Blurbing;

brynwrites:

How to relay a story with minimal headache* 

*Minimal headache is still some headache. You’re trying to summarize something that needs thousands of words to properly convey. It’s not going to be easy.

Blurbs are an absolute necessity for marketing your book, and the sooner you have a good one, the easier it is to get people interested in your work. Unless you’re writing a short story, you’ll never be able to include all the interesting parts of your book into a single blurb. That’s okay. The point of the blurb is to pick out the key focus of the story as a whole, and relay that in the most interesting way possible.

When writing blurbs, it’s good to end up with one short/mini blurb, or logline, which should be a single sentence, and one longer blurb which should be a few paragraphs. (Note that a synopsis for a query letter is quite different from a blurb. There are links at the bottom of the post which will help you with a query-worthy synopsis.) 

Tips and tricks:

Know what your story is about. No brainer, right? Keep in mind that this isn’t the same as having a summary or outline. You want to know the focus of your story, the thing that remains when you strip everything else away.

Use a formulaic starting point. A good formula to start with looks something like this: “When [INCITING INCIDENT OCCURS], a [SPECIFIC PROTAGONIST] must [OBJECTIVE], or else [STAKES].” Just remember this isn’t a cheat. You’ll still need to rework the resulting sentence.

Start small and expand, or start large and cut out. Figure out a solid short blurb and then turn every key aspect (the protagonist, the inciting event, the objective, and the stakes) into a sentence or two of it’s own, or write the full blurb first and cut away words until you have a single sentence. 

Write many versions. Without any rereading, try speed writing 25 short blurbs and 5 long blurbs. Come back when you’re done and pick out the points you feel worked the best and were most true to your story.

Get feedback. Throw your favorite few blurbs at people you trust who are also part of your target audience. Which ones create the most interested in the story itself?

Good explanations on how to write loglines, blurbs, and synopsis, from non-tumblr websites who’s links shouldn’t die:

On short blurbs (loglines)- | One | Two | Three | Four |
On long (back of book) blurbs – | One | Two | Three | Four |
On query-worthy synopsis- | One | Two | Three |

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Edit from 2/23/18:

Since I just spent some time reading a bunch of sci fi and fantasy blurbs in preparation for writing Pearl’s, I thought I might update this.

There is no right way to write a blurb. Some are a single paragraph, some are a full page. Some have quotes from the book, some directly mention the author, some focus just on the plot or dedicate most of their space to the worldbuilding. It doesn’t matter what your blurb looks like as long as it sounds good and gets people interested in your book!

A nice, simple format I’ve found to work really well for Speculative Fiction looks something like this:

Part one

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The world. Give a strong sense of your worldbuilding and the set up for any political, magical, or technological building blocks important to your plot. This can double as a protagonist (or antagonist!) introduction, or you can leave that for the second paragraph, depending on what flows best.

Part two

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The inciting event. What happens to get the story rolling? This should be something within your first few chapters, which sets your protagonist on their path. (If it’s not, you may have some structural edits to do for your novel.) 

Part three

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The hook. Leave the reader questioning what’s to come! Focus on the disaster the plot is heading for, or point out a game changer or upcoming obstacle.

As mentioned above, this is certainly not the only way to write blurbs. Some novels downright can’t follow this exact structure for one reason or another. Most don’t need to. But it’s still a nice, fairly headache-less exercise to try out when working on a blurb, and it might give you something worthwhile once you’re finished.