Blurb Writing Made Easy
by Robin Hemley
Young people often ask me, "How can I get into blurbs?" and "Is it lucrative?" In answer to the first question, you have to ask yourself, "Do I have a blurb worth writing down?" and if the answer is yes, then don't you worry, people will pay attention. Whether or not you make any money is beside the point. Only five to ten percent of blurb writers actually make a living at it. So why do we bother? For the love of it, of course. To illustrate this point, I'll tell you an anecdote of how I first got into blurbs: a vital anecdote, one that will electrify you and make you cling to the edge of your seat! . . . Long after you hear this anecdote, its echoes will continue to haunt you . . . an immense, audacious, and often brilliant anecdote . . . I'm sorry, but the blurb muse overwhelms me sometimes. I not only write blurbs, but I live them. I have sacrificed so much for blurbs, two marriages, friendships, job after steady job. I am a blurb.Like many young blurb writers, I had my first break in the blurb business after I wrote my blockbuster novel, Pokey in Sterno, a surreal, sometimes nightmarish journey through Poland on the eve of World War Two, as told through the eyes and ears of Gumby's sidekick, Pokey the Donkey (Sterno being the name of a bucolic village 100 kilometers from Crakow).
Salinger! Dickens! Donald Barthelme! De Maupassant! Chaucer! Virginia Woolf! Annie Dillard! Zane Gray! These are just a few of the notables to whom the book was compared. But perhaps the blurb that made me happiest was the one that my publisher was able to splice together from the review Gore Vidal wrote in The New York Times Book Review: For the first time . . . an American imagination . . . [has] . . . carefully wrought a [compelling and compassionate] portrait of the human condition, a story seldom told, but one that [deserves as much attention] as the work of Calvino, Kundera, Fuentes, Borges combined, a work that will lodge in the reader's [heart] and singe it!
In the words of Old Blue-Eyes, "If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere!" After Vidal's piece in The Times, my career took off, and I never had to write another novel again. You probably know me now from the dust jackets of hundreds of noteworthy books. Updike! Oates! Bellow! Morrison! Irving! Walker! Wolf! When a book is reissued, who do the publishers ask to write the blurbs? Me! I've written them for all the greats: Joyce! Robert Graves! Isherwood! Singer!
Is there a secret to being a successful blurb writer?
Luck and pluck is mostly what it takes, but as I've said, you first have to write a novel, or if you're a poet, a book of poems, or a biographer, a biography, and so on. It's called, paying your dues. Does it take any special talent to write a blurb? Yes, talent cannot be overlooked completely. Some people are born to write blurbs, but there are a few simple rules you can follow:
It is not necessary to read the entire book you're "blurbing." Professional blurbers like myself blurb literally hundreds of books a year, and so we have to take shortcuts. Most often, the publisher will include a synopsis of the book with your blurb copy, and once you've digested that you're off and running.
Compare the writer to a legend or at least a major literary figure. If the book uses a teenage narrator, or even has a teenage character somewhere in the book, a comparison to Salinger is considered de rigeur. Kundera is good, as are any and all Latin American authors, well-known or entirely obscure (most readers won't know the difference. It's the sound of the name that makes a comparison compelling).
Use a lot of "C" words. "C" words resonate in the air, stick in the mind, words like, compelling, compassionate, compass (as in "Ms. X is our moral compass), control, cry (as in, makes you want to . . .), civilized, courage, class, convincing, commanding.
Go ahead, repeat yourself. Originality might be the name of the game if you're writing a novel, but when you're writing blurbs, you can throw that hogwash out the window.
Here are a few ready-made phrases you might find useful:
This is a writer-to-watch!A Major New Talent!
A page-turner! Couldn't put it down!
A compelling, powerful masterpiece!
An extraordinary, kaleidoscopic, often brilliant novel (if you can say, "first novel," so much the better).
But a blurb writer must be humble. There are much more important things to do in life than blurb-writing. The dockworker's life is just as valid as any blurb-writer's, and the mother of any infant has done something far more Spectacular! Amazing! Heart-breaking! Dignified! Urgent! Appealing! than writing a blurb. Remember, blurb writing is a simple art form, and the blurb writer is a servant of the reading public.
