Battling With Blurbs
As I may have mentioned before, I hang out in a number of writers’ groups on Facebook. I’ve learned a few things and met some interesting people, as well as being able to offer advice from time to time. A thirty-plus year career has to count for something.
Not surprisingly, certain themes and issues recur regularly. A perennial favourite is ’is X a vanity publisher?’ (Yes, Austin Macauley, to name but one, is a notorious vanity publisher, and so are legions of dubious companies which 'borrow' names like Amazon and Penguin.)
And then there are the posts lamenting the difficulty of writing a blurb.
Traditional publishers usually have someone whose job it is to come up with snappy blurbs for their books. I say 'usually' because a couple of times the smaller specialist publishers I worked with have asked me to at least suggest a blurb. For the self-publishing author it’s often a solitary struggle.
Before digging deeper into this I ought to mention that in those Facebook groups I’ve often seen people who are obviously confused about the distinction between a blurb and a synopsis. Just in case anyone here is also unclear about it, here goes:
A blurb is the short text that goes on the back cover of the paperback or appears alongside the cover image in ebook marketplaces. It’s there to give a sense of what the book is about and why a reader might pick it up. It sets up some of the tensions of the story, but one thing it really shouldn’t do is reveal how those tensions are resolved. 'Finally, Frodo and Sam arrive at Mount Doom and the Ring is consumed by the fire' is NOT what you want to see in the blurb.
A synopsis serves a different purpose. It’s not for the reading public at all, but is used when submitting to literary agents or publishers. Typically (at least in fiction) you’ll give a sample of the actual book, often the first few chapters of 5000 words, and the synopsis serves to show how the rest of the story develops. It’s a stripped-down, no-frills, summary of the plot. A typical synopsis will probably be between 500 and 100 words—and yes, it is hard to distil any reasonably complex tale down to such bare bones. Since I shifted to self-publishing, I haven’t needed to do a synopsis, which is a great relief.
But as a self-publisher, the blurb is important, and getting it right is very much my responsibility.
Here’s the final, 'official' blurb for Three Kinds of North:
A distant future. A world transformed.
Remnants of a shattered moon traverse the skies, memorials to an ancient and nearly-forgotten conflict. In an isolated northern land, society is overseen by the reclusive, all-female, Guild of Dawnsingers, which holds a monopoly on advanced learning. Life seems peaceful and well-ordered; but are the Dawnsingers as benevolent as they seem? What secrets are they hiding?
And what really lies beyond the mountains in the East?
Orphan Jerya unexpectedly finds a home in the Dawnsingers' Guild, but her new life turns sour. Soon she finds herself struggling to reconcile the exhilaration of learning with her growing doubts about the very basis of the Guild's rule. Ultimately she faces an agonising choice which could utterly change her life, and the lives of her two most trusted friends.
The grand total, including the headline, is 132 words. The blurb for The Sundering Wall is marginally shorter (127) and that for Vows and Watersheds edges down to 120 (even though the book is the longest of the three). In all cases, they went though multiple iterations and discussions with my partner and one or two others. Now I’m facing the same challenge as one of the last pieces of the jigsaw before publication of Book Four, The Skilthorn Congress, which is due on the 8th of August.
Why are blurbs so hard?
Well, here’s one possible reason. The blurb for Vows and Watersheds, as I mentioned, is 120 words. That’s almost exactly one for every thousand words in the book itself. Unless there’s an awful lot of waffle in those 120,000 words, that’s a ton of plot, emotion, and atmosphere to reduce to 0.1%.
Of course, unlike the synopsis, the blurb is not required to encapsulate the whole story, only to give a taste of it. For standalone novels and the first book in a series, the blurb also needs to give some kind of sense of key characters and of the setting. It’s all asking a lot. Perhaps you can understand why some people say, apparently in all seriousness, that it’s harder than writing the actual book.
I don’t think that’s ever true. People spend months, if not years, writing and editing their novels. Time spent on the blurb… well, it might be that 0.1% ratio again. But it feels hard. It feels like a highly concentrated dose of the more protracted struggle that went into writing the book.
And on that note, here’s Blurb 2.0 for The Skilthorn Congress. At 133 words, it’s within tolerance, but I feel there’s still a bit of work to do. If you have any thoughts or comments, feel free to share in the usual way.
New challenges and new prospects
When a young fugitive comes to Skilthorn seeking sanctuary, it’s a complication the newly-ennobled Countess Jerya could do without. She’s already managing radical changes to the great estate, and Skilthorn is about to play host to an unprecedented meeting between Dawnsingers and eminent men of the Five Principalities.
Still, she agrees to allow the runaway, Mavrys, to live and work as a slave, with strict instructions to stay out of trouble. But it’s not long before Mavrys falls foul of the predatory Prince of Sessapont.
Jerya’s oldest friend, Railu, also glimpses the prospect of a new beginning; but is Skelber all that he seems?
The future of the Known Lands is in play, but for many of the participants it’s their own lives which are thrown into disarray.
I find a synopsis difficult enough but a blurb (or an elevator pitch, or a logline for a script) is torture. Distilling something complex and nuanced into a couple of sentences without misrepresenting the whole thing often seems impossible. Best of luck with the blurb for The Skilthorn Congress.
Definitely agree that it can be a challenge. In another walk of life (scientific proposals) I've faced limits of 500 or 1000 characters including spaces to get a point across, which sometimes generates all kinds of discussions such as on whether we really need that last sentence or can drop particular words without changing the meaning!