When you are self-publishing your book, one of the most important things to get right is the blurb – yet this is also one of the hardest to do. A good blurb attracts new readers and encourages them to find out what happens in your novel, increasing your sales and, hopefully, creating loyal fans who will seek out more works by you without needing to read the blurbs!
In this blog post, we will be looking at why a blurb is so important for your book, then consider some of the best ways of writing one. We will think about how to start it and some top tips for making it hook readers in.
Why is Your Blurb Important?
Essentially, your book’s blurb is acting as a sales pitch to potential readers. It aims to draw people in and make them want to find out more. It may not be the initial thing to catch their attention, as this will most likely be done by the title and cover design, but it should be what keeps them interested beyond that first look.
Ideally, it will make them curious enough about what happens and how the dilemmas presented are resolved that they will buy your book. More sales lead to more profits, but also to readers who enjoyed it telling others about it. In addition, more sales will give your book a better chance of being featured by a bookshop or reviewed.
Think about the books that you have read. Why did you decide to buy them? Did you read the blurb first? When we have not read anything by a particular author, we tend to go by what the cover and blurb tell us to decide if it will interest us. This is why it is so important to have a good blurb if you are publishing for the first time – you will be an unknown author without much promotion. Therefore, your book needs to be selling itself to potential buyers with its blurb when they pick it up.
On online selling platforms, your book description should be doing much the same job. It is perfectly acceptable to use the text from your blurb for this, combined with any other cover information such as quotes from readers or any awards your book has won or been nominated for.
How Should You Write Your Blurb?
Research
The first step to writing your blurb is to research what works well for other authors. Choose a small selection of best-selling books in your genre and examine all of their blurbs together. In particular, you want to be looking for the similarities at this point – what works well for all of them and draws the reader in. Consider how to apply these similarities to your blurb.
Re-read the blurbs, considering what would make you buy them. Are there particular words that catch your attention? What questions does it leave you with that make you want to find out more? Think about how to include these types of word in your blurb and how to make the reader curious about how issues presented in the blurb will be resolved.
First Draft
Now that you have some ideas in place for your blurb, you can try writing a first draft. A blurb should be fairly short – depending on your genre, they are usually around 100 to 150 words. Again, you can check this by looking at the blurbs of other books in your genre. This is why you need to spend so much time on the blurb – you only have a few words with which to entice readers, so make them count!
You will particularly need to spend a while on the very first sentence, to instantly hook readers and make them want more. Once again, look at the blurbs of other books in your genre. Some start with a question, others set the scene by describing the book’s universe and some give a place and date. Choose what works best for your book and spend a while perfecting this opening sentence.
In your blurb, you should set out the background to the story, such as location and time, as well as who your main characters are. Try to make these seem as real as possible so your readers will feel a connection to them. The more invested readers are in your world, the more likely they are to buy your book.
Be honest about what sort of story it is. Even if you think it makes your book sound more interesting to say something that doesn’t quite apply, it only means that readers will feel deceived when they actually read your book.
Rewriting
Finally, put aside your blurb for a while, then come back to it after a week or so has passed and see how it reads to you. Would you be interested in reading your book based on this? What works and what doesn’t? Use your answers to these questions to write another draft of your blurb and keep doing this until you are happy – or at least close to! Don’t spend so long rewriting it that you never use it.
Wrapping Up
I hope that this helps you to write your blurb. In my next blog post, we will be considering how having a website can help you, so come back in two weeks for that!
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