Babbling About Blurbs

I have said this before, but I enter a lot of Goodreads giveaways (because, free books!). I’m also constantly trying to find new books, but I don’t have a lot of money to spend on them. For this reason, I find book blurbs invaluable in helping me to narrow down which books I do and don’t want to spend time looking at. Those little descriptions of the book that tell the reader just enough to pique their interest can be invaluable in getting readers to decide they would rather read one book over another.

I know a number of authors who are either indie published, or who mix indie and traditional publishing. As a result, they write their own blurbs, and some of them find figuring out the right words more than a little difficult. I can’t teach someone what to say about their own book, but I can mention a few things that blurbs often contain that interest me or that put me off.

(Please remember that one size does not fit all; these are my feelings, not a hard-and-fast set of rules to writing these blurbs.)

To start with, if a blurb contains incorrect spelling, punctuation, or grammar, I immediately wonder if the author either doesn’t know how to write, or doesn’t care enough to make sure it’s corrected. Whereas some errors are simply typos (no one is immune to them), more than one or two seems –at the least – extremely careless.

If someone gives away the entire plot of their book, it suggests to me that they are trying too hard to get someone to read it. Now, there’s nothing wrong with earnestly doing one’s best, but suspense is greatly lessened by revealing the plot. Note that I’m not big on suspense, and can quite happily read a book knowing the ending, as long as it gets there in an interesting way. But the problem with those who want to give away the plot of their book tends to be that they tell every plot twist except the end. And those plot twists are the things I do read for.

Related to this point is the case where an author describes every character who appears in the book. Usually it’s best to only mention one or two, three at most, because naming too many characters is confusing in a blurb. If it’s an ensemble cast of characters, picking out the most important and referring to the others without names seems to me a better choice. Saying, “Joe and Jane and Jean and John and June and Jen are the members of the Imperial army unit which is sent to rout magical bandits” is a lot to remember – especially if the author tries to tell me details about all six of them. “Joe and Jane lead a unit of crack imperial soldiers to rout magical bandits” gives me all the information I need to know to decide whether or not I want to read the book.

And then there is the opposite problem – the author who makes the blurb so vague that it tells me virtually nothing. I will also skip over those books, because I have no real information about them, and therefore no way of judging whether or not I will like them. Saying, “Deliriama is a realm where things happen and Joe must save it,” may tell me that it’s a secondary world, but it won’t even give me the information that it’s got magic, much less who Joe is, and why the realm needs saving. I will go on and look for something else that tells me that Phantasmagora is a dream realm, and Jane, an imperial byblow, has inherited mystical rainbow-straightening powers which she must use to unkink the world from the allegorical truck stop it’s fastened to. That’s the book I’ll end up reading.

My next issue is one of my biggest ones – the moment I come across this in a blurb, I will simply stop reading and go on to another book. If the author tells me, the reader, what I will learn from his/her book, or as a corollary, what an innovative and new concept this book embodies, I stop being interested in very short order. That’s not to say that I don’t want to learn something, or that I don’t want something innovative and new. I enjoy powerful themes carefully inset in the story. It’s just that when the author puts this into the book blurb, it immediately lets me know that the author thinks s/he is writing “deathless prose” – that they are so enamored of their own words that they haven’t actually learned to edit and make them readable. There is also an element of condescension to such authors. Perhaps I’m being uncharitable, but I’ve found very few exceptions.

It’s very important to let the reader know what kind of a book they are reading. Years ago, I remember seeing a book blurb for a novel that was a particular favorite of mine. The description sounded like a standard romance, and might have been an excellent description – had the lovers not been ghosts. Certainly paranormal romance is now popular, but one doesn’t want to pick up a book advertised as a Regency romance and discover it’s a treatise on salt mining in ancient Greece. The way to do this is through skillful writing, not through simply stating the genre. Instead of "This book is a Vampire Werewolf Fairy Dragon Teen Angst High School Aliens Dystopian Post-Apocalyptic Paranormal Romance", saying, "Geordania is a student at Mythical Creature High, established when the old world order collapsed," will start to clue in the reader.

And now, here is what is possibly the trickiest thing about book blurbs: tantalizing the reader’s imagination with carefully selected details that won’t tell them too much, but will get them interested. Doing exactly enough and not too much can be hard. There can also be a healthy shake of misdirection which will end up giving the reader a more enjoyable experience. If the Vampire-Werewolf-Fairy-Alien is the bad guy, or one of the plot points is that he appears to be the bad guy even if he isn't, saying it outright is less effective than saying something like, "Geordania must rely on Alllakszsaendddoerrr's help. But can she truly trust him?"

These are the kinds of things I think of when I’m selecting books to read. With the advent of self-publishing as a commercially viable venture, there are so many books to choose from I can’t even begin to look at them all. Relying on these general guidelines has managed to turn up quite a number of wonderful books for me, and hopefully will turn up a lot of wonderful books in the future.