Back in November, a friend of mine showed a promo for a new documentary he is shooting at the S.U.C.C.E.S.S. for Autism event.
Several hundred people showed up including some former members of the Cleveland Browns (Kevin Mack and Bob Golic among others). I met many new people including one of the filmmakers who helped shoot the film.
After several beers, he asked me what I did and I said I was a writer and had just released my first book.
"What's the book about?" he asked.
I wasn't as ready for this question as I should have been. I stumbled and launched into a detailed explanation of what the book was about. He interrupted me and jokingly said, "You really need to work on your pitch."
He said, try again, and made fun of my feeble next attempts. Finally, in desperation I blurted out: "I write about what people who don't believe in religion believe in."
"Now that's interesting," he said, "I might read that."
I learned as a writer you have to be ready for this question. It's the first question people will ask when you say you've written a book.
To save you my embarrassment, let's look at some good and not so good book blurbs.
Let's start with the good and move towards what I think are the progressively better.
1. Helen Walsh's Brass
The blurb on Brass reads:
Millie, a young college student in England, drifts away from a promising academic career into a deceptively inviting world of low street culture, myriad mind-altering substances, and sexual hedonism, pushing herself to the very limits. At the same time, she craves something nurturing, authentic, and profound from her broken family and longtime friendships. Millie's descent is one toward either self-understanding or destruction.
Raw, poetic, sexually frenetic, and utterly alive, Brass is one of the most startling novels to come out of Britain since Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting.
The purpose of the book blurb is to generate interest.
The writer of Walsh's book blurb does a pretty good job in under 100 words. Millie, the main character, is introduced and we know her conflict. She is playing with fire and will either learn about herself from it or not make it. As a reader (or most readers anyways), we're pulling for her to make it.
I also like how the book is compared to Trainspotting. As long as the comparison is honest, I can say "I liked Trainspotting, maybe I'll like this ..." Comparisons often help people out tremendously.
The writer (who probably isn't Walsh herself) also generates interest by dropping risque hints about the main character's descent. Drugs and sex, ok, maybe I'll bite.
I do, however, recognize it as a bit manipulative. My question going in is, is this just going to be about drugs and sex? That is, is it just going to be about titillation?
Because if it is, maybe I'm better off looking at porn on the Internet. Still, never underestimate the power of drugs and sex.
2. Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49
From my 1990 HarperPerennial edition of The Crying of Lot 49:
Oedipa Maas is made the executor of the estate of her late boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity. As she diligently carries out her duties, Oedipa is enmeshed in what would appear to be a worldwide conspiracy, meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not-inconsiderable amount of self-knowledge.
Pynchon's blurb creates a pull using difference and language. The unusual sounding names suggest characters that might be more than characters, or characters that are parodies of characters or types.
The fact that the plot is simply the main character carrying out her duties while around her swirls conspiracy, interesting characters, and some things she happens to pick up along the way suggest a very different book.
I think this is about the right length for a book blurb - 50 words or so. You can go as high as 150 but any more than that is probably too much.
Based on this book blurb alone, I probably wouldn't have bought or read the book. It is different though and I might have read 10-20 pages in to see if I liked.
3. Truman Capote's In Cold Blood
The blurb on the back of Capote's In Cold Blood is the classic mystery blurb:
On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was apparently no motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues.
You've got me. Not just a murder, but I murder where four people are killed by point-blank shotguns blasts and there's no clues.
The blurb to Tana French's In The Woods is similar:
Three children leave their small Dublin neighborhood to play in the surrounding woods. Hours later, their mothers' calls go unanswered. When the police arrive, they find only one of the children, gripping a tree trunk in terror, wearing blood-filled sneakers, and unable to recall a single detail of the previous hours.
Even better, missing kids and a lone witness.
What about non-fiction books?
4. E.O. Wilson's The Meaning of Human Existence
One of the best ways to generate interest in a non-fiction book is to pose a question and or help solve a problem of interest.
E.O. Wilson asks:
How did humanity originate and why does a species like ours exist on this planet?
Do we have a special place, even a destiny in the universe?
Where are we going, and perhaps the most difficult question of all, "Why?"
Yep, I bought this book because it asks the hard questions.
The problem is that I still haven't read it because there have been much smaller questions I've needed to focus on.
Hopefully this summer.
Just remember, if you're going to ask questions like these, you better have a heckuva book to back it up. E.O. Wilson might.
5. Chip and Dan Heath's Made to Stick
Chip and Dan Heath focus on something a little more practical.
From the blurb for Made to Stick:
What sticks?
Whether you're a CEO or a full-time mom, you've got ideas that you need to communicate: a new product coming to market, a strategy that you want to sell your boss, values you are trying to instill in your children. But it's hard - fiendishly so - to transform the way people think and act.
In this book, you'll learn the six key qualities of an idea that is made to stick.
The authors pose the question, give some examples of why this question is important, and then tell you the book is about a manageable number of ways (six) to solve the problem.
Everything about this blurb says professional. I've found the book just as useful as the blurb describes.
6. George Orwell's 1984
The jacket writer for my Signet Classics copy of 1984 wrote:
The world of 1984 is one in which eternal warfare is the price of bleak prosperity, in which the Party keeps itself in power by complete control over man's actions and his thoughts. As the lovers Winston Smith and Julia learn when they try to evade the Thought Police, and then join the underground opposition, the Party can smash the last impulse of love, the last flicker of individuality.
I think this is quite good. It's a love story in the face of bureaucratic power. "Thought Police" is a tremendously interesting concept. I want to know more.
Unfortunately, the writer didn't stop there:
But let the reader beware: 1984 is more than a satire of totalitarian barbarism. "It means us, too," says Erich Fromm in his Afterword. It is not merely a political novel but also a diagnosis of the deepest alienation in the mind of Organization Man.
I don't really care about Eric Fromm. Ok, maybe he was more important in 1961 when this was written. The psychobabble did not age well, however.
For this reason, I would suggest avoiding buzzwords or current slang that might go out of style. Saying that your book is "amazeballs" or "ROTFL" will probably hold up about as well as trying to say something profound and philosophical on the cover of your jacket. If Eric Fromm can't hold up after 50 years, how will your philosophical musings fare?
The author kept going with his mistakes though:
George Orwell writes with a swift clean style that has come down from Defoe. Like Defoe, he creates an imaginary world that is completely convincing - from the first sentence to the last four words ... words which might stand as the epitaph of the twentieth century.
Am I really going to read this because it's like Defoe? Show me what the author writes like, don't tell me. It sounds exaggerated.
And guess what I did with that comment about the last four words? I read them and never read the book. I was 15.
To this day, I still remember and still haven't read the book.
7. Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night
How do you write about big ideas without sounding pretentious?
Kurt Vonnegut does one of the best jobs I've seen in his introduction to Mother Night:
This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don't think it's a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
This wasn't on the cover of my Dell paperback copy but I think it should have been.
Add "This book is about Howard Campell, Jr., an American Nazi trying to make his way in America in 1961" and I would have read it.
Or, even better, this quote alone could have been the book blurb:
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
8. Jane Shapiro's The Dangerous Husband
Hands down, Jane Shapiro's blurb for The Dangerous Husband was my favorite on my bookshelf:
Once upon a time there was a husband who had many admirable qualities but was accident-prone ... and a wife who, in order to survive her marriage, thought she just might have to kill him. This mordant, glittering novel tells their story.
Sparkling, not a word of waste, and boy do I ever want to know about this character's attempts to kill her husband to survive her marriage.
By comparison, the book blurb for Robert Coover's The Public Burning was a short novel. True, it was 1977 and attention spans were longer. But I would guess that some nameless, soulless cover jacket book blurber wrote Robert Coover's blurb and not Robert Coover.
I'm pretty sure Jane Shapiro wrote her book blurb. I read The Public Burning because of Robert Coover's reputation. I read The Dangerous Husband because of the book blurb.
Shapiro creates intrigue through absence and comic tone: "Once upon a time ..." We know the plot minus the details and the outcome. As a reader, I wanted to know both.
What you don't include can be just as important as what you do include.
Btw, The Dangerous Husband is every bit as good as the book blurb. The only two books I laughed anywhere near as hard reading were Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces.
The moral of this story
The purpose of a book blurb is to generate interest, not to tell the entire story of your book in 800 words.
If you're struggling try answering the question, why would this interest someone? If someone asks you, "What's your book about?" at a party, you don't want to actually tell them what it's about.
I cannot stress enough the importance of having an interesting pitch because your core response will likely be in any promotional materials, descriptions, blurbs, or just plain conversations about your book. It will appear on Amazon and Goodreads and everywhere you are online. If you have a good blurb or pitch, you will quite likely sell some books.
Any good, memorable, or horrible book blurbs you'd like to share?
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David Akadjian is the author of The Little Book of Revolution: A Distributive Strategy for Democracy.