As has probably been noticed by those following this blog (thanks, great to have you along) there's not a lot of creative writing being done at the moment. At least not of the type I enjoy. I am currently formatting The Bull At The Gate for paperback, and that means copywriting the back-blurb. Allow me a quiet arghhhh!!
The thing with a paperback is that it is a solid item. Unlike an ebook, it can't be tweaked at will, so the back-blurb has to be correct first time. It's not a product description which can go into detail about the triple storylines, Roman historical thread, the haunting from beyond a watery grave that may be more than it first appears. It is a short tease, and they can easily sound either cliched or risible. I doff my hat to those who can write them before breakfast, though having searched the Net it would seem that not many can explain the how of what they do.
So when a request to be interviewed on marketing & promotion appeared in my Inbox, I grasped the displacement activity with both hands. It's just been uploaded onto a blog entitled Self Publishing For The Technically Challenged.
At least it says what it does on the tin. I wish my back-blurb did.
You have my sympathy, Linda. The way I tackle this is to write three short sentences and then leave them to stew for a while. I then revisit over a period of a couple of weeks - patience is all, for me, in this task - and modify them on each visit. BUT, I retain the originals and all the modified versions. Generally, once I've waited the 2 weeks, I can cobble together something approaching a usable version by amalgamating the best from all the others. It seems to work for me. Good luck with the blurb.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Stuart. In the end I dumped the version I was working on and came at it from a different angle, which read much better. Sometimes these things don't 'work' because we are writing them with a novelist's eye, not a copywriter's.
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