Today, I’m working on my blurb. I made the mistake of telling my husband how intimidated I was at this prospect. You know — cooking down a whole story into some catchy hook in 250 words or less.
He said, “Just go in there and write a blurb today.”
Now he’s dead on the kitchen floor.* I don’t know exactly what happened, except maybe I now have bigger problems than blurbs. Possibly.
If you are like me and planning on writing a blurb TODAY, I do have a useful tip to pass along. Unfortunately, I can’t remember where it came from, but probably from either HM WARD or JA HUSS. It went like this:
*Most people skim the first and last paragraph of a blurb. They’re looking for the TROPES they enjoy. If they can easily identify their tropes, they’ll go back and read the whole blurb.*
Which? That’s totally what I do when I’m looking for a book to read, right? It’s almost like I’m looking for some subliminal key word to tell me if actually reading two paragraphs is worth my time.
So make sure you know what your tropes are, and put keywords indicating that trope in your blurb.
What’s a trope? Here you go.
This advice helped get me away from my navel-gazing, “How do I smoosh this complicated book down to a few paragraphs?” and into the place of, “How do I catch the attention of readers who will like this story?”
Which brings up another point I hadn’t considered when first blurbing: You want to draw in all the readers who like the kind of book you’re writing, while deflecting people who don’t like the kind of book you’re writing.
Which totally makes sense. One person’s sexy is another person’s throw-the-book-and-go-brush-your-teeth style dislike. No judgment. But a good idea to clearly tell readers what to expect so you don’t accidentally get a bunch of people loathing your book in specific, detailed reviews, amirite?
With DarkWeb, I think I’m trying to grab an audience that likes:
-Love triangles, taboo style since it’s brothers.
-Psychological thrillers
-flawed heroines/unreliable narrators
Any other bits of wisdom about blurb writing? Hit me up with knowledge!
ETA: My best guess is that I got these tips, at least in part, from JA Huss’s super interesting free marketing course, which you can find here:
*(Kidding! He magically resurrected after I screamed a couple curse words. Although it should be noted he has no further commentary on blurb writing.)