The Blurb Workshop

Description

A blurb is not a summary. It is an advertisement for a feeling, and it is almost always written by the one person alive who cannot forget the plot.

So this makes you build it in pieces before you write a single sentence of it. The promise, the person, the want, the obstacle, the cost, the question. Then you write it too long, cut it in half, and test it on people who have not read the book.

Includes twenty-four specific ways blurbs fail, a fifteen-point test, and the shorter versions you need for ads, socials, your newsletter, and the moment someone asks you at a party what your book is about.

What’S Inside

• Before you write — read twenty blurbs in your category with a log page, and work out what your reader is actually buying
• The pieces — the six answers, then the one-line version written ten times
• The draft — too long, then cut in half, then ten opening lines and ten closing lines
• Testing — a fifteen-point checklist and the stranger test, with five people and a page to record what they really said
• How blurbs fail — twenty-four ways, to read against your draft rather than in the abstract
• The other versions — retailer, ad copy, social, newsletter, the spoken one, and the comp line

What You Get

22 pages, completely undated — start any month, any year, any book.

3 color editions: Advocate (warm brown and copper), Harbor (deep blue), Press (black and slate blue). Choose one or print a mix.

Both paper sizes: US Letter (8.5 x 11) and A4.

6 PDF files in one instant download.

Print it as often as you like, forever. No subscription, nothing expires.

Format — Please Read

These are print-quality PDF files, designed to be printed at home, sent to a print shop, or added to a disc-bound or ring binder. They are not hyperlinked and they are not set up for tap-to-navigate use in GoodNotes, Notability, or similar note-taking apps. If you want to write on them on a tablet you can import and write over the pages with your stylus, the same as any PDF, but there are no clickable tabs.

A type-in edition is in progress and will be sent free to everyone who has already bought this.

Delivery

Instant download. Your files are available the moment your payment clears — nothing is mailed to you and there is no wait.

Terms

For your personal use, or for use inside your own author business, including work you do for your own pen names. Please don’t resell, share, or redistribute the files or their contents. A commercial and assistant license is coming for anyone who wants to use these with clients.

About

Made by The Indie Author’s Advocate. I’m an author with three pen names and an assistant to a good many more, and every one of these started as something I built for myself because the version I wanted did not exist.

Questions before you buy? Message me. I answer.