by John Byrne Barry | Apr 18, 2022 | book blurbs
An earlier version of this article was posted in the California Writers’ Club Bulletin, Spring 2022.
While I was making slides last month for my “How to Write a Killer Book Blurb” workshop, I realized that a book blurb is a lot like a dating profile. Years ago, I sweated over writing dating profiles and one line I particularly liked, and used, was “If you’re looking for someone like me, I’m perfect.”
When you’re writing book blurbs, you’re looking for readers who are looking for books like yours.
Of course, if you’re scrolling for dates, you’re happy to find one, if he or she or they is the right one. If you’re selling books, you probably want more than one reader.
But the analogy still holds. You want your book to be just what your reader is looking for. Your blurb is your best opportunity to do that. You want to make your book sound enticing, and you want to accurately describe your book.
If you’ve written a romantic comedy, your readers are going to be disappointed if they’re expecting Harry Potter. You want to attract the audience your book is written for.
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The blurb, or book description, on the back cover of your book and on your online sales page, is arguably more important in attracting readers than anything except your cover and title.
And a compelling blurb can be equally important before you’ve written your book, because it can guide you as you write.
Blurbs can be several paragraphs, but no one will read your second paragraph if your first one doesn’t grab them.
Often you need shorter blurbs for social media or Amazon ad copy, which must be under 149 characters. (That’s how many characters this paragraph is.)
But how do you distill your several-hundred page book into one or more memorable paragraphs?
First off, a blurb is not a synopsis, but a promise that persuades potential readers they must read your book. You reveal enough to entice your readers, but hide enough so they’ll pay to find out more. You may also want to share setting, genre and tone. Is it light and funny or dark and tense?
But no spoilers. Blurbs are like movie trailers, which never give away the endings.
Let’s look at two well-known examples.
An astonishing technique for recovering and cloning dinosaur DNA has been discovered. Now humankind’s most thrilling fantasies have come true. Creatures extinct for eons roam Jurassic Park with their awesome presence and profound mystery, and all the world can visit them—for a price.
Until something goes wrong. . . .
Harry Potter has never even heard of Hogwarts when the letters start dropping on the doormat at number four, Privet Drive. Addressed in green ink on yellowish parchment with a purple seal, they are swiftly confiscated by his grisly aunt and uncle.
Then, on Harry’s eleventh birthday, a great beetle-eyed giant of a man called Rubeus Hagrid bursts in with some astonishing news: Harry Potter is a wizard, and he has a place at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. An incredible adventure is about to begin!
Your book may not feature a dangerous predator or a bespectacled wizard, but you can use a similar formula, which has three parts — setup, hook, and punchline.
1. Setup.
When X does Y, Z happens.
Your first paragraph should give readers a clear idea of what the story is about, where and when it’s set, and what kind of book it is, like a thriller or a romance, though you don’t need to use those words.
You introduce your hero at the start of his or her journey.
Harry Potter has never even heard of Hogwarts when the letters start dropping on the doormat at number four, Privet Drive.
2. Hook.
Now, with A, X must do B to accomplish C.
Your hero must do something brave in order to achieve a goal that changes his or her life, and, if possible, the broader world.
You want to distill the plot, more of a teaser than a summary.
3. Punchline.
With Jurassic Park, the punchline is, “Until something goes wrong.” For most books, you want to be more specific, but if your premise is as brilliant as Jurassic Park, let readers use their imagination.
Either way, you let readers know that something does go wrong, and to find out how the hero solves the problem, you have to read the book. You don’t give the “how” away in the blurb.
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Non-fiction is often easier because you’re solving a problem, but you still want to stand out from other books offering similar benefits.
Here’s a good example.
Despite constant efforts to declutter your home, do papers still accumulate like snowdrifts and clothes pile up like a tangled mess of noodles?
Japanese cleaning consultant Marie Kondo takes tidying to a whole new level, promising that if you properly simplify and organize your home once, you’ll never have to do it again.
With detailed guidance for determining which items in your house “spark joy” (and which don’t), this international bestseller will help you clear your clutter and enjoy the unique magic of a tidy home — and the calm, motivated mindset it can inspire.
The formula for nonfiction starts with the problem that potential readers may be suffering from, like too much clutter. This helps readers determine if this book is relevant for them.
1. State the problem.
“Papers accumulating like snowdrifts and clothes piling up like a tangled mess of noodles.”
That’s both memorable and something millions of people can relate to. Like me, who is writing this at a desk cluttered with papers.
2. Show what your solution will accomplish
Like fiction, you want to entice, but also hide, so generally you want to share the “what,” but not the “how.”
The Marie Kondo book does include a teaser about “how” — does it “spark joy?” But no more than that.
3. State how readers’ lives will improve as a result of reading the book, and, if possible, why this book instead of others.
This is the toughest part. Marie Kondo’s blurb touts her book as an international best-seller, but it didn’t start that way. Still, “enjoy the unique magic of a tidy home” is a decent selling point.
Even with these formulas, it’s daunting to write a blurb that sells books. But it’s one of your most important marketing tasks. And it should take less time than writing your book.
One last thing. If possible, demonstrate your writing style in the blurb. If your book is funny, don’t say it’s funny. Show your humor in the blurb.
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P.S. I am available to present “How to Write a Killer Book Blurb” workshops, online or in person. Contact me at johnbyrnebarry@gmail.com
by John Byrne Barry | Jan 19, 2022 | Page-turners with a Conscience, Sausalypso
On January 1, the first day of the year, I wrote the words “the end” to Sausalypso, the novel I’ve been working on during the pandemic. That doesn’t mean I’m finished, but I made it to the end of the first draft and now I go back and rewrite, reorganize, and make it better.
I just recently reworked my prologue. Which is a short and sweet introduction and history of Sausalypso.
Prologue: A Short History of Sausalypso
My name is Tin Alley and if you’ve heard of me, keep in mind that I don’t consider myself a hero and I didn’t solve the murder by myself.
I was not in Sausalypso when the houseboat story started, during World War II, when Bechtel Corporation built a massive shipyard called Marinship on the shores of Rich Bay. At its peak, Marinship employed 20,000 workers, who built 93 cargo ships and oil tankers for the war in three years.
I lived in the City then, as a newly orphaned sixteen-year-old, laundering sheets and scrubbing toilets for Sally Cal, who ran a brothel on Nob Hill.
I am forever grateful to Sally for taking me in when I ran away from my foster home at fifteen, and putting me to work changing sheets and washing dishes and cleaning toilets and never once pressuring me to become a working girl. She knew better than I did that wasn’t something I would be good at. And when she instructed me, once I had graduated to greater responsibilities, to pass out envelopes of cash, I followed orders.
This was long before I became police chief in Sausalypso, the first woman police chief in California. You can look it up. Long before the houseboat wars, the murder at City Hall, and my brief brush with fame.
Workers came from all over to work at Marinship, and there wasn’t enough housing for them. The county housing authority and the feds teamed up to establish Marin City on what had been a dairy farm, and build housing for 6,000 workers. Still wasn’t enough. Many workers lived on old boats or built them from whatever materials they could scrounge.
When the war ended, Bechtel abandoned the shipyard, and a boatbuilder named Donlon Arquez bought 20-plus acres of waterfront, full of shipbuilding debris. The land was considered worthless at the time. But that changed.
Arquez dragged old boats, like decommissioned ferries, onto the mudflats and rented them to free-spirited artists and soldiers returning from the war. People built their homes on barges and rafts. Out of packing crates, railroad cars, motor homes. These floating homes — most were not true houseboats as they were not navigable — connected to land with ramshackle wooden walkways or floating docks made from plywood sitting on styrofoam.
Arques charged little or no rent, and his landlord style could be generously described as “benign neglect.” Others called it anarchy. The waterfront became home to junk collectors, artists and craftsmen, boat builders and carpenters. Then, after the Summer of Love turned dark across the bay in Haight-Ashbury, hippies and squatters arrived, seeking free love and free living. Many homes had electricity, the wires strung along posts on the piers, but not sewage hookups.
This waterfront property, known as the “Gates,” became the epicenter of Sausalypso’s development battles of the 1970s. Local officials tried to clean up the houseboat scene, and Arques was forced to sell as complaints mounted. Then the evictions started.
You might remember news anchors like Dennis Richmond or Johnny Dash reporting from the Sausalypso waterfront about the eviction raid standoff, when the houseboaters in their dinghies pushed away our police boats with long oars. Or you read about the murder at City Hall in the newspaper.
But you can’t believe everything you see on your television screen or read in your paper. I was there.
Here’s what really happened.
by John Byrne Barry | Nov 17, 2021 | Sausalypso
This is Chapter 12 of my novel-in-progress, Sausalypso Houseboat Wars Murder Mystery, and I’m sharing it because it requires less context than most chapters. The protagonist in this chapter is Tin Alley, the first woman chief of police in Sausalypso, an affluent town on San Francisco Bay north of the Golden Gate Bridge.
(Here’s my six-word over-simplified summary of the novel: Lazy hippie houseboaters resist greedy developers.)
It’s the late 1970s and Sausalypso city leaders and developers are attempting to evict the hippies and squatters who are living in a ragtag houseboat community in the mudflats along the waterfront. Chapter 11, “The Whole World is Watching, Part 1,” recounts a skirmish in the harbor, where the police come by boat to serve eviction warrants and are met with an exuberant resistance by the scrappy houseboaters, who fight them off with oars and then go limp when they are arrested.
The book is fiction, but based on real events. As you’ll see in this chapter, Chief Tin takes part in the White Night Riot, which happened in real life in the spring of 1979, when jurors settled on a manslaughter verdict for Dan White, the former San Francisco supervisor who assassinated Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk at City Hall in November 1978.
I’m writing fiction so I can fudge facts and make up characters, but I aim to capture as much of the zeitgeist as possible, so I’d love to hear from anyone who was there. (Actually, I welcome your feedback even if you weren’t there.)
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The Whole World is Watching, Part 2
I’m on Castro Street, in the street, surrounded by a throng of agitated protesters, itching to march down Market to City Hall, to vent our outrage over the Dan White manslaughter verdict. When I get jostled from behind, I clench my fists and spin around, but it’s a smiling man in a pink ballerina outfit and he raises his hands sheepishly and winks. Sorry, he mouths.
I’m jumpy as all get out from a punishing day, in uniform, arresting protesters in Sausalypso, so it’s unsettling to be out of uniform, a protester myself, in San Francisco, where I once lived and worked. I remind myself why I’m here. These are my people.
And by my people, I mean gay people. Like me. I’m not here as a police officer tonight, but as a gay person, as a lesbian, surrounded by other gay people, noisy and angry gay people.
When my friend Justine called me, she said the whole Castro was on edge.
I have never experienced anything like this before, this large gathering of gay people, chanting, singing, shouting, crying.
Sure, I’m angry, but I’m also excited to be angry.
Behind me, the chanting grows more impassioned. “The whole world is watching. The whole world is watching.” Like the houseboaters this morning chanted. Except it feels totally different.
The righteousness of being here, protesting a grave injustice, is visceral. At this moment, there is nowhere I’d rather be. Even though it’s cold and foggy and the wind cuts through my three layers.
We’re at the top of the hill, in front of the Twin Peaks Tavern, which Justine tells me is owned by a lesbian couple, and is significant because it has floor-to-ceiling windows. You can see us. We can see you. No hiding in the closet here. Not the first gay bar, but the first with clear glass windows.
This is the corner where, not long ago, Harvey Milk used to shout, “Come out, come out, wherever you are.” Have I come out? Not in Sausalypso. Not with my foster parents. Only with a few friends, like Justine, who I haven’t seen in ages, but always send a card to on her birthday.
I catch a whiff of barbecued meat, then it’s gone. Also garbage, car exhaust, pot, and sweat.
It’s not night, not yet. But I see lights coming on in the windows climbing Twin Peaks.
When Justine called me, two hours ago, I was gritting my way through the paperwork from the evictions and arrests at Aquarius Harbor, and, as dinnertime approached, finally eating the tuna sandwich I packed for lunch. I wish I had eaten more. My stomach is growling again.
“We’re gathering for a protest this evening,” she said, “I want you to join us.” The Dan White verdict, that he got off with manslaughter, which means about eight years max, was a travesty of justice, she said. I was exhausted, and looking forward to some mindless TV and an early bedtime.
“Where shall we meet?” I said.
Darkness hovers, and we ease into our march down Market Street, filling the street for five, six blocks, down to the Safeway sign. There are so many of us, we move slowly. It’s a traffic jam of people. A phalanx of police officers stand erect on the curb, their faces tight and tense. I’m grateful I’m not one of them. The street vibrates under our stomping feet.
A police officer’s job is to keep their distance from all these intense emotions. That was my job this morning. But not tonight. Squelching my feelings is no way to live in this moment. I don’t know anyone here but Justine, but I feel engaged, enraged, part of a movement, part of a community.
How many of us are here? I’m not sure. I’ve become better at counting crowds over the years, and this morning at the Aquarius Harbor protest, I counted two hundred, between the houseboaters and the police and the journalists and the onlookers. A huge crowd for such a small sliver of land between Bridgeway and the bay, and it seemed even larger with the cardboard cutouts — even though we knew they were cardboard.
There are five times as many people here now, at least a thousand, maybe twice that, and ahead, more protesters stream in from Noe Street, from 16th Street.
Above the crowd are rainbow flags and hand-scrawled signs. “Avenge Harvey Milk.” “A travesty of justice.” ”Twinkies my ass.”
I’ve never taken part in a demonstration, not ever. I’ve only been on the other side. Even when I was an outlaw, working at Sally Cal’s cathouse on Nob Hill, I was a sheriff of sorts — a peacekeeper, at the least.
I’m tired and wired, and the cacophony is overwhelming, yet I’m caught up in my own thoughts. About my past in the city, about my hesitance accepting my sexuality, about my unlikely escape to the relative quiet of Sausalypso.
I am forever grateful to Sally for taking me in when I ran away from my foster home at fifteen, and putting me to work changing sheets and washing dishes and cleaning toilets and never once pressuring me to become a working girl. She knew better than I did that wasn’t something I would be good at. And when she instructed me, once I had graduated to greater responsibilities, to pass out envelopes of cash, I followed orders.
I lived in the city when I worked for Sally, but it’s been decades, and I rarely passed through the Castro, which back then was a sleepy working-class neighborhood full of Scandinavians and Irish, and wasn’t even called the Castro. That was long before it became a gay enclave, long before I became a police officer, long before I realized men didn’t interest me.
Justine is also a police officer, and totally out as a lesbian — though she wasn’t when I first met her, umpteen years ago, when I was I was the bagman for Sally Cal and she was a rookie cop. Back then, she was out as a defiant black woman — her parents immigrated from Jamaica. She was on the city police force for years, and now she’s a lieutenant for BART, the new transbay railroad that links the City and the East Bay and she makes way more money than I do.
Again, we chant, “The whole world is watching, the whole world is watching.” Then, “No justice, no peace.” There’s more anger, more fist shaking, more out-of-control emotions than this morning. Two men climb on the roof of a bus and pull down the pole that connects it to the overhead electric wires. We walk around the marooned bus. The passengers exit. Several join the march.
We’re riding the rapids of a swollen river, and every block another stream of protesters swells the surge.
Above the chants I hear honking horns. We’re blocking traffic. On Noe, a driver climbs out of his car and wags his middle fingers at us, his face contorted in rage.
This is not a time to be questioning myself, but could it be that I have hidden in my closet because I don’t want people to hate me? When I see this man’s rage, my shoulders clench, even though he’s a hundred feet away and he doesn’t see me or know who I am.
But he may not hate us for being gay. Maybe it’s because we’re blocking traffic and he’s in a hurry. Someone he loves is waiting. He’s picking up his daughter or son from daycare.
Dan White’s trial has been on the front page of the Chronicle for the past week and I knew a verdict was imminent, but the confrontations at Aquarius Harbor have been dominating my attention. And draining me. I forgot about the trial until Justine called.
Six months ago, White, a former San Francisco police officer, resigned his county supervisor seat and when he wanted it back, Mayor George Moscone said no. So White climbed through a window at City Hall, shot the mayor, and then shot Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in the country.
He faced a double premeditated first-degree murder charge, an open-and-shut case. But the defense brought in psychiatrists insisting he was hopped up on junk food, that the night before the murders, when he knew the mayor had denied his request, he binged on Twinkies and watched TV.
I never expected a jury would buy that.
Justine has made friends while I’ve been lost in my thoughts, and she’s explaining to them that it was never about the Twinkies. “That gave the jury an excuse,” she says. “The jurors were Dan White’s peers and they feared, as he did, that the old guard, the San Francisco they grew up in, run by the Italians, the Irish, and most of all the sanctimonious Catholic Church, was being replaced by hippies and gays and liberals. Damn right it is! They had to convict him — he confessed, after all — but they went for manslaughter, because they understood. Maybe even sympathized.”
I keep chanting as we march, but I’m operating on two channels, one sharing the pain and fury of my community, which feels clean and sharp, the other percolating on who I am, how I got here, and what a long, strange trip it’s been. That feels uncomfortable.
I feel surprisingly at home here, as if the uniform I took off earlier is a costume. When I go back to work tomorrow, I won’t be the same person. Being police chief is my job, but being here, surrounded by other gay people, angry about injustice, this is my life.
We turn left on Polk, connect with another river of protesters flowing in from South of Market. The wind whips through the canyon of tall towers and I pull my jacket tighter. Our chants echo off the buildings.
We veer right on Fell, at the corner of City Hall, and I follow a pack of men who grab hold of the hood of an empty police car and rock it up and down.
The man in the pink ballerina outfit, who winked at me on Castro Street, climbs onto the hood and then the roof of the car. I’m right behind him. “Avenge Harvey Milk,” he chants, “Avenge Harvey Milk.” We should leave. I should leave, or intervene, but I get on the roof and join him.
A man in a hooded sweatshirt with his face covered by a mask pulls a brick from his pack and smashes the side window of the car. It shatters, doesn’t break. He whacks the window again. Now it breaks.
I come to my senses and climb down from the roof, but the whooping men rock the car even harder and I lose my balance and fall. Into the arms of a surprised young man with bright red hair. He sets me on the ground, and immediately a police officer yanks me away, and handcuffs me to a lamppost. I try to explain I’m the Sausalypso police chief, that I’ve never been arrested before, that I’ve never even marched in a demonstration before, that I don’t condone vandalism, but he shoulders his way back into the crowd and arrests the ballerina. Now there’s a whoosh of flame and the police car is burning.
First, I’m afraid the car will blow up and engulf us in flames and I try, in vain, to free myself from the cuffs. Another officer sprays the car with a fire extinguisher, and the flames die down, and I decide I’m going to lose my job, never find another one, but I’m not going to die from a car explosion, only from humiliation and shame.
Then it starts raining, and I am soaked until I can’t possibly get any wetter.
by John Byrne Barry | Jan 26, 2021 | End of Life, Page-turners with a Conscience, When I Killed My Father
Last fall, after a fellow author interviewed for a podcast, she said to me that she found it interesting that someone as articulate and accomplished as I was chose such a poor book title.
Ouch!
She was referring to my most recent novel, which is titled, When I Killed My Father: An Assisted-Suicide Family Thriller. I thought that was a good title. I still do, but with less confidence than before.
It was just one person’s opinion, I told myself. Still, I had to wonder if a different title could make a difference in terms of visibility and sales.
Titles are hard. I wrote an 80,000 word novel, with 54 chapters and an epilogue, and I had to distill that into a few words.
The premise of my novel is simple enough — what if your ailing father asks you to kill him?
Here’s my elevator pitch: Psychologist Lamar Rose’s father is suffering from cancer and dementia, and wants his son to help him end his life. Lamar refuses, but his father keeps demanding, and he relents. Then, from the pulpit of the church at his father’s memorial, his sister accuses Lamar of murder.
I like to call When I Killed My Father a “page-turner with a conscience,” about a man caught between what is compassionate and what is legal.
Response from readers has been heartening, but I have not had as many readers as I’d hoped. Not everyone wants to read a book about death and dying and end-of-life decisions, of course, even though, as more than one reviewer noted, the novel is also fun and funny. My disappointing sales may have more to do with my subject matter than the title.
It is possible to republish with a new title, but I have 40 ratings/reviews on Amazon, with an average of 4.5 out of 5 stars, and 46 ratings/reviews on Goodreads, and I would hate to lose those reviews.
There are authors who have done republished with new titles, and managed to keep their reviews — See Helena Halme on How to Change a Book Title Without Losing Reviews. But there’s no guarantee that her strategy will work for others.
The web is full of advice for writers, and no shortage of articles about how to promote yourself on social media, how to use the right keywords in your book description, how to find the right editor. But I have found hardly any useful advice on book titles, other than obvious things like, the title is uber important and you should devote your best energy to it.
The advice that is out there is more on how to avoid a bad title. As Tucker Max, co-founder of Scribe, says, “A good title won’t make your book do well, but a bad title will prevent it from doing well.”
Here are the attributes of a good book title, according to Max:
- Attention Grabbing
- Memorable
- Informative (Gives an Idea of What The Book is About)
- Easy To Say
- Not Embarrassing or Problematic For Someone To Say It
- The right length
Well, I think I’ve got three or four out of six.
When I was first writing When I Killed My Father, its working title was Edgewater, which was the name of the senior residence Lamar’s father lived in, on the lakefront on Chicago’s North Side.
There was a lot I liked about that title — the noirish sound of it most of all — but it’s such a common place name and it doesn’t signal the subject or genre of the book in any way.
I brainstormed many title ideas, such as:
- Cheeks as Smooth as Ice
- Die Now, Pay Later
- What I Did for My Dad
- My Father Begged Me
- What I Promised My Father
- At First I Said No
- The Measure of My Love
- I Can’t Stand to Live Like This
- Some Secrets Should Stay Secret
- The Duties of a Son
- Fulfilling My Father’s Wishes
And many more.
My brother Pat, who read an early draft, suggested Let Me Go, which I liked a lot, and that’s what I used when I published my advance reader copy.
But one day, when I was sharing title ideas with fellow writers, one said Let Me Go was too subtle. I said, “Well, I don’t want to be too over the top and call it ‘Why I Killed My Father.’” She blurted out, “Oh, that’s so much better.”
I took heed and that became my first choice, but because it sounded like a how-to book, not a novel, I changed the first word from “why” to “when.”
I’d love to hear what you think, whether you’ve read the book or not. (If you haven’t, you can read the first three chapters here.) Should I change the title? What title do you like best?
If you’ve published a book, do you have second thoughts about your title?
You can share your thoughts in the comments below or email me at johnbyrnebarry@gmail.com.
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