My First Stab at Revising My Blurb

I'm not a big fan of overthinking things. Overthinking leads to self-doubt and is really a circular waste of time. Because inevitably one ends up back where they started.

I studied everything I could glean from Jessie Cunniffe's (of Book Blurb Magic) blurb writing tips, which consisted of free PDF cheat sheets and random bits of advice included in her emails. The most useful to me was her blurb revision mini-class. Not because of how she revised an author's blurb, so much as her basic blurb structure. I'm the type of person who has difficulty grasping a point if I can't visualize it. So, with the video, I was able to examine her screen shots to drill down on (essentially) what goes where.

Here's how I interpreted it:

1. The hook. It should be bolded and italicized, and it needs to be a short statement or question that captures a potential buyer's attention.

2. Next is what I call the setup, or what Jessie simply calls the opening paragraph. The purpose of it is to ground the reader in a place and to introduce the main character (who she is, what she's doing, etc.) Not a bunch of flowery words; just the "who" and the "where".

3. Next the "problem". I wouldn't describe this as the inciting incident, at least not in my novel. In mine, it's more of a circumstance the MC finds herself in that's a major complication in her life. For other genres, it could well be one incident.

4. What the MC does to try to overcome the problem, or the action.

5. The roadblocks. What #4 leads to.

6. The Call to Action (CTA). I've never included a CTA in any of my blurbs, but Jessie says that people like being told what to do (she's never met me), so add something like "Click now to buy..." 

All of this, mind you, should total 150-180 words. 

This was immensely helpful to me in forcing me to focus. With past blurbs, I never found a way to explain the first quarter of the book without going on and on, and boring a potential reader to death, yet the setup has to be there. 

And there's a lot of setup: 

Leah quits the band, she takes to the road, stumbles upon the town of Chance, gets a job serving drinks at the Chance-It saloon, meets Jared, falls in love with Jared, breaks up with Jared Jared breaks up with her, the Chance-It starts to fail because Jared dissolved his band, then Leah steps up and confesses to the owner that she's a singer, and she offers to get a band together to help his bar survive. Only then does the record label offer appear. 

Does all this need to be spelled out? Well, not if it takes up all 180 words, it doesn't. It can't. 

What I struggled with is a) misleading a potential reader by framing my book as a Nashville story would only lead to disgruntlement, the last thing an author wants. and b) my nasty "guilt gene". I can't misrepresent what I'm selling. 

So, Jessie's structure really helped. I combined it all into one short paragraph and moved on to the next.

And the rest of the steps were fairly easy. 

No, it's not finished (I don't think). I need to live with it a while. But I didn't overthink it. I also tried to keep in mind what Jessie had said, that you don't write a blurb for the reader. I'm interpreting that as, the blurb has to please the writer of it. Would I take a chance on this novel after reading the blurb? Does it sound interesting to me? That's a tough one to be objective about. It would require me to develop a sudden case of amnesia and completely forget that I know the story at all. What author can do that? It's pretty impossible.

Back to the hook. The way I approached it was...research. I grabbed a couple of the story's themes, then searched for quotes that related to them. BTW, Pinterest isn't much good for anything, but it's great for quotes. You can see a whole page of them at a time. I isolated three possibles, then went with my gut. And my hook is in the form of a question. (Another tip that Jessie gives is that the opening statement or question needs to be relatable, sort of a "what would you do in this situation" premise, or an "I've experienced this" statement. Never ask something like, "Will Trudy ever find love again?", because nobody knows Trudy and they don't give a damn if she ever finds love.)

I still have the stumbling block of inserting keywords. One should never stuff their blurb with keywords, or mine would read like this:

"Leah is a female singer who's suffering an identity crisis, so she goes on an emotional journey to find her voice. Her coming of age happens when she experiences lost love and music drama. It's a story of heartbreak and healing." 

Cool! I'm buying that for sure! 

So, I'm toying with adding a couple of keywords to the CTA. Something like (but not the same as), "Click to buy Running From Herself, a story of (blah blah blah) and (blah blah blah)." This would only be for SEO purposes, of course, but SEO is really important for the algorithm.

Poverty, I find, is a huge motivator. I can't afford to pay Cunniffe $295.00 to write my blurb for me. So, I needed to get my ass brain in gear.

Once the blurb is finished to my satisfaction, I'll include it in a post. But for now, time's a wastin'. This sucker needs to be done within the next couple of days. Because I'm sick of thinking about it.