The Art of the Cover Blurb

Just in case y'all thought I know what the heck I'm doing, well, stop right here.  I'm wading through the strait between the waters of "HAVEN'T A CLUE" and "FIGURING IT OUT AS I GO".

For those of you who don't know the publishing lingo. The cover blurb is usually the back cover copy of a print book.

BUT it's more than that. It must:

• give the potential reader a taste of the story
• the feel for the author's writing style
• it must pull you into the story without giving anything away
• it must entice you to take the next step of opening the book

And I have to say that I failed miserably with FAERIE. I waited to write the blurb, spending over seven days and only God knows how many incarnations I wrote of the stupid thing.

AND I STILL GOT IT WRONG.

At least wrong for that story. I'm going to fix it, but I will say that I'll have my blurbs ready PRIOR to my final edit of the next story.

In fact, I have a potential blurb ready for Book Four, IT TROLLS FOR THEE. Yes, book four. Haven't written it yet. No clue what's going on in it. Oh, have some scene ideas, but that's it. First I have to reread #3 TROLL to see what I wrote to come up with a blurb for #3.

--yes, this is putting the cart before the horse, but it wasn't my fault. I woke up out of a dead sleep with this blurb in mind.

This isn't the final copy. Heck, this isn't even much more than some brain drippings onto a page. It could almost be considered an 'elevator pitch' or a logline. Here it is the rough copy :

Betrayed by her best friend.
Her goblin mentor captured by the Dark Ones.
The war in Celestia is heating up as the evil gains control by pain and death.

With only her human mother to help her, Kyte Webber must rescue her goblin mentor.  She knows she can't do it alone . . .

I'm playing with these lines:

New friends turn up in unlikely places.  Enemies will soon become her allies in the war.

Will I use this?

Don't know.  But I do know that the logline for book 3, FOR WHOM THE BELL TROLLS, basically allowed me to write the entire 50,000 word story in 19 days.

What was the logline?

Half-elven tween steals a Celestian book to help the ‘good’ side in the war, but inadvertently helps the Dark Ones gain power . . . oops.

Not genius, but it didn't have to be to work.

Later, Peeps!  I have a new story to write!

Log lines

On Monday, I had a little reality check concerning what writers need to produce when they finish a novel.

And it isn't just a fantastic novel . . . though that is an important part of the equation.

A writer needs to be able to write a long synopsis (8-10 pages, double spaced), a short synopsis (less than five pages, double spaced), a one page synopsis (single spaced) a blurb (a couple of paragraphs, 500 words MAX, think back cover copy of a book for query letter), and an elevator pitch (one or two lines, roughly 25 words).

So I was trolling through the normal blogs that I check daily and I came across the Query Tracker blog, about pitching log lines and one of the genres requested was YA fantasy. I'm writing a MG fantasy, so I thought 'what the hay'. The contest is now closed and the results are pending, but it really brought the fact to mind that all writers, especially unpubs need to know how to do a one line pitch, or an elevator pitch. It turns out that my online goals group was presenting a log line class by my friend and CP Cindy Carroll.

Talk about synchronicity!

Uh, I didn't have a log line for this book. It isn't finished. I thought I'd wait until it was done, but I had managed to get myself stuck and couldn't figure out how to raise the stakes. (see Monday's blog) ;-) But I wanted to enter this pitch contest.

Why?

I don't know. Guess I just like rejection. Anyhoo, log lines originated in the screenplay world, but has now oozed over to other writing genres. Basically, you, the writer, pitch your story idea to an editor/agent/producer/etc. providing the essence of your story in 25 words or less. The log line should tell us WHO the story is about,WHAT he wants (Goal), and WHY he can't have it (Conflict). Names are not used. Descriptors tell the listener more than names anyway.

Cindy is really, really good at this. During the class many people posted their lines, and she waved a magic wand and clarified the statement usually using fewer words than the original log line.

Well, I wrote my line, had Cindy look at it, and submitted it. Now, the last time Query tracker did something like this, they had almost 600 responses. So I know I'm not going to get a request or any props, but coming up with a log line did one thing that I didn't expect.

It gave me the external conflict that I needed to continue with this story. The WHY. This isn't to say that the story won't change, but I now have a direction to go.

My log line? You want to see it? This is a middle grade fantasy novel, roughly 35,000 words long. Okely-dokely, here you go:

When a tween’s garden gnome disappears she enlists the help of her friend to investigate their cat-collecting neighbor and discover she’s a witch intent on wiping out mythicals to empower the coven.

Write on!