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10 Key Points to Getting Great Book Blurbs

5/28/2020

One does not often consider book blurbs, but they’re a key element to selling your book. They inform prospective readers why your book is worth looking at and will often clue them in as to your book’s contents. But how does one go about getting that all-important blurb?

1. Know what you need. What is a book blurb? A celebrity-written endorsement of your book about three to eight lines on the back.

2. Decide who you will approach. Pick several authors or individuals who have some relation to the subject of your book. It helps if you know the person, or a friend knows the person. Contacting the person is probably the most difficult part of the process. Allowing them to have enough time is critical. Offer to allow at least three months for them to read your book and write the testimonial.

3. Send a nice small package. It should include a cover letter, a synopsis and press release about the book, sample endorsements, and the book itself.

4. Write a thorough cover letter. The cover letter should tell what the book is about and how they might benefit from having their blurb on the back of the book, on your book's website, etc. And of course, tell how it would help you.

5. Include a synopsis of the book. Short, sweet and full of the best of your book. Remember, the key here is short, so succinctness is extremely important.

6. Insert a generic press release for a book event. Whether it’s the book release party or a signing, include an event so the person writing the blurb knows you’re planning to market the book to live audiences.

7. Write and include a page of sample endorsements. Provide at least three, ideally five, that the celebrity can pick, that will fit the style of the person you are asking.

8. Why include the book? Would you write a testimonial about a product that you hadn't seen? Most other people won't either.

9. Send your package early. Call six months before publication to ensure the correct address and to ascertain if your target celebrity is interested in providing endorsements/review blurbs. Send the complete package at least three months before publication.

10. Why is it important? When you see the cover of the book, you pick it up and turn it over to see what others say. Nearly everyone wants to know what others say about a book that they are considering reading. You and your book gain credibility from an expert in your field supporting your book.

Nancy E. Randolph operates Just Write Books LLC offering consulting and coaching to writers. With over 50 years of writing experience and two decades in the publishing industry working with dozens of writers, Randolph has learned how to produce a manuscript that is ready for publication. Randolph uses that knowledge to help writers and authors reach their publishing goals. An active community member along with two others she founded and serves as a member of the board of Save Our Swinging Bridge.Org to ensure the maintenance of the historic Roebling-designed and -built bridge connecting Topsham and Brunswick.

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10 surprisingly manageable steps to put together your memoir

5/21/2020

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Nearly everyone has a book that others say, “You should write that.” Many of us have a story we would like to memorialize about a family member still living or deceased. Sometimes we have a trove of photos, letters, and paraphernalia that seems overwhelming. We’ve put together ten steps to help you.

1. Determine why you want to write the book. Is it for your family or do you think this book will sell to a greater circle of friends and acquaintances? On the other hand, do you think people who are neither your relatives or friends will be interested in your story? Regardless of the answer, the same approach will be used to produce the first rough draft of your autobiography. Your answer to “why” may be used as your introduction.

2. Begin by gathering your materials. That includes photos, journals, letters to and from you, newspaper articles, clippings from magazines, baby books (if one of your parents was nice enough to do this), school writing projects, souvenirs, yearbooks, email messages, blog posts and anything else that you might have written or might have been written about you. I suggest that you have a box in which to put everything.

Put together a collection of images and photographs to tie the memoir together.

3. Make a timeline of your life. Since it is a timeline, keep it simple and chronological. Include all important events—marriage, graduations, certificates, birth(s) of children, travel, death of loved ones, jobs, promotions, volunteer work, membership organizations’ events, household moves. You get the picture. A printout of the timeline could be placed in a three-ring binder.

4. Look at your timeline and start writing the things that easily come to pen or keyboard. Name the incident, event, and write it into your timeline, showing that you have it. Add the file name and location.

5. Create a schedule for writing. Write for 30-60 minutes once a day, three times a week or every weekday. Whatever you schedule—stick with it and write. Just write. Continue to write your memories, aided by your collected materials until it becomes difficult.

6. When it becomes difficult, connect with a friend, family member, or acquaintance who may be able to fill in gaps of memory or knowledge. They may have more information about other family members who are deceased, events that happened when you were too young to remember, or enhance your memories with another view. Write those events/memories. Keep notes of the names of people who gave you more info and link it to the info given. File these new writings and keep the timeline up to date with location and file names.

7. Put all your writings into one document in your timeline order. You now have your very rough draft.

8. Before you begin polishing your rough draft, work with someone unfamiliar to your story. Print out a hard copy for your reader. The reader will read your rough manuscript (don’t have them fix the typos now—you may delete part of the story or rewrite much of this anyway). The reader’s job is to write questions in the margin. Who is this? Why was this event significant? Where were you? All the questions to which you know the answer but have forgotten to write in your closeness to the story. I suggest that you have three readers using three separate clean manuscript copies. You then take all comments and put them onto one draft. Some authors might use a clean draft on which to write all notes and questions. On the other hand, one of your reader’s drafts may have the most significant edits and questions—I would use one and add the other comments to it.

9. With that marked-up draft, begin filling in the blanks. Continue with your writing schedule until you have a completed rough draft of your book.

10. Now is the time to get someone to edit. You need to ensure that everything is spelled correctly and the facts are as true as you know. The editor will also see when transitions are missing and will either prepare suggestions or notes for you regarding what needs to fixed. Notes such as “needs transition,” “you haven’t introduced this person to your readers” or “time sequence seems off.” Fix those and then prepare for another round of edits.

Brian Barlow took nearly a decade to write his memoir Only One Child.

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10 Key Points to Getting Great Book Blurbs

10 surprisingly manageable steps to put together your memoir

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