Or, How I Learned to Stop Fretting and Just Get It Done

(This post originally appeared on https://blog.shelschneider.gay/2024/12/26/how-to-write-blurbs/)

Let’s get this out of the way. Blurbs are anathema to most writers. Let’s explore why that is.

You’re a writer. You’ve just spent weeks or months or years of your life writing The Book. It doesn’t matter if it’s your first, your tenth, or your fortieth. It still represents a huge personal investment of time and energy. It’s where your focus has been all that time. You’ve written and rewritten, edited and revised, proofread and formatted. You are Ready To Sell!

All you have to do is take your baby, upon whom you have nurtured many hours of sweat, tears, and possibly blood (hey, I don’t know what your writing space is like!), and reduce it down to a single paragraph or two. That’s the equivalent of having a catered twelve-course meal and then having to tell someone about it in thirty seconds before their train comes and you never seen them again. Is it any wonder writers rail against the very idea of How to write blurbs? We are writers; we write. We don’t summarize. That’s the job of people who create syllabuses (syllabi? syllabeesees?), or Cliff’s Notes. It’s a job for left-brains, not for we creative wizards! If you want to know what the story’s about, y’all better buy it and start reading. Our words should sell themselves. They should be Good Enough.

Sadly, no, the art of marketing is a complex balance of factors, and far smarter folks than me have written a lot more words about it. In my experience, it boils down to just a few factors, though, and I’ll lay those out here for you. There are two types of potential readers. The first–the ones we love–are those who are looking specifically for our work. The fact that it exists is good enough for them, and they will gleefully snap up anything we deign to release for publication. As much as we crave those kinds of readers, we have to earn them, and that brings me to the second type of potential reader: the skeptic. Skeptics are readers who don’t know that they want to read your book yet, and it really boils down to three steps. I’m going to mostly talk about the middle one.

Steps of the Sale

1. The cover. You gotta have a good cover. A good cover is what gets the skeptic to pick up your book, or to click on the link. From there, they all go to…

2. The blurb. Whether it’s on the back of the book or right below the cover on the website, this is what will either create further interest from the skeptic or turn them off altogether. The entire purpose of the blurb is to either get the skeptic to buy the book outright (they usually won’t), or to go to the final step…

3. The text. Some skeptics will read the first page. Some will read the sample provided on various websites. Some psychotics will open the book to a random page in the middle and read that. Regardless, if you’ve gotten a skeptic this far, you’ve got a better than even chance of them deciding to buy it. You gotta have good text inside. That’s for another post. But let’s go back and talk about that blurb, and figure out what makes a good one.

How to write blurbs

At its simplest, what is a story? It’s a conflict, and resolution of said conflict. This is how I approach writing my own blurbs:

CHARACTER must GOAL, but ANTAGONIST is working against them. If they succeed, VICTORY CONDITION. But if they fail, CONSEQUENCE.

That’s it. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

Oh, you want more? Okay. You know all those B and C plots and characters you are desperately in love with? Sorry, but you should leave them out of your blurb. If you get the skeptic to buy the book, they will meet them in due course. I can’t tell you how many books I have not bought because the blurb was so long and convoluted that I had no idea what the story was actually about. Obviously, you don’t want to do that either.

Take the above template and modify it to fit your own story. You might have more than one main character. Great, mention two of them. If you have more than two, leave ’em by the side of the road to catch the next bus. Keep it SIMPLE. All characters have goals. Your story is about them trying to achieve their goals. Tell the reader what it is. This is what your story is about. I’m going to repeat that, but in bold. This is what your story is about. If you can rattle off 3 or 4 basic sentences when someone asks “Hey, what’s your story about?” you will be well ahead of the game. All books have (or should have) conflict in them, and that conflict is driven by the antagonist working against your main characters. The antagonist doesn’t have to be a person. It could be a situation. It could be nature. It could even be a bear (I recommend giving your characters sharp sticks in that case). Your character must overcome the antagonist to achieve their goal. If you already have all those figured out, congratulations! You have half your blurb written and you didn’t even realize it!

The other half of the blurb is raising the stakes. Sure, we know what the character wants, and that the antagonist is working against them. But what happens if the character succeeds? More interestingly, what happens if they fail? Again, these are simple concepts that you should be able to consolidate to a couple of sentences.

CHARACTER must GOAL, but ANTAGONIST is working against them. If they succeed, VICTORY CONDITION. But if they fail, CONSEQUENCE.

Don’t be afraid of writing blurbs. It’s not a synopsis. It’s not a book report. It’s a marketing hook, pure and simple. There’s a reason commercials are short. Your blurb is a commercial for your story. It’s to convince the skeptic to start reading. Nothing more.

Finally, let me put my money where my mouth is. This is the cover and blurb for my upcoming release, Rain Must Fall. I don’t have a release date finalized yet, but it will probably be in late February. Look at the blurb and see how I constructed it using the basic template above.

You can check out anytime you like,

But you can never leave.

Super-powered αssαssin Jes is done. After spending years performing jobs for the shadowy organization called The Source, he’s decided to stop. But with a Seattle PD detective hot on his trail, The Source can’t risk him turning state’s evidence against them.

In a world of highly damaged people, what’s one less? Into each life, some rain must fall. This may well be Jes’ last storm.

Analysis:

Zeroth sentence: Just a quote from the Eagles’ “Hotel California” that seemed to fit the blurb.

First sentence: CHARACTER

Second sentence: GOAL

Third sentence: CONSEQUENCE

Fourth, fifth, and sixth sentences: Wait a minute…where’s the VICTORY CONDITION, Ian? You can’t tell us the rules for how to write blurbs, and then break them!

Actually, yes, I totally can. That’s the point. This is not gospel. It’s a guideline. Adapt it to your own story, like I did to mine. Good luck, and keep writing!