heck had happened?

Both author-publishers had created their own nightmares, through sheer inadvertence. Both had read recent blog posts or “how-to” information on how to use HTML in their book descriptions in order to draw more attention to their books. They used header tags, bold, italic; all the things that any diligent publisher would do. But they had made one mistake.

 

Click here to read the full post on Booknook.biz.