If you are like me, one of the hardest things you can do is to create a compelling blurb for your book, or marketing copy for a manuscript that you're writing and proposing.
It's true that I know the value of my book, but it is also true that I know much more, so much more that it can be hard for me to distill a simple explanation. I can try for hours, even days to write a blurb, and it's likely to be bland, or worse yet confusing. The problem is that if the blurb is bad, many people will never look at the book. I've developed a solution. It works for me; perhaps it will work well for you too. Here are the steps.
1. Determine your book's dominant genre. This is not always simple for me, particularly if I am in the planning stages. It's possible that my manuscript may morph. I started out writing a book as a middle-grade fiction book, but it morphed into into a book that is structured along the lines of best selling thriller.
2. Determine the premise of the book. Each book can have only one premise (what every page, every paragraph, needs to foster), but you can have a number of books in a series that all contribute to an overall premise. The premise for the first of three novels in my science fiction fantasy series is "Evil cannot be destroyed but can be contained." The collective premise of the series of three books is, "For humanity to succeed as a species we must learn to live in harmony with the universe."
3. Find a best seller that is in the gendre you have selected that is consistent with the premise of your book. The genre that I am emulating is a thriller.
4. Locate a blurb of the book that resonates for you. An easy way to do this is read the jacket flaps of any successful book in the gendre you are using, or visit a library web site, look up the book, and then read the blurb that they display to patrons. As an example, I selected a blurb written about a best seller, which appeared in Publisher's Weekly.
5. Adapt that blurb to your book. -I do not want to copy the blurb and fill in my book's name. I want to emulate the style of that blurb.
The reason this system works for me is simple: I am not emotionally involved in adapting a blurb written about someone else's book. I am emotionally involved with my own book. Feel free to leave comments about how this system works for you. If it's appropriate, I'll respond.
Alan H. Jordan is the author of hundreds of magazine articles, six business books, six children's audio books and The Monster on Top of the Bed, a picture book for children ages 2-7. His poetry has appeared in major poetry magazines such as Mobius, the Poetry Magazine. Visit his blog to get many tips on writing and the marketing of writing.
Visit http://harmony123.com/ to register for free downloads of The End of All Times, and read the blurb that Mr. Jordan's created by adapting the Publisher's Weekly review of Dan Brown's New York Times Best Seller, The Da Vinci Code.
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