Seekerville Welcomes The Blurb Queen

 Hi, I'm Cathryn Cade, aka The Blurb Queen.

I want to thank Tina Radcliffe so much for inviting me to guest blog here. I’m honored to be in Seekerville.

I also write romance … but over the last few years, whenever a fellow author has shared struggles with the ad copy or blurb for their story, I wanted to jump in and help trim, mold and shape. I love writing blurbs!

And yes, I see you shaking your head in amazed disbelief. I totally get that—I've an author friend who loves writing synopses, another who excels at query letters. I salute all of you who do well at these. 

Me? No, just no.

But blurbing is my kind of chocolate. It's a new challenge with every book!

Can I, in a few sentences, make you eager to 

- live vicariously through my heroine?
- sigh over my hero, if romance?
- grow spiritually and emotionally with my characters?
- learn how my characters experience a crisis of faith and with God's help, triumph?
- immerse yourself in the locale & inhabitants where my story unfolds? 
- travel back into your favorite time in history and experience how it colors the problems & triumphs of characters?

Yes, depending on the genre, a well-written blurb can do all these things. Maybe not all in the same one. But a good blurb will touch on a combination of story facets. 

 A good blurb is NOT a mini-synopsis. A blurb is AD COPY.

In other words, you don't want to tell the reader about your book, you want to make the reader buy your book. The point is to show the reader in as few words as possible, 

'Hey! Look at this--if you read this book, you are guaranteed a certain experience.' 
  
So first, you deduce what experience the reader wants from your genre of fiction. And you probably know this instinctively and use it to write your stories, but here we’re drilling down to the components so we can break them out.

In Christian romance, sweet romance, our readers want a heroine, a hero, a knotty, believable problem or wound for each of them, and then we want the two thrown into a situation that will not only force them to grow spiritually and emotionally to succeed, and give them that black moment when all seems lost, but we want them to finally learn that the other person is God's choice for them to spend the rest of their life growing with, and we want them to triumph in some way. 

And although we don't want sex, we do still want a sense of the romantic tension between the protagonists. Tension between protagonists sells. And again, I know you know that, but we’re going to bring that out in the blurb, to hook the reader.

** If you write historical fiction, the reader also wants to know immediately the time period, so they can read on or move on. 

And I did say the specific is terrific, didn't I? Let's get to it.

A good blurb will have

The Tagline - an over-arching hook 

and/or

The Tiny Blurb – this is something I do for my clients. It’s a very short blurb that really sums up the characters & their problem. Amazon now gives us that tiny little place beside the book cover, and then readers must click ‘read more’ if they want the rest of your blurb. It can stand alone, or work with the full blurb as an introduction.

The Body of Blurb

•    The character by first & last name, what they do/occupation and how they feel/the start of their emotional story journey. And if you have 2 POV characters, they’ll each get this.

•     Next, what's happened in the past that’s influencing the way they live now? 

•     For a later book in a series, what’s happened in the last book(s) to cause internal or external conflict? 

•     The complication - What's going on so they must act? 

•     Setting - Tie it in with the story conflict.

•     Selling paragraph - This is where you can say 'if you like A Certain Author you'll love this book', or ask questions 'Can these characters win out against whatever they're battling?' and make it an actual question. 

•    Call to Action - This sounds simplistic, but this is where you poke the reader and say 'Do it!'

 And now … time for a sample.

Here’s the blurb for Tina Radcliffe’s re-issue of The Rosetti Curse, a sweet romantic comedy.

The Rosetti Curse
Author: Tina Radcliffe

TINY BLURB

Tagline: A Romantic Comedy of Italian Proportions …
Can a widow determined never to re-marry and a cop who's been engaged too often find love together? Or will an old curse keep them apart? 

FULL BLURB

A Romantic Comedy of Italian Proportions …

Can a widow determined never to re-marry and a cop who's been engaged too often find love together? Or will an old curse keep them apart?

She's done with marriage …
A curse has widowed three generations of Tessa Rosetti's family. And she may look good in black, but after surviving a husband, she's not going there again. 

Back in Silver Ridge, Colorado, she'll attend her mother's second wedding, help at the family bakery, but no romance! Until she finds her first love, Riley, bleeding on her front doorstep. He always did make her want to bend the rules--and all grown up, he's more attractive than ever.

He's through with romance …
Thomas Riley went from local bad boy to California cop. He's back to settle his grandma's estate, and to escape the media frenzy over his latest failed engagement, this time to a Hollywood starlet. 

But he discovers someone is cooking up more than biscotti at Tessa’s stepfather's cookie factory. Riley won't let her investigate alone--not with danger looming. He's impressed with her courage, intrigued by her spirit, and more attracted every hour.

Can this couple find a way to a shared future before the last cookie crumbles?
 
CALL TO ACTION

Find out if old curses are made to be broken--get your copy of The Rosetti Curse today!

The good news is, if you want to learn to blurb your own books, you can. I did … although I’ll confess that as I learn more about writing blurbs, I’ve gone back and redone several of mine … more than a few times.

Go ahead, Seekers and Villagers, Be Brave! Post a Blurb You’ve Written. We’re all here to learn, right?

If you do not want to write your own, but now see how important they are … well, that’s where I come in! 

Contact me @  theblurbqueen@outlook.com
                      @  Contact Form on my website
                
Also on TheBlurbQueen.com you’ll find my Prices, Portfolio, & Referrals by satisfied clients!

You can visit me on Facebook www.facebook.com/TheBlurbQueen/
                                &    Twitter http://www.twitter.com/TheBlurbQueen

Best,
Cathryn Cade
Aka The Blurb Queen

We've got a $25 Amazon gift card up for grabs today. Leave a comment, and/or leave a blurb and you are in. Winner announced in the Weekend Edition.

Royal Decree of the Day!   Everyone who shares a blurb of theirs or another author shall be entered in an additional drawing for a Seeker book of choice. E or print. Winner announced in the Weekend Edition.

What's Your Fifteen-Word Wonder?

Recently Camy and I went to Sonoma to a wonderful retreat hosted by our agency. There was a great line-up of speakers which included editors, publicists, financial advisers, agents, bestselling authors and more. Some of those included Andy McGuire of Moody and Andrea Doering, formerly of Crossways Book Club and now editor at Revell. She talked about what it takes to make browsers into buyers. Jeanette Thomason, Editorial Director at WaterBrook Press also touched on this subject when she discussed branding.

The thing that stuck out the most to me was, at least one of the speakers mentioned that book buyers give publishing houses approximately 20 seconds of time per book. In that time frame, the publisher has to "sell" the book or convince the bookseller to carry a particular title. Normally they have a few-minute conversation where the book buyer hears a slew of short blurbs in a row from the publisher, who is pitching a sequence of projects.

So we were encouraged to break our stories down into one 15 word sentence. Because basically, that's all you have to WOW the editors who will then have to WOW their committees who will then have to WOW the bookseller who will then have to WOW the reader. All of these people will decide in a matter of seconds whether to buy your book.

Scary but true.


juxtaposition

–noun 1. an act or instance of placing close together or side by side, esp. for comparison or contrast.
2. the state of being close together or side by side.



Camy and I roomed in a cottage together and we discussed our stories and how we could insert within that 15 word sentence a juxtaposition of terms that would hook readers, the first of which is an editor.

I became totally enthralled with this juxtaposition concept. I'd heard that blurbs should leave the editor intrigued, but the juxtaposition of terms was a new concept for me.

We know we have a matter of 1 sentence to hook a potential editor or agent.

How do we do that?

Best-selling author, Brandilyn Collins, known for her "Seatbelt Suspense" has great advice on verbal pitches on her Web site here. A verbal pitch really is the same thing as this 15 word blurb (story summary) I'm talking about.

I'm counting on my fellow Seekervillains and you commentators to pitch in with advice. As well as any other resources you've discovered that talk about how to come up with these one-liner book zingers.

So today I thought it would be fun to play with our blurbs here in Seekerville.

I'm also hoping my Seeker sisters will pitch in and share their past and present blurbs as well as the process they use/d to come up with them.

Ones I came up with for the stories I'm working on now:
1. She just wanted to be a hero. The hero just wanted a home.
2. An attorney with traffic tickets crashes into a Harley-riding hero on a mission.
3. Still working to condense my third to under 15 words. LOL!

The second one sort of juxtaposes with itself because attorneys should be law-abiding yet she has a problem speeding. Also, Harley riders are cliched to be bad boys. Yet, because I love to turn stereotypes on their heads, this bad boy is an elite rescuer and First Class Hero.

The one for my debut novel that sold to Steeple Hill said:
A special ops soldier meets rapid-fire resistance after pledging allegiance to a promise made to a little ill boy.

An alternate blurb for that story was:
A teacher of special needs children determined to make the rest of life matter to a dying child finds something special and unexpected along the way.

Those were longer than 15 words but at the time, I was happy to get them down to 30 secs. LOL! And obviously Steeple Hill saw something about the blurbs to like because they garnered editorial requests.

Now I know I need to shoot for 20 seconds and no more. Quite a challenge for a wordy-bird like me.

So let's get started:

---If you write or have a story or even an idea, how about you share your 15 word blurb with us (in the comment section) and let us give you our feedback on it.

---If you are a reader only, share a back cover blurb you read recently that convinced you to buy a book.

Ready, set, BLURB!

Cheryl