A Blurbing Birthday Continued

Okay, so readers who tuned into this bat-channel yesterday will have been witness to my epic snit-fit over the blurb that the good professionals of DSP came up with for my novella And Is Never Shaken. 

Not because the blurb wasn't well-written, correct and factual, but because despite this, it also had many of the problems that readers of Reviews by Jessewave had raved about here. If you'd like to read the blurb, you can go back to yesterday's post here and see for yourself what I mean.
 
We ended yesterday's thrilling installment with my decision to risk not only my own sanity, but also annoying the people of DSP, by attempting to completely re-write the blurb and asking them to use my version instead.

The first thing I did was to throw out both the short synopsis which I had submitted to DSP originally and the blurb that DSP had sent me. I tend to think that the first mistake most people make when writing blurbs for readers is to confuse what a prospective buyer needs to make their decision, with what an editor needs to make theirs. The editor needs to know the shape of the story and the factual details of how it starts and ends. They need to know you're not going to have aliens appear in chapter two and turn everyone to jelly. Once they're assured of that they open the file and begin to read, which requires a commitment of time, but no money. If they have questions about tone or language, they answer them by reading the story. It's right there.

But your potential buyers are looking at a professional entry on a publisher's website. They know this book has been accepted for publication and edited, so they already know that aliens don't appear and turn everyone to jelly (unless the story actually calls for that). What they want to know is what they can expect to experience as a reader if they invest their hard earned cash in your story. Why buy your story and not the three others that came out from the publisher at the same time, or the twenty others that came out from different publishers that day? They need to know the world they're about to step into if they buy your book.

Bearing all this - and the comments from the erudite readers of Jessewave's blog - in mind, this is my blurb-writing check-list.

1) Characters. This is romance we're writing here - the characters are everything. Introduce both the main characters with a couple of key facts that allow readers to visualize them. I don't mean their appearance, unless the way they look is what defines them in some way (if one of them has a disability, or is astonishingly good-looking for example) . In the case of And Is Never Shaken, both protagonists have jobs that they love and which define them, so those go in the blurb. 

2) Relationship. Again, this is romance. The relationship is what we're reading for. We need to know the 'hook' of the relationship - love at first sight, hate at first sight, the odd couple, gay for you, May to December, whatever. My characters have little in common and have a large age gap, yet they keep bumping into each other, and this makes one of them think the other is a stalker. Not a great start for them, but a great 'hook' for the book.

3) What Happens Next? One or two sentences about how their beginning eases into a middle. Do they fight like cats and dogs, get separated but struggle to keep their love alive, find themselves swept away in a fairytale passion? This is the meat of the story. This is where you tell readers if they have humour or angst or outdoor sex or naked swimming in a vat of custard to look forward to.Try to express the tone of the story. It's pointless to write a funny blurb if the story isn't comedic, pointless to write an angsty one if the story is light and sweet. If there are squink factors in the story which you haven't already mentioned, put them here. If you added a threesome to spice things up (I hope you didn't, by the way) you should be hinting at the characters journey of sexual discovery so that it doesn't come as a complete shock to the reader.

4) The Big No-No. Or - what goes wrong. Not too much detail, because that's the point of reading the book, but at the same time don't be coy. Blog readers said they hate, hate, hated it when authors tried to convince them that there would be a sad ending because, let's face it, this is m/m romance and that doesn't happen very often. So unless you actually wrote a down-ending (which was brave of you) it's better to focus on the conflict here. What goes wrong? Put a question in the reader's mind so that they picture the pain or difficulty the characters might face to get their HEA or HFN. However, another huge Red Button was the use of rhetorical questions, so don't try to put a question into the reader's mind by saying 'Will Tim and Fred fight through their parent's expectations to be together?' Because the reader knows the answer must be yes, and this just annoys them and makes them think snarky thoughts.

Putting all this into practise: 

(One paragraph) Cassian Ford is a successful writer in his forties, established at the local university (hello, character number one!). Andy Havers is a book restorer in his early twenties who just moved to town (Hello character number two and May to December relationship!) They have nothing in common, and yet somehow everywhere they go they seem to run into each other. Despite a bumpy beginning - an exasperated Cassian accuses Andy of being a stalker - (there's the hook, and a hint of humour) the gap in age and their many other differences, a passionate romance develops between them. But just when Andy is convinced he's found true love (these last two lines are the What Happens Next - they tell us that things are passionate and loving) secrets from Cassian's past erupt into the present (word choice hopefully suggests angst and drama) and Andy realizes it might not be him Cassian wants at all...(Yowch, that sounds kind of painful for Andy, I wonder how he gets over that?)

Without the commentary:
 
Cassian Ford is a successful writer in his forties, established at the local university. Andy Havers is a book restorer in his early twenties who just moved to town. They have nothing in common, and yet somehow everywhere they go they seem to run into each other. Despite a bumpy beginning - an exasperated Cassian accuses Andy of being a stalker - the gap in age and their many other differences, a passionate romance develops between them. But just when Andy is convinced he's found true love, secrets from Cassian's past erupt into the present and Andy realizes it might not be him Cassian wants at all... 

Mission accomplished. Now I had to submit this to DSP and hope they liked it.

Now, let's get something straight here before we go any further: I'm a seasoned publishing professional. I've been dealing with editors, marketing directors and Big Cheeses (otherwise known as Commissioning Editors) for...Jeez, seven years now. But no matter how many times you've had playful banter with an editor, no matter how confident you are as a professional, no matter how sure you are that you're right, EVERYTIME that you have to disagree with an editor, you will be reduced to quivering jelly. What if they get really upset and don't want to work with you anymore?

Luckily, despite that big build-up, DSP did like my version of the blurb, and said they'll use it. And they didn't even cuss me out for being an awkward b*tch either. (Sigh of contentment).