‘I feared I’d never get the blurb finished in time for the launch’ – guest post at Jami Gold’s

1. Take 100,000 words.

2. Stuff that into three paragraphs or so.

3. Don’t leave out anything important.

Welcome to summarising your book for the back cover or for pitching to an agent.

A few of you may well remember the frantic email sessions last summer as we batted ideas back and forth for my novel’s flap copy. I proved that despite having written a reasonably lucid novel, I was entirely incapable of distilling it into a suitable blurb. I think it took six weeks, several false starts and wrong turnings – many of which I didn’t want to abandon because they’d been hard enough. Did three paragraphs ever cause such anguish?

Anyway, I learned a lot in the process, and today I’m at the blog of paranormal author Jami Gold, sharing all my tips.

One of those tips is to not become too attached to the wrong soundbite. Boy, I nearly hobbled myself there. You can see my blurb outtakes at Jami’s lovely blog, but in the meantime I thought it would be fun to share here some wrong blurbing that we’ve done.

Tell me, in the comments, the blurb or pitch you had to junk – and why it was soooooo wrong. I look forward to sharing your pain…