BAIPA

Other than your book cover and title, nothing is more important in attracting readers to your book than your blurb, whether it’s on your back cover, your online sales page, or your promotional collateral.

In the olden days, before self-publishing, websites, and social media, publishers wrote book blurbs. Now, if you’re self-published, you need to write a memorable book description so your book stands out in today’s crowded marketplace. But how do you distill your several-hundred page book into one or more memorable paragraphs?

Your blurb is not a synopsis, but a promise that persuades potential readers they must read your book. You reveal enough to entice your readers, but hide enough so they’ll pay to find out more. You also want to share setting, genre, and tone. Is it light and funny or dark and tense?

In this workshop, we’ll review various examples of effective blurbs for novels (“Jurassic Park,” “Harry Potter”) and non-fiction (Marie Kondo’s “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up”) and various formulas you can use.

This is a hands-on workshop. We will solicit blurbs from participants in advance and then project some of them on a screen and work together to make them persuasive and memorable.

Key takeaways:

• Learn formulas to give potential readers a clear idea of what your book is about without giving away too much.
• Learn how to create a hook that will entice the reader and a punchline to make the sale.
• Learn how to use keywords in your description to improve organic search.
• If your book is nonfiction, like self-help, learn how to frame your book as the best solution to a problem.