And here you thought writing that full length novel was a
chore — mazel tov by the way on such an achievement — now you have to come up
with loglines and blurbs, YIKES!
Whether your book was 25-thousand words or 125-thousand words,
suddenly you feel frozen at having to boil it all down to a sentence, a short
paragraph or a short summary. With all of the action you packed into your soon
to be bestselling (you hope) novel, how are you going to come up with just a
few words that captures the essence?
Like it or not until your name becomes a household word,
folks will want an easy way to know if they will be interested in investing
their precious time and hard-earned funds into your book. Entice them. Of
course the presentation, book cover design and intriguing title will help to
grab the attention of a potential reader, but what happens when he picks the
book up and wants more assurance?
A logline is a teaser. Loglines are short, think Twitter
tweets and shorter. Try to use no more than 5 to 12 words to pique a reader’s
interest. Questions work well. For my book Karma Visited I simply asked “Do you
believe in Karma?” What is the premise of your story? What is the most
important lesson learned? Is there something local that draws a
parallel between your community and the theme of your book? Or is there something that makes this relevant to current news?
The blurb is often referred to as an elevator pitch. Imagine
you have this fantastic idea and you need to present it to your boss. But she
is really busy today and the only time she is willing to give you is that ride
down to the main floor. You get into the elevator and you have only the time it
takes until the doors open downstairs and she is going to walk off and forget
you. Whew.
Go through your complete manuscript and write down all of the
KEY points of your story. Go through your list and circle the most important
items. Still too many? Go through it again. If you are having difficulty you
can ask a friend to list the most important things in your story and work from
there. Try to include more items from early in the story (first 3 chapters?) so
that you do not include anything from the conclusion or after the conflict.
You should prepare more than one blurb, start with 25 words,
then 50, 100 and 150 words, and then work on a 250-word summary of your book. Begin
with the blurb that is most comfortable for you. If you happen to pick the 100
word blurb, for instance, that work off of that for shorter blurbs. Same goes
for adding words to a shorter blurb. Refer to the list of the most important
themes in your story. Do not give any spoilers, let your readers want to find
out what happens in the story by reading it.
Writing
Assignment: Using no more than three paragraphs summarize your story, do not include
spoilers. This summary may be reminiscent of book reports from middle school.
Writing
Prompt: Make a list of single keywords relevant to your story that you could
use for blog posts, these keywords should be usable for retail book lists as
well. Choose words that would interesting and would attract readers looking for
just YOUR kind of writing (i.e.: contemporary, romance, crime, legal, occult…)
Challenge
Assignment: Read thru your most recent WIP up to the first 3 to 6 chapters (or
use another author’s work if you don’t have one). List 10 to 15 of the most
crucial moments of your story. Write one sentence for each item on your list;
write it so one sentence flows into the next. How many words do you have? Add
or reduce words to make blurbs from 25 to 250 words long (25, 50, 100, 150 and
250)
