Blurbing It Out
A tirade on the writer’s craft
Francis W. Porretto
SmashWords Edition
Copyright (C) 2011 Francis W. Porretto
Cover art by Francis W. Porretto
Discover other works by Francis W. Porretto at Smashwords.Com
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==<O>==
Welcome, Gentle Reader, to a brief tirade on an underappreciated aspect of the writer’s craft—not his art, but his craft—that I hope will prove useful to you and profitable to me.
This little screed has a single, all-important point:
ANYTHING WORTHY OF PURCHASE MUST FIRST BE SOLD.
Your writing will not sell itself. You—the independent writer—must sell it.
The independent writers’ movement is a thing of great promise. I’ve encountered much good fiction, modestly priced, here at SmashWords. I’ve also encountered quite a lot of crap—often of the sort that deflects me from spending my money, not merely on that particular work, but on anything else the author has produced or will produce.
If you think that to be a trivial concern, be aware of the following:
-- I read approximately 150 full-length novels per year;
-- I operate two Websites, both of which promote the works of independent writers;
-- My fiction has a substantial following: approximately 75,000 readers overall at this time.
This rant addresses the ineptitude of the typical independent at creating his promotional blurbs and long descriptions. It’s been provoked specifically by the vast number of dishearteningly poor blurbs I’ve encountered at SmashWords—blurbs so bad that all by themselves they scream “Avoid my crap! I’m a writer solely in my own imagination!”
So many writers treat the creation of their promotional materials—their blurbs and long descriptions—as inconsequential throwaway efforts that I sometimes feel the onset of despair. I feel the urge to track those writers down, lift them by their lapels, and scream into their faces: In God’s name, don’t you want to be read? Do you have the faintest idea what your carelessness about your 400-character blurb says about your overall skills with the English language? Don’t you crave the feeling of acceptance and appreciation that would come with a readership and a little revenue? Do you think you can have it without putting in the necessary effort at selling your works?
That effort must be of two kinds:
1. You must craft a blurb of professional quality;
2. That blurb must give the reader a reason to care about your story.
Only your close friends and relatives will even feign interest in your stories unless you satisfy those two requirements.
I’m a blunt sort, just in case the above hasn’t already revealed that to you. I never restrain my opinions, the dictates of good taste in the applicable context excepted. But you’re reading this because you’ve already decided that it might be relevant to your promotional efforts; therefore, I shall spare you nothing.
If you’re serious about improving your promotional blurbs and long descriptions, read on.
Part The First:
A Blurb Is A Hook;
Bait It Properly!
I’ve discovered some good fiction at SmashWords—and a lot of utter crap, of course—but I’ve also discovered that there are many whose storytelling gifts are greater than their ability to promote their work.
Now, I’m no promotional genius. I use this site, my other, op-ed oriented site, a little Twitter (fporretto), and a lot of prayer, and just about nothing else. But I flatter myself that my max-400-character SmashWords blurbs are middling-decent hooks, if not a little better, for the reader interested in my admittedly weird sort of fiction. And I’ve sold over 75,000 books at this point. To save you wear and tear on your mouse, here are a few of my blurbs:
For Which Art In Hope:
Hope, a world peopled by anarchists, is in ecological crisis. For 1200 years, a secret Cabal has elevated powerful psi talents to the Godhood of Hope -- the management of Hope’s crust -- at the eventual cost of their lives. Now only two remain: Armand Morelon and Victoria Peterson. But one is utterly unwilling and the other is murderously insane. And the survival of Mankind hangs in the balance.
For On Broken Wings:
You’re a young woman with no memory of your past. You’ve been made a sexual slave by a gang of vicious bikers. After ten years’ agony, you’ve freed yourself by committing murder and earning a faceful of scars. But the biker king is obsessed with you. Your sole chance of escaping him lies in trusting a mysterious young man you’ve just met. Do you choose the devil you know, or the devil you don’t?
For Shadow Of A Sword:
Christine D’Alessandro returns to Onteora County and is enmeshed in two deadly conflicts: one between security entrepreneur Kevin Conway and his competitor Ernest Lawrence; and one between presidential aspirant Stephen Sumner and President Walter Coleman. Behind them looms a third struggle, between two immortals, for the future of Mankind unto the limits of Time. Sequel to On Broken Wings.
The idea is to pique the reader’s interest without wearing out his patience over something he’s odds-on not to want to read anyway. Give him a glimpse of the central character(s), the (first) major conflict, and the stakes; you can’t reasonably expect to do more than that in 400 characters. Neither can you reasonably expect to write a blurb that will make everyone desperate to read your book; the statistics are heavily against such a turnout. Indeed, if as many as 10% of the readers who read your promo blurb go on to read the free sample of your novel -- you did make the first 20% or 30% freely available, didn’t you?—you’re doing really well.
Now have a look at some...lesser examples of the art:
"Hammer in the Head" is a very short fiction story dealing with a tragic accident, the hope, the healing and the coping and the love of grandmothers for grandmothers are are salvation. This very short story also deals with true forgiveness. Those readers fortuate enough to read this very short work will be reminded of simplicity, that simplicity works and that simplicity will get the job done!
The author has told us little about the meat of his story, and far too much about what he hopes the reader will get out of it. In addition, the spelling is poor and the grammar is questionable.
In this, her ninth novel, mortal threats force Diana Delaney to flee her Midwest home. She takes refuge with a favorite cousin in Greensboro, North Carolina, and meets Lance Cassidy, a handsome widower who is struggling with the loss of his wife while keeping her memory alive for their two young daughters.
Who cares if it’s the author’s ninth novel? Does it improve the listening experience for you to know, specifically, that the Symphony of Joy was Beethoven’s Ninth? Anyway, what’s the novel’s major conflict?
A novel of improbable proportions, ‘Dancing the River Lightly’ takes you on a nonstop ride through the magical world of the Pacific Northwest, where dreams unfold, friendships are forged, and lives are changed forever.
No characters! No conflict! No sense of the import of whatever action the book depicts! Just take the author’s word for it: it will change your life!
It’s possible that the fiction thus blurbed is highly worthwhile; I wouldn’t know, not having read it. But the reason I haven’t read even the free samples of those stories is that the promo blurbs are awful. Their authors have done a poor job of catching my interest.
If you want to be read, you have to work at this stuff. Grandmaster Siegbert Tarrasch once said, after obtaining a poor result in a tournament, “In these competitions, it is not enough to be a connoisseur of chess; one must also play well.” Similarly, it’s not quite enough to write a good story and make it available at modest cost; you must also entice readers into devoting some of their cash and their precious, ever-dwindling lifespan to reading it.
Physical books do that with dust-jacket or back-cover blurbs. On-line books must make do with compressed on-line blurbs. Given the reluctance readers generally feel about spending money on an unknown’s eBook, the creation of such blurbs must be taken seriously—as seriously as the crafting of a resume for a much desired, highly paid job. In a way, it’s the same undertaking.
Part The Second:
Your Blurb Is The First Example Of Your Craft
A Potential Reader Will See:
Don’t Make It The Last One!
As I said in the previous section, a promotional blurb is like a job interview for writers. If you mess up at this stage, the odds are poor that a cruising reader will bother with your book or story. You’d think it wouldn’t be a hard lesson to absorb, whether for its significance or for its ease of correction. At least, I’d have thought most of us are capable of editing our own blurbs with some facility.
Yet the clinkers keep on coming. A great many of them are errors in spelling or punctuation—and no fault reveals a lack of skill with the English language more swiftly or luridly than those.
Spelling errors of the “usual sort”—i.e., the simple mangling of a word—are easily corrected by the spellcheckers built into programs such as Microsoft Word. I can only conclude that too many would-be writers have far too much confidence in their spelling skills to use those checkers. This is, to put it as gently as possible, a severe, possibly fatal mistake.
Spelling errors of the second order—i.e., the use of the wrong word, possibly due to homonym confusion -- require the use of a second pair of eyes. Do not assume that just because your blurb passed the spellchecker, it must therefore be correct in all regards. Get someone else to read it and ask about your use of it’s where you should have written its, or of there where you clearly meant their.
Finally, we have punctuation errors. I’ve been called a “grammar bigot” many times. There’s some truth to the accusation, as I was well educated in English grammar and consider poor written grammar a serious failing in an educated person. Note the emphasis on written grammar. In ordinary, colloquial intercourse, we get away with many sins...because, as the Romans once said, verba volant: the great majority of our words are heard only once before they take wing and fly away, rather than being recorded in some enduring form for others to criticize later. More simply put, we speak far more than we write.
Unfortunately, one consequence of this is the formation of a number of bad habits that seep from our patterns of speech into our written work. In particular, since we don’t punctuate when we speak, we tend to slough considerations of punctuation when we write. But proper punctuation is as important to elegance and legibility as good spelling.
Lynne Truss’s magnificent little book Eats, Shoots and Leaves is invaluable in this regard: at once entertaining and instructive. Read the damned thing. I cannot overstress the importance of this step, as punctuation errors can make even the best-crafted blurb illegible or fatally confusing. Worse, a serious punctuation error will evoke the disdain of an educated reader more swiftly than any other kind of misstep.
This is so serious a matter that if you, Gentle Reader, should take only one of my suggestions to heart, I’d greatly prefer that it be this one. Learn the proper uses of the comma, the semicolon, and the colon. Learn how to form plurals and possessives. Learn what constitutes a run-on sentence and strive with all your might to avoid them. No other improvement in your blurb-grammar would be quite as salutary for your sales.
Part The Third:
Help Is Available...
For A Price.
If you don’t have a friend, wife, or child to review your blurb before you post it, you’re unlikely to find errors of grammar, spelling, or punctuation yourself. So I’m going to make you an offer:
SEND YOUR BLURB TO ME.
I’ll correct it for you. Indeed, I’ll edit your blurb to professional quality, and thus conceal your promotional and linguistic ineptitude from all and sundry until they’ve taken the step of plunking their cash on the barrelhead for your book.
My fee for this service: $1.00 U.S., payable through PayPal. Send your blurb to me at:
porretto@optonline.net
...with the subject line “Blurb Help.” If I find it unsalvageable for any reason, I’ll tell you so before you pay me, so you’re risking very little.
If you’d also like me to edit your Long Description, that will be another $1.00 U.S., and the same guarantee applies. I won’t take your money if I can’t help you, but I consider those fees to be modest for the service...especially since no one else appears to be offering them at this time.
Inasmuch as even writers wise enough to hire professional editors for their eBooks seem not to understand how desperately they need the same kind of oversight for their promotional stuff, I expect this offer to be spurned. But there it is: use it or not, as suits you, and live with the consequences of your decision.
Oh, and by the way, Merry Christmas, and may the joy of His Coming be yours throughout the New Year -- no matter how badly you punctuate or spell!
==<O>==
About the Author
Francis W. Porretto is an engineer, fictioneer, and commentator. He operates the Eternity Road Website (http://eternityroad.info), a hotbed of pro-freedom, pro-American, pro-Christian sentiment, where he and his Esteemed Co-Conspirators hold forth on every topic under the Sun. You can email him at fwp@eternityroad.info. Thank you for taking an interest in his works.