Book Blurb Hell

I may have been better off when I didn't know the rules for writing a book blurb. All I really knew in the past was that the blurb needs to be written in the present tense and that you don't include spoilers (well, duh). When I say I was better off, I mean psychically, not sales-wise. 

Sure, I tried to be compelling, but looking back, my blurbs read more like, "fact, fact, fact, question". Mabel is living a lonely life in a one-bedroom apartment when her dog runs away. As she searches for him, she encounters Frank, who invites her to share a cup of coffee with him. Will Mabel find romance at last? Did her dog adopt a new family?

I'm not saying this is why my books haven't sold (no one wants novellas), but it sure didn't help. 

All the blurb advice I ever found was basically the same: premise, conflict, stakes. That told me what to include, but not how to write it. I also made the mistake of perusing the Amazon blurbs for best sellers. I found them to be inordinately long-- I mean sometimes half a page long--and thus filled with far too much detail, but they were best sellers, right? It wasn't until I found a few of Jessie Cunniffe's articles and viewing her podcast appearances that I learned just how poorly trade-published book blurbs are written. And I'd been using them as a guide!

Cunniffe is firm that a book blurb should be around 150 words, not to exceed 180. There's a very practical reason for that: that length fits neatly on the book's Amazon product page without requiring a potential reader to click, "Read More". (Most people won't do that.) 

When I tried incorporating Jessie's tips into the blurb for Running From Herself, I managed to hit the word count target after lots of pruning, but that was only one element. I won't list all the elements here, but you can read about them in this post. I believe my primary issue has always been what to include in my blurb and what not to (meaning, "is this part boring?"). I know with What We Conceal and Once in a Blue Moon, I went too far overboard with detail, and I still haven't tackled revising those. On the opposite end, with, for example, Shadow Song, detail was almost non-existent. That sweet spot is a very difficult target to hit!

The tendency with new authors, especially, is to go on and on and to essentially name check every freakin' character. I've seen both fantasy and sci fi blurbs that describe the world, complete with its unpronounceable place names, in paragraph after paragraph. Dude, no one's read your story yet! They don't care!

And now I'm trying to compose a blurb for my anthology. Instead of describing one story, I've got four to deal with. I considered not even delving into the stories at all, and instead going with the book's overall theme, but how bland and uninteresting would that be? How much can one say about "home"? And why would anyone want to read it? Is the book about remodeling? Buying a home? Yet, summarizing four stories would eat up a shit-ton of words. 

I could publish Book 1 today. The cover is done, the formatting is done, I've brainstormed at least a few keywords. But that damn blurb is tripping me up. As the draft of it stands right now, to me, it reads as too sickeningly cloying or sickeningly philosophic: "What is home? Is it...blah blah blah or blah blah blah blah?" And the ironic part is that none of these stories were written with the theme of finding home. (They weren't written with any particular theme.) But that's what I concluded ties them together.

I have to keep reminding myself that I'm not publishing this anthology with the expectation of selling any copies. It's for me--to have a physical copy of my work. But that physical copy will have a back cover blurb, too, so I'm going to be stuck with whatever I manage to eke out.

I don't want to just pull the trigger and publish without thinking the whole thing through. My tendency would be to do that, but tendencies have not served me well in the past. If time permits, I'll stare hopelessly at my first draft some more today. It's well past summer, but lightning could strike. It could happen.

If it does, you'll be the first to know.