Creative Kicks - Week 4 - Blurb with Louise Mangos

You’ve written 120,000 words of your book and pared them back to around 90,000. You’ve edited and re-edited and edited again. You feel like you’ve read those words eleventy bazillion times (yes, that IS a number). You can even quote big chunks of the narrative from memory. Now you need to write a blurb. And the very thought makes you want to abandon everything and pour yourself a pint of prosecco. 

The blurb is a handful of sentences that sets the scene for your novel. If you’ve written in genre, the blurb should show something at stake for your protagonist or main characters in the narrative, whether your story is a romance, a crime, or a historical novel. The blurb often, though not always, asks a question of the reader - what would they do in a precarious situation? It should state the premise - perhaps a sentence about the dramatic opening to your story - and a hint of at least one reason your protagonist is not getting what they want. Most importantly, it has to make the reader want to dive into your work.

The blurb will appear on the back cover of the book, so it’s the second thing a potential reader will read after the title and your name. It has to be more perfect than all the words in your novel. It is not a synopsis. You must not reveal any spoilers. At this point you are giving nothing away beyond the first chapter.

The blurb is also useful as an elevator pitch. When someone asks you ‘What’s your book about?’ you need to be able to tell them without hesitation, especially if it’s an agent or a publisher. You never know where you’re going to meet these people. They are the gatekeepers of the publishing industry, and you must be ready to present them with the golden key. Assume you only have the time it takes to journey in the lift between four floors to forge your key and unlock the magic.

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Exercise:

The easiest way to write a blurb is to create a mind-map.

1. Take your main protagonist. Write their name in a bubble at the centre of your mind map.

2. In a bubble above your character, write a sentence about the rising tension to the first dramatic incident in your plot. You could also make this a question - ask the reader what they would do in your protagonist’s shoes.

3. The other bubbles around the centre should include early plot arcs or twists in the narrative.

4. Pick one, and write a sentence that hints at the jeopardy or conflict in that incident.

5. Expand on the consequence of the drama, without giving away any obvious clues.

6. What is at stake for your protagonist? State their most intrepid challenge. This should be the final line of your blurb.


As an example, here is the blurb for my debut psychological thriller Strangers on a Bridge:

To what lengths would you go to protect your family? 

When Alice Reed goes on her regular morning jog in the peaceful Swiss Alps, she doesn’t expect to save a man from suicide. But she does. And it is her first mistake.

Adamant they have an instant connection, Manfred’s charming exterior grows darker and his obsession with Alice grows stronger.

In a country far from home, where the police don’t believe her, the locals don’t trust her, and even her husband questions the truth about Manfred, Alice has nowhere to turn.

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You’ve got your blurb, something you’ve decided you can also use as your elevator pitch. And you pitched it so perfectly in that lift, you now have an agent who’s interested in representing you. Alternatively, you might have gone down the indie route and decided to self-publish. Now you need a tag line - one short sentence that will appear on the front cover of your book to deliver an essence of the tension in your story to the potential reader. Your tag line could be the last hanging sentence of one of your most tense chapters.

The tag line for Strangers on a Bridge is: ‘She should never have saved him’

This might shock the potential reader. Most of us would do anything to prevent the suicide of someone - our instinct is to pull any fellow human back from the brink. So why shouldn’t Alice have saved Manfred? She does actually think this at some point in the narrative. Your tag line should make your potential reader want to find out why.

However, I should add that if you’re lucky enough to strike a deal with a large publishing company, it’s likely you won’t have any say in the tag line chosen for the cover. There may be three or four people working on the marketing and publicity for your book, and they will come up with a selection of possible tag lines. These will be passed around the team and a shortlist drawn up. Focus groups might then have the taglines tested on them before the final one-liner is chosen. Not by you. By the publisher.

A final note on writing the blurb: Most authors only write the blurb after the manuscript has been perfected. But it helps some writers to have a vague version of the blurb when they’re plotting the chapters. I use the mind map method to plot my novels, and have adapted my own system from the Snowflake method taught by Randy Ingermanson. You may not have a final title for your novel, but it helps to create a working title, even if it’s something like ‘Woman Stalked by Man’. Around the title, forming the start of your snow crystal, you have your main characters, and from there you have key moments in your plot. This method can be used as deeply as you wish. You might want to plot each of your chapters this way, each with its own individual snowflake. Here is a link to Randy’s site for writers who might be finding it difficult to plot their novels:

https://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/snowflake-method/

I look forward to seeing all your wonderful novels on bookshop and library shelves!




Strangers on a Bridge was a finalist in the Exeter Novel Prize and long listed for the Bath Novel Award and is published by Harper Collins imprint HQDigital. Louise also writes short stories and flash fiction, which have won prizes, placed on shortlists and been read out on BBC Radio. You can visit her website www.louisemangos.com with links to more of her short fiction, or connect with her on Facebook or Twitter @LouiseMangos. Louise lives on a Swiss Alp with her Kiwi husband and two sons. When she’s not writing you can find her in her kayak on the lake in summer or on the cross-country ski loipe in winter, painting in her studio, or drinking prosecco in vast quantities when she’s trying to write blurbs for her novels.

Link to Harper Collins page: https://www.harpercollins.co.uk/9780008287948/strangers-on-a-bridge/

Amazon.com link: https://www.amazon.com/Strangers-Bridge-gripping-psychological-thriller-ebook/dp/B079KL6VSB

Amazon UK link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Strangers-Bridge-gripping-psychological-thriller-ebook/dp/B079KL6VSB

How To... Write a Killer Blurb

By JJ Marsh

Authors swear the blurb, or back cover copy, is ten times harder than writing the novel it describes. Which is understandable. You know all the nuance and detail of 100K words and cannot possibly reduce its essence to 250.
Or can you?

Having written cover description for all kinds of material - from cookbooks to crime, from erotica to executive summaries - I have a few tips.

Here’s a ten-step plan to creating an effective blurb for fiction.

Ready, Steady...

 

 

Start with bare branches. In Techniques of a Selling Writer, Dwight V. Swain offers the basic framework for a blurb. Write one sentence and one question, containing character, situation, objective, opponent, disaster. It works for every genre.

Eg: When humans begin to grow to twelve-feet tall (situation), John Storm (character) must find out why (objective). But can he defeat traitors in high places (opponent) who want to fake an extra terrestrial plot and will kill anyone in the way (disaster)?

Research I. Read the blurbs of similar books in your genre. (Yeah, I know, yours is unique, but bear with me.) If you had to describe it in the most reductive terms, would it be Anna Karenina meets Bridget Jones (as Adele Parks described her first novel to attract her agent)? Or Hotel Rwanda meets Million Dollar Baby? Choose your comparisons well. You may not use them in the blurb but they might still be useful for your elevator pitch.

Research II. Key words. Which words will help your target reader find your book? Which words do they search for? Look again at those blurbs. Make a mind map of all those vital clues. For Rise of the Golden Aura by Chanrithy Him, I had a hit list: vampire, Asia-America, romance/love, myth, supernatural, underworld, beauty pageant, queen, series. We got every single one into the final draft.

Mood, style and tone. Cover copy reflects the book within. If is wise-cracking, hard-boiled noir, so must be the blurb. I always ask clients for three chapters of their book so I can get a sense of the way they write. On reading, I make notes: ethereal and whimsical / sardonic and dry / cosy and humorous. When you begin to write the text, keep these words in front of you.

Patterns. Be aware that blurbs, just as much as covers, are part of your brand. Jane Davis is not writing a series, but readers keen to discover more of her work will appreciate the similar style across her entire canon. So I kept notes on length, format, style and phrasing to avoid repetition but enabling the maintenance of a 'Davis' tone.

... Go!

Add leaves and flowers. With all the ammunition above, take your Swain frame and start expanding. Use powerful nouns and verbs. Avoid the passive voice. Vary sentence lengths. Aim for the essence. Pack every sentence tightly and make every word earn its place. Remember the power of threes. Here's a sample extract from an upcoming novel by Luna Miller.

Gunvor may be in her sixties, her hands might be too shaky to continue performing operations and her body complains every time she works out. But her mind is as sharp as ever. She’s curious, intelligent and experienced - perfect qualities for a private detective.

As the agency’s rookie, she gets a surveillance job. A straightforward case, they said. A domestic. Suspicions of infidelity. Follow the husband.

Rewrite. Keep paragraphs short and remember how it looks online. You need some white space for ease of reading. Aim for five paragraphs and around 200 words. End each sentence and each paragraph on a high-impact word. Here's the opener to The Beauty Shop by Suzy Henderson.

England, 1942. After three years of WWII, Britain is showing the scars. Circumstance brings three people together, changing their destinies.

Sell. Tell the reader how this book will make them feel. Don’t be afraid to use an element of drama. This is your punchline. David Baddiel makes this point in Time for Bed. His character Gabriel is choosing a video. The review on the back of Beaches says, ‘And at the end you cry, goddamit, you cry real tears’. Gabriel wells up right there in Blockbusters.

Tagline. Read the blurb again and sum it up in one line. Think film posters.  
‘In space, no one can hear you scream.’ 
‘The true story of a real fake.’ 
‘She fell in love with him the day he decided to marry someone else.’
I find it helps to try them out in the voice of Morgan Freeman.
When you've got it, put it right at the top of the blurb, but check it doesn’t clash. My tagline for my own Book 2 was 'You Never Know Who's Watching'. Lovely! Until I noticed the word 'watching' in the first line. Not lovely.

Puff quote. Ideally, end your blurb with an endorsement from a well-known writer or enthusiastic reader. Choose carefully and don’t be afraid to edit out cliché. A current client has this: “What an amazing capture of unadulterated raw humanity, in all its shades of light and darkness. I read it over a few days. Couldn’t put it down. Really, really enjoyed it.” My advice was to trim. The stuff in bold is where the power lies.

Read the whole thing aloud. If you stumble, there’s a reason. Polish, rewrite and hone till it sings, then share with respected opinions.

This may sound like a lot of work, but your blurb and the cover are what sell your book.
So take your time and get it right.