It’s Read Around the Rainbow time! If you haven’t seen these posts before, we’re a group of authors who blog on the same topic on the last Friday of every month. This month, we’ve decided to talk blurbs – a favourite topic among many authors 😆
How do you feel about blurbs? Do you write them before or after your story?
There are a few people who like blurbs. In my mind, I know this, but I can’t for the life of me understand how they’re functioning human beings 😂 I’m joking. I’m sure they’re perfectly sane… or close to.
So, blurbs. I hate blurbs. I’d rather write ten stories than one blurb. And it’s not only that I hate writing blurbs, I hate reading them too. If you can get me to read the first paragraph of a blurb, you’ve done a good job! Most often when I pick a book to read, I read the first sentence of the blurb, then I skim some reviews, and if it’s somewhere I can see tags, I read them too. Read an entire blurb? Nope.
This, of course, results in a few DNFs for me since I’m also a bit picky about what I read 🤣 I never said it was a good tactic.
Do I write the blurb before or after the story? After, at the very last minute, when there is nothing else I could do instead. I think this also has to do with being a pantser. I don’t know how my story will end, so to write the blurb before I’ve finished the story would only mean I’ll have to rewrite it, and considering how much I love to write blurbs, I want to avoid that. Imagine having to do two blurbs per story 😳
It’s not that I don’t understand the importance of blurbs – or that’s a lie. And I think that’s exactly it. I don’t see the point because when I’m in tantrum mode, I can almost convince myself no one in the whole wide world would ever voluntarily read a blurb, because why would they? Such a waste of time! LOL
And it’s not like I haven’t tried. I’ve tried to hack my brain, have tried to make myself believe in the importance of blurbs, the magic of a well-written blurb. I’ve read loads of books, articles, posts, tips etc about how to write a compelling blurb, but no matter how a blurb is written, I find it very uncompelling.
But if it’s something you have to learn when in this business, it’s that you shouldn’t transfer your behaviour onto your readers. I hate blurbs, both to read and to write them, but it doesn’t mean that the people wanting to read my books do, and by having written a blurb I give them a chance to make an informed decision about whether they want to read this particular story or not.
Though I’m not gonna give up hope of there being a day when ‘This is a story about a werewolf’ will be sufficient as a blurb 😆
Check out what the other have to say about blurbs and where in the process they write them. Who knows, there might be someone who likes writing them *looks around* 😄
Holly Day 
I hate writing them, too. I guess I imagine those reading them all look at them the same way I do (from a reader’s perspective), and clearly that’s not the case. To me, the blurb is critical in my decision whether or not to buy the book.
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I think we just have to accept people are different. I’m a cover shopper and next step is checking reviews, preferably the bad ones. A two star review can be the selling point for me, depending on what they dislike of course 😁
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Exactly! ❤️
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I don’t understand how you people (as in you’re not the only one who doesn’t read blurbs, Amy doesn’t either, nor does a booktuber I’m following 😀 ) can ever pick your next book when you don’t read the blurb??? I can’t be bothered to read all blurbs, either, but that helps me decide. If the blurb’s too wordy, I probably won’t like the book either, so I skip it.
This is how I pick my next book:
1) Is it a series? If yes, I rarely pick it.
2) Blurb
3) reviews, preferably low rated ones 😀
Also: I vote in favor of blurbs like “This story is about a werewolf”. Or we could just do a tag cloud à la AO3 instead of blurbs?
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I pick books by cover and reviews, and as you say, the bad ones. A two-star review often is what makes me pick the book. And the author is important too. If it’s someone I like, I don’t even check reviews, then I just jump in. BUT that means that I sometimes sit there with daddy book or an Mpreg book which then result in DNFs because those just aren’t my thing.
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