How To Write Good Fiction Book Blurbs
People talk endlessly about fiction book blurbs. That’s for good reason: A blurb is a sales page, and if you read my site, you’ll know that sales pages are the golden goose made real. A good sales page can make or break any product.
Fiction book blurbs are no different. That’s why it’s a tragedy when I see them done wrong.
Luckily, citizens of the world, I’m going to teach you how to write fiction book blurbs in this article. I’ll give you all the elements and tell you how to put them together. Then at the end I’ll give you the secret key that you have to think about above all.
How to Write A Blurb For A Fiction Book
This is the easiest type of blurb to write because of a) the examples you can find, b) the nature of the book and c) the more you tease the reader, the better your sales will be. I know an author who used to follow a structure like a non-fiction book blurb would have – he’d write:
This happens and then the two heroes find danger and then they save the day in this epic fantasy battle.
This is the sort of thing you do for non-fiction: You give people exactly what’s in the book.
Guess how many copies he sold? Next to none.
When he learned that being a book-tease was the name of the game, he started shifting copies a lot quicker.
Here’s the deal with how to write fiction book blurbs. In any book you’re going to have the following (or some approximation thereof):
- A hero (and probably a heroine in some form)
- A conflict for the hero emotionally
- An event that’s so terrible or awesome it changes his/her life
- A villain of some sort
- A happy ending – or a conclusion at least.
This is basic “Hero’s Journey” stuff and nothing spectacular. I’m going to tell you what to do with each section.
Happy Ever After
Firstly: Happy Ever After or The Conclusion. Forget It. It has no place in your blurb. No place at all. Nobody will buy the book if you give them the ending. Check out all the blurbs of books you already know the ending to – how many mention the ending? They don’t. Never. Forget it.
Now, if you’re writing some genres, people might want to know this beforehand. Romance is a big one and some mysteries also include the information. If you’re going to do this, don’t make it a part of the blurb. Write it at the end, in brackets and italics. Something like:
Spoiler alert: Every book in this series has steamy romance, standalone stories and HEA.
Spoiler alert: This mystery is puzzling but not grotesque. No mutilations here, only a fiendish caper to solve. Our detective will solve it. Will you?
A final point on that… Don’t reveal the ending. Even if you’ve got a spoiler, don’t say things like, “He asks her to marry him” or “It’s Colonel Mustard in the Kitchen with the Lead Pipe.”
The Event
Secondly: The Event. Nuclear bomb gets dropped on New York. Hamlet’s Dad dies. Don’t mention these explicitly.
You can mention an inciting incident: Frodo getting the ring. Harry Potter getting invited to Wizard’s school. But the main gist of the book is not something you give away explicitly. Simply refer to it as, “Something terrible” or “Something unexpected.”
Say the bomb gets dropped on New York – refer to that as, “a catastrophic event.” What do you do with that catastrophic event? Frame it with the stuff below.
Hero and Conflicts
These are the bread and butter of your blurb. Romance authors are the absolute masters of it, and they’ve taken pages out of cold reading manuals. Make your hero as specific yet universal as possible. It doesn’t matter what your character is in terms of their job, race or background, but the conflict is universal.
An ex-soldier is hiding out in the woods of Alaska with only his dog and his daughter as a companion. When his dog is killed and his daughter is taken, he can only do two things: Get her back and get revenge.
Nobody can relate to an ex-soldier hiding from terrorists or whatever. Everyone can relate to someone killing your dog and stealing your daughter – even if you’ve never had a dog and don’t have a daughter. Specific character = good. Universal conflict = good. This is also the inciting incident.
After a series of cryptic messages, he narrows his search to one man from his past. He’s in New York, and our Hero is coming for him.
That’s when it happens.
Not only will a catastrophic event stop our Hero from ever finding the man but it’ll also change his life – and the world – forever. With the man assumed dead and the trail for his daughter colder than stone, what will our Hero do now?
This is a weak example, but it gets the point across. Guy is looking for his girl, bomb goes off, he thinks that the day is lost. Also, we’ve referred to a villain in vague and uncertain terms.
The Villain
The villain should always be treated like a chaotic element that is going to throw a spanner in the works. Nothing more, nothing less.
Any story is basically A to B… and the journey is the hero overcoming his inner conflict by means of the external event.
A story about a man’s daughter going missing and a bomb going off in New York aren’t books about a kidnapping and a bomb. They’re just incidents that help the hero turn into super-Dad.
The villain is never the main nemesis in a novel – he’s an antagonist and another obstacle in the path of the hero.
Refer to him or her in the blurb as some mysterious creature who wants to cause chaos.
Final Thoughts
Alright… you’ve got to the point where you have framed your book as an emotional conflict that your hero has to endure. It might be the girl who just can’t find the right guy or the wizard whose powers have magically deserted him.
Surprise, surprise. This emotional flaw in your character gets them in a sticky situation. The girl is thrust into danger with no hunky man to call for help and the wizard gets abducted by evil minions of Satan.
Who knows what actually happens after that… but your readers know it’s bad because you literally say, “That isn’t the worst thing that can happen… it gets worse. Much worse. In fact, it gets so bad it looks like it’s OVER for our girl or wizard.”
Oh… and even if they get out of that sticky situation, there’s a temptress who will stop at nothing to ensure that our girl doesn’t live happily ever after and there’s an evil necromancer who has been cooking up an evil potion for centuries.
There are a few things running through those examples but the key thing which I haven’t mentioned explicitly is this: you tell them nothing.
Really, in terms of a book’s structure, the inciting incident is the first third of the book. You never mention anything beyond that. You tease the hell out of your reader and that – in copywriting terms – is to build desire.
And as we know from copywriting, you build desire and then you hit them with the call to action.
This can be a simple, “Buy my book right now to find out what happens” but you’ll find most good blurbs end with a rhetorical question. This is especially true of mass-market paperbacks and older books where the effectiveness of them was being discovered:
- Will he ever see his daughter again?
- Can she find love in a hopeless place?
- Will he break the spell cast upon his family and vanquish the evil wizard into another dimension?
There you have it. This is my formula for an awesome fiction book blurb.
At some point, I’ll talk about writing blurbs for non-fiction books… if only because it’s completely different.