A Blurbing Birthday

The fateful day has dawned, and I am a year older and definitely wiser. My first birthday present? A blurb from DSP for my novella And Is Never Shaken.

Very recently there was a blog post about blurbs on Reviews by Jessewave. You can find this revealing article (and what's even more revealing, the comment trail following it) here.

What this made clear to me is that for a lot of people the blurb is all they read - it makes the decision on whether they buy or not. People ignore covers because often they're terrible or cliched; even if they're pretty they usually say very little about the story itself. And it seems most people don't have time to read the excepts either - there are just too many books to get through, and they don't think the excerpt really tells them much.

The blurb is the number one selling tool that an author can have, other than a well-respected name.

Unfortunately, a lot of readers feel that the blurbs they're offered are letting them down. And readers place the blame for this squarely on the shoulders of the author. Yes, they acknowledge that editors and other publishing professionals are partly responsible for this too, but most readers seemed to feel that since the author is the one who knows the story inside out they should be the one who makes sure the blurb reflects what their work is really about.

All of which resulted in this reaction when I saw the blurb which DSP had written for And Is Never Shaken: AAAAAARRRGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yes, it's safe to say that I was a tad upset. The blurb I read - though technically correct and not terrible in any way - held basically ALL the elements that the readers of the Jessewave blog had isolated as problems for them. Let me illustrate:

The first time Andreas Havers meets Cassian Ford, Cassian stops him in the street and then walks away. The second time is when Andy signs up for a creative writing course—a course Cassian is teaching. The third time, they bump into each other in the hallway of Andy’s new apartment building and realize they’re neighbors. After being accused of being a stalker, Andy finally loses his temper and tells Cassian where to get off.

Strangely, instead of letting the acquaintance die there, Cassian pursues Andy and apologizes. Explaining away his odd behavior, Cassian asks Andy out on a date, a date that will turn into a passionate affair threatened by secrets from the past.

First of all, this is two paragraphs long. Now, I personally have no problem with two paragraph blurbs. In fact, I like a lot of details. But the vast majority of e-book buyers do not appear to agree with me. They want one paragraph only - they were very emphatic about this.

They also felt that many blurbs missed out pertinent details of the story which might either make them want to buy it, or warn them to steer clear. In this case, the romance is a May to December relationship, with eighteen years between the protagonists. This is a selling point for me (which is why I wrote the story) and might be for a lot of others too, but for those who are squinked out by May to December, there's no warning here.

Finally, they felt that blurbs didn't give them any idea of the tone of the story, and in some cases that blurbs were actively misleading. Well, this blurb has no tone, really. It's just business-like and straightforward, which would be fine if the novella were business-like and straightforward. But it isn't. And Is Never Shaken has a lot of poetic language and also some humour. I don't think there's any way that anyone could label this blurb misleading, but it doesn't give much of a flavour of the story either.

So, after much gnashing of teeth, stressing and hair-pulling, I decided to completely re-write this blurb and ask my DSP editor to consider a new version.

Since this post is getting rather long, tune in tomorrow to see how I incorporated the blog reader's comments into a new version of the blurb, and hear about DSP's reaction to an uppity author re-writing their blurbs wholesale.