Write Your Blurb In Easy Steps
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Before you start writing your blurb, ask yourself: who will be reading this book? This question is important, because it helps you to picture the reader as you write. Once you have an image of your ideal reader in your mind, you’ll find it’s much easier to work on your book. Working out who your readers will be also gives you a head start in writing the marketing section of your book proposal.
Let’s stay with the book on natural healthcare for pets. Who would be interested in this book? Make a list. Your list could start with: pet owners who use natural healthcare, companies that manufacture natural petcare products, and veterinary surgeons.
Then go on and create your blurb in the following easy steps.
One: Make a list of the benefits to the reader
Your reader will buy the book because of the benefits the book gives her. Features are different from benefits. For example, you may be presenting recipes for making pet remedies. The pet remedies is a feature. The benefit of the pet remedies could be that they save the reader trips to the vet and money on expensive commercial products. YOU MUST USE THE BENEFITS IN YOUR BLURB.
First list all of the features your book will contain. Then make a list of all the benefits.
Take down three or four books from your shelves, and study their blurbs. Do they list the benefits? How are the benefits presented?
(You’ll occasionally find that the author and publisher, not to mention the publisher’s sales and marketing departments, were all asleep when the book was in production, and the blurb contains a long list of features. Work out how you’d convert those features into benefits. This is excellent practise for you.)
Two: Rank the benefits
Rank the benefits in their order of importance. You may want to get some help here. Read your list of benefits to a friend, and ask how she’d rank them.
Three: Write several blurbs, in various lengths
In addition to your list of benefits, your blurb can contain an intriguing fact, or a short anecdote. For example, if you once saved the life of your pet with a natural healthcare remedy, you could tell this story as part of your blurb.
When you’ve completed your blurb, in around 200 to 300 words, create shorter versions. Create one of 100 words, another of 50 words, and you can even try to pare it down to 25 words.
Here’s a one sentence version of the sample blurb for LifeTime: “LifeTime: Better Time Management in 21 Days shows you how to manage your time so that you can achieve any goals you set for yourself.” As you can see, the sentence is taken from the longer blurb.
Essential blurb add-on: the testimonial
Publishers love cover testimonials, because they know that they sell books. How many times have you bought a book because someone you’d heard of and respected recommended the book to you? If you know anyone famous, or can get in touch with them, now’s the time to contact them to ask them whether they’d be willing to read your book and provide a quote for you to use on the cover.
Outlining your book
Start with a mind map
This is where your blurb comes into its own. You will be able to formulate a basic outline from your blurb as a mind map, or cluster diagram. For each book written, You should use mind maps. Since a book is long, it is hard to keep the entire thing straight in your mind — mind maps help you to do this.
Here is a sample mind map for Making The Internet Work For Your Business:
Diagramming your initial ideas of what you’d like the book to contain gives you an overview, from which you can develop a more detailed outline. Go through all the material you’ve gathered so far, and insert headings into your mind map.
Remember that at this stage, nothing is set in stone. Just work as quickly as you can, don’t think too much about it. You just want to get an idea of how much material you have.
Create your outline
Working from your mind map, create a chapter outline of your book. The easiest way to do this is just to write numbers from one to ten or one to 15 down the page, and type in chapter headings. Most books have around ten to 15 chapters. If yours has more than 15, that’s fine.
Only got three or four headings? No matter how little material you have, or how much, don’t worry. This is the initial stages, remember. Just work quickly so that you get something down on paper. Tomorrow we’ll be researching your book, and as you research, you’re sure to find many more headings for your outline.
In these very early stages of working on your proposal, your subconscious mind is your greatest resource. Therefore, if you get an impulse to write down something, write it down, even if it doesn’t make much sense to you. The reason you got this idea will come to you.
related post
- Write The Blurb And Outline Your Book
- Write the proposal
- Concept Generator 1: What You Are Good At
- Step Number 7 Write a powerful, attention seizing headline
- Can't dedicate a calendar week to writing your proposal?
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