I’m putting this blog post into the archives. It’s over two years old, and I have done updated posts on blurbs with newer resources. You can check out how I wrote the blurb for one of my recent books All of Nothing, here. Please let me know if you have any questions, and I’ll be happy to point you in the right direction! 9/15/19  VR

I think I might have touched on this previously in one of my other posts at the beginning of this publishing series. Your blurb goes on the back of your paperback and is used for the “what your book is about” description at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, etc. So you want it to sound good to make your potential customer an actual reader. Blurbs kinda suck because you want to give your customer enough to draw them in and want to keep reading, but you can’t give so much away that after they are done reading it, they don’t need to read the book anymore. I can’t tell you how to write your blurb, but I’ll use this blog post to point you in the right direction.

I’d never heard of Libbie Hawker until I read this book by David Neth. David wrote that Libbie Hawker did a great vlog on how to write a blurb, and I watched her YouTube video. She makes some fantastic points, and you can watch it here (part one) and here (part two). YouTube made other suggestions, but I didn’t watch them, but you can watch them if you’d like.

When I needed help writing the blurb for 1700,  I Googled “how to write a blurb,” and I used the first article that came up. I liked the example from Girl on a Train and tried to write my blurb based on that article. You can find it here.

One thing I didn’t consider was something I read in this book by Judith Briles that said the top of your back cover is prime real estate, and you should put some kind of a question or statement on the top in really huge letters. That was a cool idea, and I might do it for my next book. The Hunger Games did it:

But then, of course, you can argue against the whole thing, as my friend Joshua did in his blog post, stating that back blurbs are for bookstores. Yes, Debbie Downer, my book probably won’t make it into a bookstore, but I like putting a blurb on the back, so I will. You have to write one anyway, so might as well copy and paste it on there. But it does make for a nice, clean back cover. (Sigh.)

It’s a yummy book, and you can find it here and read the blurb too if you’d like.

I did read this book (yeah, I read a lot, lucky for you!) and they wrote a section about writing blurbs too. I found it to be very helpful but nothing Libby didn’t cover in her vlog.

Anyway, so there are some resources on how to write your blurb.

Next time I’ll write about the back cover and then recap what I’ve gone over so far. After that, I’ll tell you how to format your e-reader file for Kindle so you can load it into Kindle Direct Publishing. After that, I don’t know what I’ll  write about, though something is bound to come up, huh?

Thanks for reading! Talk later!