Welcome back to Austen Promises and the Writer’s Journal!
This post was my Austen Authors blog post for Monday, so if you don’t follow that blog, you still get to see the post. Just without the images. LOL
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One of our duties or jobs as a writer, especially if we are self-published, is writing blurbs for our books. This can be more complicated than it seems.
If you are a voracious reader like me, you have read thousands of blurbs. Some were intriguing, some not so much. Some inspired you to snatch a book up and buy it, but others only urged you to put the book back. (I confess, I have put very few books back. 😉 ) I have seen enough book blurbs to know how they should go, and so writing them has rarely been a difficult task for me.
However, as a full-time author who must examine every area of her writing business with an eye to improving sales, I have discovered that, as good as I think my first blurbs were, they needed improvement if they were going to entice readers to buy my books in a market that is far more crowded than it was three years ago, when I published my first book.
But what to do? How was I to improve upon an area that I felt I really had a handle on? For starters, I listened to some podcasts about it. There are several podcasters who devote air time to helping other writers. Joanna Penn (who writes thrillers as JF Penn) and Mark Dawson (another author of thrillers) are my two favorites. Both are British, so I get to hear the accent, and both give excellent information. I don’t remember who I learned about blurbs from now, but I’m pretty sure it was one of them.
You’re probably wondering what improvements I made to my blurbs. To be honest, I mainly kept the summary part the same. I focused a bit more on how I presented each main character, and devoted one short paragraph to Lizzy and one to Darcy. The biggest change came in the form of additional paragraphs. The blurbs on my newest books now have a short paragraph stating the book title, series name, and my name, but in a catchy way. Then, there is a paragraph that gives three or four adjectives that describe my book, along with the genre. I generally use “sweet” as one of the descriptors, because that’s part of my branding and accurately describes my books.
I add one final paragraph to my blurb when I upload the e-books. Because of Amazon’s policy of cutting page numbers in half (a policy I have described here before to no avail and that is a dead horse that I refuse to continue beating) I add a short, one or two sentence paragraph to the end of my blurb, stating the word count and the page count in print. Even if buyers refuse to pay attention to it, I feel better knowing that I have been honest and transparent with them by adding that bit. If they ignore it and criticize me for page count later, they are the ones who look like fools, not I.
That being said, here’s the blurb for my new release, Caroline’s Censure, which is due to hit retailers in the next week or so:
One newly married couple plus one troublemaking best friend’s sister equals a challenge to face.
Fitzwilliam and Elizabeth Darcy have already dealt with plenty of people who object to their marriage. Now they are faced with one more.
Caroline Bingley, Darcy’s best friend’s sister, has always wanted Darcy for herself. Now that he is married and can no longer be hers, she resents the new Mrs. Darcy and will stop at nothing to cause discord between the newly-wedded couple. When she hires someone to make it appear that Darcy is unfaithful, will Elizabeth believe his claims of innocence, or will she turn away from him and live a life of mistrust and heartbreak?
Caroline’s Censure is the third book in Zoe Burton’s Darcy Marriage Series. If you like catty villains, devoted heroes, and sweet romance, you’ll love this Pride and Prejudice novella variation. Purchase Caroline’s Censure to read the Darcys’ latest adventure today.
Can you identify the parts I described?
Look for Caroline’s Censure to arrive very soon at all major e-retailers.
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Come back next Wednesday for another peek into my journal! <3
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