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.