E45 – Editing Book Blurbs

Show Notes

In this episode, Miss Catherine M.H. and V.E. Griffith discuss strategies for editing book blurbs.

The Revision Wizards are at https://www.revisionwizards.com
V.E. Griffith’s website: https://www.vegriffith.com
Miss Catherine M.H.’s website: https://www.scribes-pen.com

Transcript at: https://revisionwizards.com/?p=2445

Transcript

[V.E. Griffith] (0:00 – 0:15)
Welcome to the Revision Wizards podcast. I’m V.E. Griffith, and this is episode 45. Today’s episode is about editing your book blurb.

Who better to ask questions to than my blurby co-host, Ms. Cathrine M.H. How are you doing today, Ms. Cathrine?

[Miss Catherine M.H.] (0:16 – 0:26)
I’m doing pretty good. I’m excited to go into this because I am finally working on a book blurb, and it has been a journey.

[V.E. Griffith] (0:27 – 0:34)
Well, let’s start with some basic questions for folks who don’t know anything at all. What’s a book blurb?

[Miss Catherine M.H.] (0:35 – 1:06)
So there are two things that a book blurb can be. The first thing is what most of us think about. This is the little bit of passage on the back of a book that everybody reads to see if you’re interested in the book.

The other version is a book blurb is that summary that you would send out to get agents, and that is also known as a book blurb. But in our case, we’re going to be talking about the version that is on the back of a book because I am self-publishing, and I’m not sending one out to an agent.

[V.E. Griffith] (1:07 – 1:10)
So what makes a good one? What makes a bad one?

[Miss Catherine M.H.] (1:10 – 1:48)
That is the million-dollar question that has no actual answer. No, just kidding. So first, for a good book blurb, you do want to catch the attention of your reader.

You want to give them just a bit of a taste of what the book is about, possibly what the genre is about, and a little bit of a question leaving them hanging and wanting to figure out some things. A bad book blurb is a book blurb that gives away a whole bunch of stuff that’s happening in your book or just info dumps on the back.

[V.E. Griffith] (1:48 – 1:50)
Okay, so how long should one be?

[Miss Catherine M.H.] (1:52 – 2:40)
A book blurb should be no longer than 300 words and is usually between about 80 to 150. That really varies depending on genre. So that’s one of those things where certain genres get away with having a much longer one, and some of them get away with having a much smaller one.

It really does depend because you’ll be, like romance, you’re introducing a little bit of plot, a little bit of spice, and you want that. Sci-fi can sometimes go a little longer. Fantasy novels either have an essay or one sentence.

So it really just depends on the genre. But most of the time, if you’re sticking between 80 and 150 words, you’re good.

[V.E. Griffith] (2:41 – 2:51)
Okay, so tell us about your process. Are you an overrider when it comes to blurbs, or are you finding yourself to be pretty tight in summarizing your story?

[Miss Catherine M.H.] (2:51 – 3:45)
Weirdly enough, I think I’m an underwriter when it comes to it. Oh my God. I know.

Isn’t that crazy? Looking back at some of my book blurbs, it’s really fascinating how short they are. And I mean, like really short.

It’s very, very, I mean, you were just watching me go through and look up some of my book blurbs because I have them in NaNoWriMo. And that was the only other place that I ever had them because originally when I wrote a book blurb, it was a fast little thing that I just was putting up to be like, yeah, this is sort of what my book is about. So the first one I ever wrote was the first time I ever tried NaNoWriMo.

And it goes, a spoiled upper class woman and a lower class factory worker find themselves working together to solve the mystery of the missing women in hopes to find the one person they both hold dear.

[V.E. Griffith] (3:46 – 3:48)
Well, that’s not too terrible, is it?

[Miss Catherine M.H.] (3:48 – 4:42)
Not too bad. Yeah. But it also doesn’t do anything else.

Like it’s grown since then. That was my first, like I’ve sort of plotted out a book, which everybody knows is a horrendous idea for me. And that was like how I described it to someone and rewrote it down.

Later on it, it expands. And then I have Miss Eleanor Leonard was a young woman who belonged to the upper class. Her father was the sole owner of the only train manufacturing company.

She lived a carefree, boring life filled with social standards, high expectations, and the greatest dowry ever known. Miss Elizabeth was a simple maid who kept the young woman company and told her stories and gossip and rumors. It was a normal day when Eleanor found out that one of the rumors was more disturbing than others.

After discovering a bit of truth, she is too to save her maid from the horrible fate.

[V.E. Griffith] (4:43 – 4:43)
Okay.

[Miss Catherine M.H.] (4:43 – 5:45)
Horrendous. Horrendous. So it goes on from there.

So like then I get more and more wordy and then I’ve cut back. I think the one I had kept for a really long time is this one. And the reason that it worked for a bit was because I had those 14 chapters that I originally cut.

So now this one doesn’t work as well. An upper class young lady, Miss Eleanor Leonard, finds herself forced into an engagement with the repulsive Lord Victor Poulton. Just as her world is turned upside down, her best friend goes missing.

Seeing connections of her kidnapping to a place called Draper Street and her fiance, she takes it upon herself to go looking for her. With the help of one of her father’s lower class factory workers, Mr. Theodore Milton, they find that there are hundreds of more women who have gone missing. Through midnight train car rides, false identities, and even crashing a royal ball, the larger picture starts to show from the shadows and can no longer be ignored.

[V.E. Griffith] (5:45 – 5:46)
That’s much better.

[Miss Catherine M.H.] (5:46 – 5:47)
Not too bad.

[V.E. Griffith] (5:47 – 5:48)
Yeah.

[Miss Catherine M.H.] (5:48 – 6:23)
But yeah. And then I cut out those 14 chapters. So the whole part about the fiance is no longer as needed.

That will be in a reader magnet. So it’s just not as important anymore. The midnight train rides were actually seven of them in the original book.

You didn’t have any of those. You had one. So now they get like one midnight train car ride, but there were originally seven.

There was multiple different zones where they were traveling.

[V.E. Griffith] (6:24 – 6:24)
That’s a lot.

[Miss Catherine M.H.] (6:24 – 6:28)
Yeah. I told you, I cut out a lot before I even sent it to you.

[V.E. Griffith] (6:28 – 6:37)
So has it been more of a challenge than editing the manuscript? Or is it about the same? Oh, so much.

[Miss Catherine M.H.] (6:38 – 6:42)
No, I think writing the manuscript and editing it was easier.

[V.E. Griffith] (6:42 – 6:43)
How come?

[Miss Catherine M.H.] (6:43 – 6:57)
Mostly because it’s really hard to describe your novel without giving it away. Because you want to the good parts, but you can’t tell the good parts on a book blurb. Because if you tell the good parts on a book blurb, then you’ve given your story away.

[V.E. Griffith] (6:57 – 6:58)
That makes sense.

[Miss Catherine M.H.] (6:58 – 10:25)
You want to leave just enough that they want some, but not too much that they’re like, well, I know how the book goes. It’s been hard to balance that. And the one that I’m working on now, because I don’t have it still fully fleshed out, is this one.

So this is the newest version that I’ve been working on, because I’m actually taking a book blurb writing class in order to write a better one. After her maid Lizzie is sold into an underground sex slave trade, Eleanor Leonard runs away from her upper class life to save her. Diving into the scandalous world is as easy as clockwork, but climbing out of Draper Street unscathed becomes impossible with every story she exposes.

Theodore Milton gives up his engineering position in the factory to follow Eleanor in hopes of finding his sister, Lizzie. Infiltrating the aristocratic society is harder than putting an engine together, but Draper Street starts to reveal the dark secrets of his family. With the duo becoming the infamous writer Scandal’s Pen, those behind Draper Street respond to the threat with an uncanny understanding of their character.

The cogs have started to turn and it’s only a matter of time before the building’s steam burns someone. So that one works a lot better than my past. It certainly does.

Yeah, it tells just enough where I’m getting there. It’s definitely showing my two main characters, Eleanor and Theodore, and it’s giving a lot more to my genre. It’s definitely like if you didn’t know it was steampunk by looking at the cover, then you should know it is steampunk by reading my book blurb.

And if not, well, then you’re in for a surprise of what steampunk is. So there is still, I do need to clean this version up still. I know that, but this is probably more or less the version that I’m going to be using.

I’m going to need a hook sentence at the start. So that’s a really big one that I’ve missed out on all of my blurbs so far is that sentence that is the hook. And I’ve been going back and forth between three different hooky sentences.

So for me, the book blurb is now like ready to be shown to people kind of like you would for betas. So I’ve been going around to my writing community and posting the book blurb, the first version. So this is version three at the moment, and I would get their feedback just like you would for your book.

And with their feedback, I’ve taken a little bit, I’ve put it together. Then I went and asked a bunch of readers what they thought, where their questions were, what wasn’t making sense, what sounded boring. And then I took that back and I changed it up a little bit.

My biggest thing I got from both groups was that I didn’t have a hook, like enough of a hook to draw them in, that it sounds really good and interesting, but I just need a little bit more to really be like, I need to buy this book right now. So the recommendations that I’ve received was either have a really good hook, like a sentence that starts the whole blurb or really good hook at the very end. That’s going to be like, I need to know.

So that’s been so far my process.

[V.E. Griffith] (10:26 – 10:29)
So at what point in the process do you start thinking about a book blurb?

[Miss Catherine M.H.] (10:30 – 12:32)
For me, I had thought of a book blurb on my first draft, which is why that first draft one is like that sentence long of this is kind of what I think it’s going to be about. Because to me, it really helps if I was to be like, what is your book about? Well, to me, I have an upper class person, they’re working with a lower class person, they’re trying to find missing women.

If I put that into a sentence, it gives me enough of a book blurb that I can look back at it and be like, yeah, this is what my book is about, because I pants it. So for me, having that little bit of a book blurb was very helpful. Then as things would grow, and I would find out more, I would add to my book blurb.

So I knew what it was going on in my head. So to me, that book blurb had helped out, because little small things like I knew that I had midnight train rides. Super cool.

I’ve got that I am crashing, you know, a Royal Ball. Cool. I’ve got that.

Or I have, you know, the the missing women, Draper Street, when I finally figured out what Draper Street was like, all of those things. To me in my book blurb made sense. And it helped me understand the things even if they would give away more than they should, or didn’t make sense to someone else, they made sense to me.

So each of those versions, I have 1, 2, 3, 4, I do have four original book blurbs. And that coincides with the four different versions of my editing that I did before I gave you the book. So this final one that I just read out is my newest version of what happened after I cut my first 14 chapters.

So for me, each editing process, I had a book blurb that helped me narrow down what my book was, and what I would want people to read.

[V.E. Griffith] (12:32 – 12:37)
So what suggestions would you offer to people who’ve reached the point where they need to write a book blurb?

[Miss Catherine M.H.] (12:37 – 13:59)
I would suggest start by writing a single sentence. How can you summarize your book in the most generic way possible? If you start with that one sentence, perfect, because then that gives you something to build on.

One of the books that I originally looked into on writing a book blurb, which I cannot seem to remember which one it is, even though I’ve got a whole bunch of them right there. It gave me a small outline, which I’ve used. And it was have the name of your person, like, so have your character, have the life they’re living, have the situation, so the inciting incident, and then what happens because of that inciting incident.

And that’s where I would start with mine. So I knew that Eleanor was upper class, she lived that life all the time. The original inciting incident was that she was engaged to a monster, who she realized was like hurting women.

And then her her maid goes missing. And so she leaves to go find her. So that was my, here’s how I’m starting my my book blurb, have a person, I have the inciting incident.

And I have the immediate call like consequence of that inciting incident.

[V.E. Griffith] (14:00 – 14:02)
So what did we miss about writing a blurb?

[Miss Catherine M.H.] (14:02 – 16:11)
It is hard, but it is fun. It’s really strange to write a book blurb because you write it in present tense. And you write it in third person.

Usually, the only times that I’ve seen first person are really for romance. Romance genre gets away with a lot of different things. But most of the time, it is third person and present tense, which is not something I write in, I write in third person.

But I write always in past tense. So it was interesting to change my idea to a present tense for this book, as if it’s happening right now. So think about that when you’re writing it.

If you need to write it in first person, in order to try to get it out, do that and then see how that would be changed to third person. And then just remember that it’s usually in present tense. I have tried AI to see if it could write it a little bit better.

And it adds very strange things to it. So it will add new plot lines or new things like that. So be careful if you’re trying to have your AI help you out with that.

Read through it very carefully. And make sure that you are really getting what your book is about and the message that you want to send and the people you want reading your book. For me, I don’t want a 12 year old reading my book.

I’m talking about a sex slave trade through my book. So I need to make sure that that’s like my art, my audience is on my book blurb, because I don’t want the irony. I don’t want my book banned.

But I really do want my book banned. But I want it banned for like, real reasons, not because like a 12 year old picked it up in a library. And then suddenly, like, their mom’s like, Oh my god, they pick this book up.

Okay, I didn’t hide anything. You know what my book is about just by reading the back of the cover. So you’ll know who the audience is for.

And what kind of genre and what kind of lessons I would like to have learned from it.

[V.E. Griffith] (16:11 – 16:14)
Well, that sounds good. I guess that about does it for today.

[Miss Catherine M.H.] (16:14 – 16:22)
I think so. I’ll let you know when my next book blurb is out, or I’ll post it and we’ll have the real finished version of my book blurb out.

[V.E. Griffith] (16:22 – 16:25)
Okay, well, we’ll see everybody next time then.

[Miss Catherine M.H.] (16:25 – 16:26)
Stay magical.

[V.E. Griffith] (16:27 – 16:27)
Bye.