Back Cover Copy: Make it a Marketing Tool

One of the most useful and versatile pieces of writing you can craft to market your work is a blurb that simulates the back cover copy of a published book.  Time and again, you’ll find places to post a succinct and compelling overview of your manuscript.  But how does one go about writing this piece?

Like any piece of promotional literature, crafting inviting back cover copy for a manuscript requires a different mindset that writing your story.  I recommend you set a day aside to write your blurb, and immerse yourself in other back cover copy first.  Visit Amazon and do a search on books that share your story’s genre and tone.  Read a wide variety of back cover blurbs for those books to get a feel for the rhythm of the overview  Sometimes, there is a paragraph devoted to the heroine and another for the hero, then a third paragraph that poses a story problem / major conflict.  Other times, the summary takes a paragraph to set up the hero and heroine’s meet, then delves into the conflicts in a separate paragraph.  Either way, you should come away from your search with a couple of distinct possible models for your back cover-style copy.

Make sure you keep your verb tenses active and your sentences packed for as much punch as possible in a short space.  This is the kind of writing that benefits from a great deal of polish.  Don’t worry about being a wordsmith in the first draft, just get the general idea of the story down on paper and you can massage the lines later.

I recommend making sure you get across a bit about your main characters in these paragraphs.  For example, mention their professions and a facet of their core personalities.  Example, cynical P.I. Gena Cartwright or do-gooder attorney Matthew Blaise.  These are time-saving ways to get across something quickly about your character.  Next, make sure you explain how the characters are in conflict with each other and what external conflicts they face.  Pick out the most important of these and highlight them in the blurb. 

Often, I start my synopsis with back cover-style copy.  That overview is the first piece of writing I do on a book, sketching the story in broad strokes in my mind so I can see the core conflicts and personalities of my characters.  Making the summary paragraphs sound compelling and interesting pulls me into my story, making me want to answer the questions I raise.  Even after I use the back cover copy to start the longer synopsis, I find other uses for those paragraphs.  They can go on my website as place holders until the official (publisher-penned) back cover copy is released.  They can to into query letters when I pitch the book.  They can go to the marketing department of your publishing house to help them write the official back cover copy and to guide them in creating the cover art.

To check out some of my backcover blurbs, please visit my website.  Just click on the Bookshelf page to review a list of my books to see how they've been summarized in a way that invites you to read more. 

By Joanne Rock & Catherine Mann

Selling Your Book: Where to Begin   

       

First up, you have to know what you’re writing and how it fits in today’s marketplace.  If you’re not sure how to categorize your work, visit the bookstore and search out books that reflect yours in theme, voice, style, content.  You might discover your humorous voice tends toward David Sedaris, but you’ve written a punchy take on modern religion.  Have you created a new niche?  Or are there books similar to yours out there?  

If you find similar books, the next step is to note the publisher.  This could be a publisher for you to target.  Also, see if you can hunt down that author’s agent – check the dedication or scan the Internet for interviews or information about that author’s book sale—and put that agent on your list of places to submit your work.  If that agent liked author A’s voice, he/she might like yours as well.

Even if you didn’t find any books similar to yours in the store, you should still come away with a clearer idea of what you write.  Dark mysteries with a touch of satire.  Heartwarming romance set in small town ....America.....  Quirky slice-of-life essays about motherhood.  Be able to define your story brand as specifically as possible so you can communicate it to editors and agents.  This helps you sell yourself.  It also helps them sell you—to their editorial board, and eventually, to readers.  

Once you’ve come up with a list of potential publishing houses and/or potential agents, you need to do some serious thinking about how you want to move forward.  Do you want to try and investigate the publishing houses on your own and do your own submissions?  Or would you feel more comfortable with a knowledgable agent promoting your work to editors?  You might decide to target publishers first-hand and then learn, after checking out each publisher’s submission guidelines, that most of your target houses only accept submissions from agents.  Then you’re back to square one.  More on agents in a future blog post.

For now, let’s say you wish to submit to publishers yourself.  Visit their websites and study their guidelines.  Follow these to the letter!  If they ask for a certain format, they’re not kidding.  Single spacing a submission instead of double spacing just gives them a reason to kick it back to you.  That’s an easy rejection.  You don’t want to give them any reason to reject you, let alone easy ones.  You’re goal is to make yourself and your book a proposition they can’t ignore.

All of which brings us to the need to develop marketing tools for your work. In short order, you’ve got to start developing a compelling query letter, a dynamic synopsis, and a tightly focused book blurb.  That’s just for fiction.  If you’re writing non-fiction, you need much different support materials, including an overview of the competition.  For more on what’s needed, check out the wonderful article on the BookEnds Agency website:

http://bookendslitagency.blogspot.com/2009/01/what-is-book-proposal-for-nonfiction.html  

I’ll be back with more on agents shortly and will follow up with pieces on queries and blurb-writing.  Good luck!

I just returned from the Romance Writers of America conference in ....Washington.. ..D.C.....  After hanging out with 2,000 writers—some old friends and many more new-to-me friends—I always come home recharged and ready to write.  The conference is always professionally uplifting as I learn new ideas for tweaking my writing process and lots of tidbits about what’s happening in our industry.  But perhaps more importantly, I am uplifted personally since the writers around me inspire me.  I might hear Brenda Jackson talk about how she managed to write sixty plus books in fourteen years—all while she worked full time at another job (wow!).  Or I might listen in a workshop as pre-published writers talk about the obstacles they face to try and carve out time to write in busy, busy lives.  They all make time for writing, and it reminds me what a compelling urge we have to tell stories.  There’s something timeless about that urge—something that we’ve shared with our ancestors since they were painting on cave walls.  I like knowing I have a place in that long standing tradition.

Because I’m so inspired, I thought I would share a piece of RWA with you.  I’m posting the notes from my workshop, “Tending the Writer’s Emotional Health” so that you can have a taste of the conference from afar.  The workshop was all about protecting and nurturing your creativity, managing the inevitable stressors, and maintaining productivity in your writing career.  I hope these ideas help energize your Muse and show you how to make a little more room in your life for your creative impulses.  So without further ado...

w  Organization— an organized physical space = an organized mind

w  Physical Comfort— you need a better chair, good lighting, the right keyboard

w  Room of One’s Own— failing that… space of one’s own.  You deserve a place to spread out and a spot that appeals to the five senses. 

w       Social Networks— keep yours varied with cyber groups, real life writer friends, clubs or special interest groups with interests outside writing

w       Entertain Your Muse— experiment with what maintains your creativity by keeping a writer’s journal, finding a creativity coach, engaging in alternative arts

w  Schedule Breaks— small ones throughout the day, days off in a week, weeks off in a year

w  Sleep— your body requires it for good health, your brain needs it to work out  story problems

w  Rewards— good managers offer incentives and so should you

w  Balance— know when to shut down the computer

Elaine Seymour, Belleville ON

Susan Leech, New Columbia PA

Linda Bass, Glen Carbon IL

Carol Woodruff, Mt. Arlington, NJ

Lou Gagliardi, ....Greensburg.., ..PA

Sherry Haut, ....Judsonia.. ..AR....

Haleigh Heineken, Kansas City KS

Cindy Holub, ....Alexandria.., ..VA

Cheryl Snyder, Alison Park, PA

Jackie Wisherd, ....La Mesa.. ..CA....

Patricia Barraclough, ....Jonesborough.., ..TN....

Tammy Yenalavitch, ....Charlotte.., ..NC....

Diana Wilson, ....Scottbluff,.. ..NE....

........ 
Congrats to all, and please do check back for future contests on MySpace!  I had a blast .

Know When to Rewrite

Today we arrive at a cold, hard truth about revisions.  Sometimes all the revisions in the world won't fix a bad scene, a bad chapter or a bad 100 pages.  For the sake of your story, sometimes there is no choice but to rewrite those portions of your book.

If the idea makes you shudder, consider this.  Rewriting can actually be a faster fix than revising, assuming you have a firm idea of how your problematic scene or chapter should have been written in the first place.  Revising requires the stop-and-go pace of cutting out frequent lines or paragraphs, then rethinking how to connect the gap in a way that protects the flow of the words but gives different information then the original.  You are calling on your writer instincts hand-in-hand with your editor instincts and, let’s be honest, those are two very different facets of any writer.  You have to make these two work together on page after page after page of your story and that can be a huge challenge.

When you opt to rewrite, you can shove aside your internal editor for awhile and simply re-imagine the scene from the beginning.  This can be creatively freeing!

Re-plotting Your first task in rewriting a scene or section of the book is re-plotting.  How has your story gotten off track in this portion of the book and what can you do to correct the problem?  Did your story go off on a tangent because you were fascinated with a secondary character and let them dominate a scene?  Did you force your characters into making a decision dictated by your synopsis that—upon later reflection—really didn’t make sense for the kinds of people they are?

With a concrete plot objective in mind, begin rewriting the scene, using the last line of the scene before it as a story prompt.  Try writing the new material on a laptop or word processor away from your main computer or perhaps open a blank document and work there.  This mental separation from the larger story might help shut down the internal editor and let the new scene stand on its own feet.

Remember where and how you need to finish your scene with an endnote on your fresh document that reminds you where to pick up with your existing text.  Keep the plot and conflict goals of the new scene in mind throughout and consider using the rewrite as an opportunity to strengthen small points of the story that need tweaking in the manuscript overall.  For example, if your internal editor has determined the story belongs more to the hero than the heroine, try to strengthen your heroine in the new scene so that you’re combating two problems with the rewritten material.

Likewise, if you’re attempting to speed up the overall pace of your story in the revision, let this rewritten scene accomplish that goal (in part) by infusing the new material with more momentum.

Some key notes on re-plotting—or any plotting, for that matter!—include the following:

1—Give your main character a goal and an obstacle.  Make the threat to that goal clear and pressing.

2—Create a ticking time bomb.  Even in a romance with no suspense element, there needs to be a sense that the problem has to be faced and addressed soon or there will be consequences.  Impose a deadline for conflict resolution.  This gives the novel a wonderful sense of pacing.

3—Create stakes and raise them continually.  Establish a threat to the character (might be to their life, their love, their home and happiness) that only grows bigger and more dramatic through the course of the novel.  Problems get worse before they get better.

4—Develop character growth.  Your characters change during the course of the novel and it’s this change that enables them to overcome the conflict by the last page.  What is your main character capable of at the end of the book that they weren’t capable of at the beginning?  Know why and how this growth occurred and show us that growth in action through the hero’s journey.

5—Give us a black moment that makes us fear for the resolution of the conflict.  There needs to be a story disaster that is a point of no-return for the character.

6—Develop a resolution that is derived from character growth and provides a satisfying ending.

Checking over your whole book—as well as your rewritten material—for these principles will help ensure your story delivers with a bang.

Re-characterizing If you want to change any significant aspects of your main characters in a revision, rewriting can be your best option.  Whereas deepening a character’s motivation might not require any rewriting, changing that character’s profession, backstory or key traits are tasks best tackled with completely new material.

Why not just tweak the smaller parts you want to change?  As tempting as that may sound, the approach could cost you a great deal of character continuity.  If nothing else, at least re-work that character’s first scene, the one that is so influential in how a reader will feel about your character for the whole course of the book.  Be sure to scrub out all traces of old character traits no longer applicable to the figure and take your time setting up the character’s new persona. 

Weaving in the New   Stitching together the old scenes with the new can be a laborious task as there are several logistical points to handle with care.  Re-written scenes in a book are the most likely to break the sense of story chronology or to give us a jarring view of our characters because the author has had more time to get to know the character fully and might inadvertently introduce readers to a slightly different version of the character with their knowledge of the full story in mind.  In other words, you’ve seen your hero combat the black moment and commit to change at the end of the book by the time you go back to add a scene to chapter three.  Be careful you are writing the character as readers know him at the beginning of the book and not as you know him at the end.  While it’s great to foreshadow plot elements or character flaws, it’s not acceptable to let a different version of your character walk into a few select scenes for rewriting.  Be consistent.

Watch Your Timeline   Be careful of your book’s timeline as you revise and rewrite new sections.  It’s easy to get your days tangled up at this stage and readers will be quick to point out any chronological glitches.  It might be useful to write up a timeline for your book overall so you can see the timeframe you have for any additions added in the middle. 

Also, be careful juggling things like time of day and weather so that you don’t have a twilight scene take place when it should be morning or vice versa.

Reader Orientation   Another item to consider in your rewrites is character point of view and scene setting.  If you’re crafting a completely new scene, be aware of whose point of view the deleted scene was in.  If you are giving the new scene to a different character, will it give too much screen time to one character in particular?  This is something you weigh carefully during your first draft but might be less aware of in a scene written out of context.

Next, firmly establish a sense of place and time at the opening of your new scene to prevent the sense of your characters’ being talking heads on a page.  They need to be fully-fleshed out in their environment to maintain the story flow.

Use Your All-Seeing Eye   While you don’t want to write your character too differently in a revamped scene, you do want to use your knowledge of the full book to plant extra details you might not have been aware of on your first draft.  If you discovered your hero was color blind midway through the book, you can use a rewritten scene in the early chapters to plant a clue.  Have him squint at the heroine’s new dress that she’s excited about, a small action we see in her point of view, but one which supports a facet of him we unearth later.

If your story incorporates suspense elements, the rewritten scenes are good opportunities to mention items the hero uses to defeat the villain later in the book. Does he drop a chandelier on a villain’s head?  Be sure to let us see the chandelier and make us aware that the butler has said it needs repairs.  In other words, use the rewrites as opportunities to throw juicy tidbits to the reader so the ending is all the more satisfying. 

Faster Than You Think   Sometimes rewriting is the most efficient way to revise.  Rather than nitpicking a scene to death to make it work, try using the delete key (while always copying and pasting the deleted material to a notes file).  Be inspired by the blank page and the fact that you don’t have to fix anything. You simply have to write a new scene and you have the benefit of doing excellent “prewriting” work that will inform the work and keep your keys flying.  For truly problematic areas, this is often the quickest, smartest solution.  Plug in a stronger chapter that will sparkle with the skill of a writer who knows her story inside and out!