The Writer's Guide to a Good Story

Creating Good Blurbs

So a blurb's basically those descriptions you put up for your stories before people click away at the first chapter to start reading them. I am not going to call myself the expert at making blurbs, but I'm going to give you some tips about the basic "Do's" and "Don'ts" of making them.

1) DON'T make your blurbs too long. Seriously. If your blurb's more than eight paragraphs, I'm going to fall off my chair and to the carpet, asleep.

2) DON'T make your blurbs too short. If you're creating a work of fiction, your blurb should not just say "Anna and Chase get married and live happily ever after."

Here's one of the more perverted guidelines I saw on a poster in my English class once: your blurb should be like a dress. Long enough to cover the subject matter, but short enough to keep it interesting.

 Not sure why that was on a poster in a middle school classroom, but I take my advic where I can get it. 

One thing I want to say about length is that while I haven't seen many blurbs on here that were very long, I have seen plenty of blurbs on this site that are only about one sentence. In all honesty, a lot of the time, people seem to pull off one-sentence blurbs really well. 

But there are some things I have noticed about stories on here with one-sentence blurbs. If you're going to try to write a really short blurb, make sure you pack as much punch in it as you can. Make it quirky, silly, interesting, etc. 

Another exception I've seen to the blurb length rule is with books that are part of a very long or elaborate series. Again, I have no big issue with this because with a very long book part of a long series, it is understandable why an author might want to lengthen the blurb a little to clarify the story for new readers. I guess the big lesson here is depending on book type or length, it is not a major crime to break the blurb-length rule as long as you know what you're doing. 

3) DON'T use a stereotypical hook. I cannot tell you how many times I've seen "Anna was your typical good girl. Then she meets Ethan, the bad boy."

With a stereotypical hook, the reader will most likely feel that they already know what is going to happen in your story, and that there is no point in reading it. 

4) DON'T give away too much in your blurbs. That's as bad as those trailers people complain about that give away the whole movie.

No one's going to want to read a book with this blurb: "So Jamie had a problem. She meets a mysterious boy with a secret identity that turns out to be Ross Lynch!"

5) DO create an interesting hook. If you include an excerpt from your book that talks about the character's head being drilled open by a psychopath, I will definitely want to read it.

6) DO get to the point quickly. I don't care about your character's pet cat, her locker number, or the color of the handle on her tennis racket. Maybe in the story itself, I'll want to know more about it, but for the blurb, it will probably make me want to put the book down. You state the problem or name an interesting thing that happens in your story. Get to the good stuff.

7) DO keep it vague. That ties into what I said earlier. We don't want to know too much about your character, and you don't want to info-dump. That'll just confuse the reader and make them lose interest in your story.

8) DO end your blurb with a cliffhanger. For example, "Alvin needs to find out what's causing his illness before he dies."

If you need examples from real life, check out movie trailers, or the backs of books. Even the blurbs of other stories on here. Notice how some books may actually put short excerpts in the front with the climax or the most interesting part of the story. Things like that tend to entice a reader or draw them in. 

Remember that a blurb is not the same thing as a summary. A summary would give away the ending. And it sums your story up (Hence the word summary), instead of drawing in readers.