Welcome, friends and fans! Today I wanted to speak with you about creating the back cover blurb for your potential novel, novella, short story, etc…Your current fully edited WIP, (work-in progress, just in case some of you don’t know. 😉 is all but ready to be e-mailed to your literary agent or publisher, and all that remains, is the three to four paragraphs describing your 400 page masterpiece. Now, some authors stress out thinking about this synopsis of sorts, but I’m here to tell you, “Take a few deep breaths and a nice beverage…and relax.” Remember, you just finished a beautiful story. Time to complete the process and entice the readers (like you did the whole time you were creating.)
The first key is develop a “hook”, to draw people to your work. The “hook” is going to be similar to the one you created when sending out those fifty something query letters. (Maybe more like 100…just saying.) The first several words need to be your best. (just my opinion.) Example:for my debut novel, Lucifer’s Calling, the first sentence draws my readers in. “A paralyzing prescription is recipe for creating one man’s art.” Now, the key words that leap off the page are: paralyzing, prescription, and recipe. Does that make sense to most of you so far? (Duh, a rhetorical question…indeed.) Words are powerful, and using them in a manner which makes people really think, will reward both you and your audience. Okay, so there is your juicy tidbit dangling in front of potential readers. They want to know!.
Now, in the last few weeks, I just released the first installment of my two-part novella, Cupid’s Kill. I followed the same pattern on this work, as I did from my debut release years ago. The goal of your blurb/mini synopsis is to immediately grab the attention of your readers or others, who may be scrolling through Amazon or B&N looking for one of their favorite authors. All of a sudden, they happen to see a book cover (Hopefully you have an appealing one.) along the bottom of the screen that catches their eye. Next, they happen to click on it and read the blurb/synopsis. You may receive unexpected readers because of what that first blurb says. So it’s important for us to have key words in our blurb/synopsis which will propel your opportunity for even more sales. Let’s try a little experiment…if you writers out there would like to throw your opening sentence of your blurb at us, we will put them on next week’s blog and share them with our fans. The audience can tell us, what they like and what draws them to each blurb, or what doesn’t. (We don’t want that to happen.) Let’s have some fun with this, and hopefully we can help each other to make the blurb creation process for our works something we all can enjoy. Enough said…until next week, remember…death is only a click away!
Jeffrey Martin's Novels 