How to Write a Book Blurb

Many of us unpublished writers have a dose of humility and a smattering of self-consciousness.

I am here to tell you with a book blurb, to knock that shit off.

Your book blurb is about selling your writing.

Your book blurb is about enticing a reader to buy your book.

Your book blurb is competition. You are competing for the hard-earned dollar of an honored reader.

If you cannot write a blurb for your book, give it up. I am totally serious. Don’t give up witting if that is what you enjoy, but give up selling your book. You must own this process. A book blurb is what constitutes the majority of your query. The book blurb is what you put on your website. The book blurb is your illicit lover. The book blurb is fairy dust you snort when the pixies aren’t looking.

If you are on the publishing path, you have to want it. You have to want it real bad. You have to look at your significant other one evening, and think, “I could make bedroom eyes here. Or I could write.” You dream about your book. You go to the bookstore, and look at where your book would be, memorizing the author to the left of the book and to the right. You have pretend conversations with the characters in your book.

If you don’t want it that bad, this post is not for you. That ego that you check at the door while read’n da blogs? Ya, go get it. I’ll wait.

(la la la, la la la)

Alrighty then. By the way, I am smoking a cigar, sipp'n Congnac, and wearing a Glock 19 while writing this. That’s how ego I went here, folks. It doesn’t get any more MAN than that.

Rawr!

Let’s take it by steps.

Step One
Determine the type of book. Do you envision your book selling as a hardback or paperback out of the gate? For this exercise, we are going to use Hardcover. Because that’s my dream.

Step Two
Find a book, preferably someone else’s, that you don’t particularly like. In this case, we’re going to use Twilight. My wife’s copy. Sorry, honey. Behold! The actual book:

Please ignore the Nikon speed light flashback from the ceiling. I could not remember how to dial it down a notch to give a uniform lighting.

Step Three
Find the dimensions of this book. In this case, 8.2 x 5.9 x 1.7 inches (I got this from Amazon). We’re not interested in the thickness of the book (1.7 inches). For this exercise, girth doesn’t matter.

Step Four
Go into Word, or some other word processor, and under the Page Setup option, choose the Paper tab and change the height and width to the book height and width.

Then under the Margins tab, change all the margins to .25.

Step Five
Save the document.

Step Six
Paste in your book blurb. Here is mine:

After breakfast, Investigator Lexus Toulouse, ex-soldier extreme, learns she must track down a war-era serial killer.

Before lunch, she finds her Libido Generator is on the fritz, her old warship wants to “get back together” and her impromptu partner, Scott, seems to be displaying very peculiar mental abilities while stirring the odd romantic feelings in her. She doesn’t want odd romantic feelings. She already has four husbands!

Her world spirals out of control when she mistakenly plugs herself into a simulation of the murders. As memories of the war surface, it all comes crashing down on her sanity. She struggles to do the right thing, but if the right thing is bringing back the soldier she buried deep within herself, can postwar Lexus ever return?

By dinner, she is lucky to be alive…

Step Seven
Change the font. My book is science fiction, so I used a nice sci-fi looking font.

Step Eight
Change the paragraph settings. I suggest for Spacing, 10pts After and 1.15” space between lines. Your mileage my vary.

Step Nine
Mess around with the document. Try using a drop cap, bolding certain words, etcetera.

Step Ten
Save the document.

Step Eleven
Go under Print Preview and mess around with the margins. You need to leave enough space for the ISBN number at the bottom of the page. Look at the actual book from Step Two for guidance.

Actual sample margins after adjustment:

Step Twelve
Save the document.

Step Thirteen
Print the document. Don’t worry about finding paper the actual size of the book. Your printer, unless it is stupid (and there are some out there) will print the page using the paper in the tray. The custom paper size was for your formatting convenience.

Step Fourteen
This is the most important step. Hold the paper to the back of the book from Step Two. You can see where the edges are beneath the paper. Does it fit? Are you using a too small of a font? Can you position the paper on the book so the text position looks good?

If the answer is yes, proceed to the next step. If the answer is no, then you must stop screwing around by writing a ginormous book blurb. This is a real book blurb. It has to fit at on the back of the book and it must look like a book blurb. If it doesn’t, then it’s not a book blurb. Fix it. Cut. Or, rarely, add.

Repeat after me: If your text does not look like a book blurb, then it’s not a book blurb. It’s voodoo. It’s crap. You need to de-crap it. Be honest with yourself: if the font is too small because you just gotta write, you may want to consider that really, you’re not serious about explaining your book in just enough words.

But it’s not just about eye-candy. It’s being able to say what you want to say in short-form. A blurb. Write the blurb. Be the blurb. Print the blurb out and sleep with it under your pillow. Imagine what it would feel like if Babs from Slave to the Needle tattooed it on your ass. If there are many words, man, that book blurb is gonna hurt.

If you are happy with how the text looks, the size, the wording, how it is arranged, then go to Step Fifteen.

Step Fifteen
Fold or cut the paper and tape or glue it to the back of the book (this is where someone else’s book you are not impressed with comes in handy).

Step Sixteen
This is almost as important as Step Fourteen. Does your book blurb sound catchy, as a whole, now that you are looking at it as a real book blurb? It’s on the back of a real book.

If it doesn’t look cool
If it doesn’t sound cool when you read it aloud
If you don’t get chills down your spine when you look at it
Start over

Optional Step Seventeen
Get crazy!