S01E17: When blurbs are buttery

In this week’s episode, Samantha and Matilda discuss blurbs, the difficulties, mistakes, and tips to make them as buttery as possible!

Next week Sam and Matilda will come together to talk about soda can strategies, a term they invented to talk about book selling!

Where to find Sam and Matilda:

SAM IG: @sammowrimo

Website: www.samantha-cummings.com

Book to start with: The Deathless - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Deathless-Frances-June/dp/B0915V5L6F

Most recent book: Curse of the Wild (Moons & Magic Book 1) https://amzn.eu/d/fVXwW3j

MATILDA IG: @matildaswiftauthor

Website: MatildaSwift.com

Book to start with: https://books2read.com/TheSlayoftheLand (book #1 of The Heathervale Mysteries)

Most recent book: https://books2read.com/ButterLatethanNever (book #3 of The Slippery Spoon Mysteries)

Mentioned on the show:

Leigh Bardugo - Ninth House: https://www.amazon.com/Ninth-House-Leigh-Bardugo/dp/1250751365/

Transcript:

Welcome to your next step of the Self Publishing Mountain.

I'm Matilda Swift, author of Quintessentially British Cozy Mysteries.

And I'm Samantha Cummings, author of Young Adult Books About Magic, Myths and Monsters.

I've written the books.

Changed their covers.

Tweaked their blurbs.

Tried tools from a dozen ad courses.

And I'm still not seeing success.

Now, we're working together to plot and plan our way from barely making ends meet to pulling in a living wage.

Join us on our journey, where we'll be mastering the pen to snag that paycheck.

Hello, and welcome to Pen to Paycheck Authors podcast.

I'm Samantha Cummings, here with my co-host, Matilda Swift, and we're here to write our way to financial success.

We're two indie authors with over a dozen books between us and still a long way to go towards the quit the day job dream.

If that sounds familiar, listen along for our mastery through missteps journey.

Each week, we cover a topic to help along the way, and this week's topic is going to be blurb writing.

But before that, let's do our wins and fringes of the week.

Nailed it.

Matilda.

Regalers with your wins and whinges, please.

Oh, I am winning all around this week.

Personal win, I'm on the way to adopting two cats.

So very excited about this.

I have my home check this week, and I should be visiting the cats next week, and then I shall be the owner of two cats.

I shall reveal more about them.

And on, my major win is Bookbob.

I have a Bookbob on Wednesday.

It was very exciting.

It was, it felt like the week really built around it.

So it was really nice.

I had all the formatting and things out at the weekend.

I had the cover updated.

I was checking different formats and different covers in different places.

That was really helpful.

I had gotten, I sent my email out on Monday and I had some other promos on Tuesday and then the Bookbob went out on Wednesday.

And I say it's like Wednesday.

Maybe it was Thursday.

I don't know.

I feel like I've lost track.

It was Thursday.

It wasn't Thursday.

I just, the week has just like disappeared in it.

I also saw Elizabeth Gilbert speak on Wednesday.

I've just had a lot going on.

So it was fantastic.

It has been the week, and then I went to see a really interesting, like, cute little amateur writing group had written a play.

They presented a radio play on Friday.

I've been so literary this week, but I'm also a book bub.

Superstar's week.

It was fascinating.

I think the best thing about it was, it was like really getting to see parts of publishing that you don't get to see.

So just looking at the way that other authors, there are trad authors in my book bub, had set it up.

The way that people's rank changed, I obviously tracked people's book bubs in the days before and after, and saw how their ranks changed.

So it really was a great chance to see how different types of sales affect your rank in a way that I haven't really seen before, because I haven't had such big numbers.

So it was fantastic.

Lots of things I've learned from it as well that I would do the same more differently or just that I got to learn.

So really fun.

I am 70% of the way to making the money back in three days, in three days, before it's ever meant to be, so excellent.

And I think having judged by the rank, I think there must have been lots of borrows.

So I'm expecting the money to keep coming in.

So I would love taking that next week, but it feels like a win purely in the base of like, the getting to learn about it.

And all the financial side of it is also fantastic, but it was fun and fascinating.

How about you?

And you did also, I'm just gonna, before I go on to me, you did also get to number one in Amazon in Cozy Mysteries.

I was there for days.

That was interesting.

I didn't just go up and down.

It wasn't for days.

So it wasn't just that a book bug went well and you've noticed a spike in sales and reads.

It is that you actually did get the little orange banner that says bestseller, which is, I think, absolutely fantastic.

I know we shouldn't, well, I say we shouldn't praise the visuals, the kind of vanity side of things.

But why the hell not?

I think that's amazing.

Everyone tries to get a little bestselling tag and you got it.

Yeah.

I think what was really interesting.

I'm very excited for you.

Yeah.

And it was really interesting.

It stayed at code number one for a few days because I could see who was coming up behind me from the subsequent bookbugs I had expected to be moved quite quickly.

But I think just by sort of coincidence of pattern of books that came up, mine stayed at number one, and then slipped to number two after a couple of days, and is only, I think, this morning dropped from number three.

And it's still in the top 10, I think, last time I checked.

And that is several days later.

So getting great visibility.

I assume Amazon is sending it out to lots of people.

I think there'll be lots of followers in the way.

So really great.

Like, couldn't have asked for better in terms of affecting the rank.

I'm really glad that I did Facebook ads beforehand.

I'm really glad that I did a quick promo on my newsletter list beforehand.

That I got to test those things that I knew enough to do it.

Felt really good.

I think next step is, what do I do now that I need to think about?

How to kind of maintain that.

But that's for next week.

I'm just going to enjoy that this week.

So it's Sunday today.

Just a few days out and it has been a tiring week.

As I said, I've also fit in lots of literary activities, including our full day mastermind session that we do once a month.

And I am so literary and I'm working on my new book.

So I fit a lot in.

It is astounding that I still must do a day job.

Yeah, like you've lived a year in a week.

Yeah.

Like you've done more things than I ever do in one week.

And I still look so young.

I don't know what it is.

I know.

It's crazy.

You've really been blessed.

Well, I don't really have anyone just this week.

I think that last time we did this, my win was that I'd published a book.

Cause I'm pretty sure when we did the podcast, that was like the day it went out.

I'm kind of like, like you.

I have no idea.

I feel like your win was we were in Harrogate.

What's going on?

Yeah, my win wasn't that I was in Harrogate.

I took the week last week to go away and it was to work on stuff.

And I'll say partial win in that I did do some editing.

I didn't do as much as I wanted to, but my biggest win really was that I read two fantastic books and I'm going to say that is my win.

Because I kind of get stuck sometimes in, I think that I'm going to read a book really fast and then it takes me a month and I hate that.

Like I hate taking so long to read a book.

I mean, I'm doing loads of stuff as well.

So it's not really my fault.

It's just that there aren't enough hours in the day, but I read two full books last week and it felt fantastic.

That really makes me feel like I'm on holiday when I can just devour some books.

And they were two books that I felt changed my chemical makeup.

That is a great way to grab a good book.

So recommendations then, what are you sharing with us?

The first one that I read, which I read in 24 hours, which is like I haven't done that in ages.

I read Wayward by Amelia Clarke.

I think that's potentially her name.

I'm really bad at remembering all these names.

Is Amelia Clarke not the actress from Game of Thrones?

Yeah, potentially.

I remember names, but I don't remember who to attribute them to.

I know it's really bad.

I've got a terrible memory for names.

So Amelia Hart.

I've read it as my superpower.

Sorry, what was her name?

Amelia Hart.

Amelia Hart.

I knew there was Amelia.

And that book was, I know, it's really bad.

I'm just turning into my mother.

So that was a book that, yeah, I feel like it kind of touched like my witchy, like nature witch soul, you know, like it really made me feel like, oh, like, like everything around me is magical.

I am part of a magical world.

It was very, very nice read.

It was a little bit harrowing in terms of like, there was a lot of horrible things, like a lot of difficult relationships for women in the book.

But it was still quite an empowering read.

So that was very good.

And then I just finished Ninth House by Lee Bardo.

Wait, how do you go?

You see, I can't even, I'm looking at her name and I still can't say it.

I'm like, Lee Bardo.

Like, that's not her name.

Um, terrible.

It's close.

It's pretty close.

Yes.

Yeah, it was close.

And that was a five-star book for me.

Five-star book.

Could not, I wanted to jump into the book.

Can't remember her name.

I love every word that she wrote.

Because the name on the cover is the least important words, like in terms of the quality of words.

Um, I really find it odd how people really love signed books.

Um, because I'm like, those are the least important words in the book.

Like if I've slaved over the entire book, like I don't want you to value just the ugly scroll on the inside cover.

I've got terrible handwriting.

No, I have, I have got quite a lot of signed books, but it's mostly just because I love, I was talking about this earlier in our chat, in our little mastermind meetings, that I really love to preorder books.

Like I feel like it's just such a nice little treat.

I just feel so excited to be involved in like the hubbub of somebody's publishing journey.

But I just love preordering books.

And so a lot of people sign preordered books.

So I have like a selection of them.

But yeah, I'm not really that interested in it.

It's not really something that I care about.

I love reading.

Tell us also a little bit more about the book that you published this week, just so we know it doesn't go by unnoticed.

We should celebrate.

Oh, yes.

I know.

I'm so bad.

I never celebrate.

So it was the third book in a series that I've written called The Fantasy Girl Series.

And it's about, it's that they're middle grade, but they are kind of a cusp book.

But the protagonist is nine years old.

So middle grade books.

And it's about a young girl in 1930s Hollywood who discovers that magic and monsters are real.

And she gets caught up in this whole magical, mystical world.

And it's all about her trying to find her footing and figure out if she's got magical powers and trying to save her parents and her mom and all this family stuff.

So it's kind of like a fun little dramatic fantasy adventure.

And I do love it.

And this is the third and it's not the final book, but I am unsure whether I'll continue the series, which is something that we may talk about in the future.

Yes, so potentially a conversation for another podcast, but I'm not sure if I'll have the time to finish it.

It's not a series that people are that interested in.

So I finished this book and published it because I'd started the process.

And it was just nice to just to get it finishing off my desk.

But it's not hugely successful and I've never really pushed it to be.

And it's not really the genre that I've wanted to write in.

It was just a fun little experiment, but I'm kind of done with now.

But I mean, I love the series.

I do love it.

And this latest book has a magical library in it.

So I thought I'll go out on a high.

Lovely.

So yes, a lovely, a magical school and a magical library.

And you've learned plenty from publishing it.

Oh, I've learned so much from publishing it.

It was really was, the first book was my first, the first in the series was my first self-publishing foray.

So this series is really something that I've, yeah, I learnt a lot from.

I learnt how to format a book.

I learnt how to do covers with this book.

I learnt the whole format.

I learnt the whole publishing process with this series.

So it hasn't been a waste of time.

I've loved it.

It's been lovely.

And now I'm on to bigger and better things.

Ooh, exciting.

Okay.

So speaking of which, we are finishing up our series on writing as marketing now.

They're not really finishing the topic.

Obviously we'll come back to it many times.

We've done a sort of a four episode set on it.

The last one we're doing is about blurb writing, which is nobody's favourite type of writing.

And we have been talking about it all day because it's definitely something that we find is better done collaboratively because it is unpleasant.

That's always better done together.

So tell us a bit about blurb writing, how you do it, what's worked and not worked in the past, and what you've got under your belt right now in terms of blurb writing.

Oh, got all the big questions for me right at the start.

Generally, I've never disliked blurb writing.

I do see it as a challenge.

And I don't think I've particularly been great at it, but I also haven't been the worst at it.

So it's kind of a thing that I do enjoy doing as like, it's in itself, it's a creative project to try and distill your entire book into the snappiest of snappy bits of writing.

It's crazy.

Is that what you're trying to do?

And that I think is the problem.

Exactly.

So this is the problem.

So in the past, I have tried to explain my book in the blurb.

And recently, I've come to the conclusion that that's not what you should do.

So I've always tried to, I always have tried to kind of hit every, every action point in the book, in the blurb, thinking that that's the thing that's gonna make people want to buy the book.

But what I've learned recently, and I've been, I've bought a lot of books last week, and I bought some books where the blurbs were, purely for research, definitely, yeah.

Yes, it wasn't just me splurging in a bookshop.

No, it was me splurging in a bookshop.

I picked up the books, and most of the books I knew that I wanted to buy already, because they've been on my list for a while.

So the blurb wasn't super important, I just knew of the books and I wanted to read them.

One of the books I bought that I knew that I just wanted to read no matter what, because it had been recommended to me so many times, is Ninth House.

And I'll talk about that in a second.

And the other book was a book that I'd heard of, but I didn't know anything about the story.

And the reason I bought it was because it's had something particular in the blurb, which made me immediately say, I'm reading this.

And I think I'll talk about these two things now, and then go into what I think like the mistakes I've made.

Well, I know what mistakes I've made, but like the way that it's shaped how I'm thinking about blurbs at the moment, if that sounds okay to you.

I don't want to bogart the conversation.

But I'll start with Ninth House, because I have been recommended this book a lot.

And now that I've read it, I know why, because it's essentially everything that I love wrapped up in this glossy cover.

Absolutely beautiful cover, yeah.

And we have got a video cover, so if you show the cover, people will see it.

Yes.

Ooh, shiny, shiny snake.

But shiny, shiny snake.

It's not, it's all over the place.

Okay, can you see it forwards?

Yeah.

Okay, that's fine.

Okay, thank God, because I can't.

So it has a little thing from Stephen King on the front, which is just like, if you can get somebody to drop you a nice...

I mean, he does blurb a lot, so...

He probably gets around to all of us at some point.

He does.

Yeah.

For this book, he said it was impossible to put down, and I'm sure he'll put that on my book as well at some point in the future.

But we also have a little snippet from Lev Grossman and Joe Hill.

And I mean, I love these.

I think Lev Grossman's was one of the best fantasy novels I've read in years.

And Joe Hill said, the ninth house rocked my world.

Did he just get his copy from his dad?

So it was a two for one.

Immediately, it's got some things on the blurb and stuff on the cover that you just think, wow, these are some big, lovely words to say.

But the thing that shocked me the most about it is that the blurb doesn't really say much about anything.

It doesn't give anything really away.

Well, that's not true.

It says a lot.

So I've just read the blurb, right?

And the blurb says a lot.

But from having now read it, you know the blurb says not a lot compared to what's in the book.

Not as much.

Yeah.

So the blurb is a glossy picture of what the book looks like.

So it's like the best version.

It's like the airbrushed.

It's pure butter.

It is.

It is like the most buttery of butter you could ever come across.

So this is ghee, which is what is classified as the biggest butter you can get.

So it's like pure, absolutely pure, clarified, clog your veins, stop your heart.

Drown in it.

Drink it from the tap.

And when I read this, I thought this book sounded fantastic.

And then I read the book and re-read the blurb and realized that whilst the blurb is super buttery and has all of the things that the book contains, it doesn't actually have any of the details that I would have.

I mean, I wouldn't have written the blurb like this, essentially.

As in you would have written it better?

No, no, not at all.

I would have put way more information in it.

And that's where my brain kind of exploded because I realized that you can write a blurb, I'm going to say blurb so many times, but you could write a blurb that is just purely butter, glossing over the nooks and crannies that you think your story rests in.

And I think that's where I've been going wrong all this time.

I think all this time I've been thinking, oh, I should be saying as much as possible in my descriptions to really like show people like, but tell people's names and specific locations and specific events that happen.

But that's not, I don't know, I just feel like...

The issue is they're the things that stand out to you.

They're often like, oh, I know, that's a really key part of the book, you've mentioned that, but it's like, that's not a key part of the book, someone that hasn't read the book.

Can you give an example from that blurb, from anybody go on, of like something where the blurb says one thing, and then if you can sort of hint vaguely at what it actually really means in the book.

Yes, so it's in the second paragraph, where we've already found out that she's been accepted or like taken into Yale.

So she's going to be in Yale's freshman class.

And it says her free ride comes with a catch.

She has been tasked with monitoring Yale secret societies, notorious haunts of the rich and powerful.

And that's, I mean, I know, because we all love Yale and we all want to be, we just I just I just want to be there.

I want to be Rory Gilmore.

That's I want to be Rory Gilmore, except not Rory Gilmore.

But yeah, like a better version of it.

And whilst it is about secret societies, and whilst the main character does monitor the secret societies, it kind of hints at a little bit of spy work, I guess it sounds like she's going to be like sneaking around spying on secret societies, like Rory trying to get in with with the life and death of a good thank you and only apparatus.

It's in my head.

And so it sounds like she's going to be kind of going undercover and it's going to be sneaking around.

But that's not it at all.

So what the whoever wrote the blurb is, I mean, it could be that she's written herself, but it will not be that she's written herself.

Having worked in publishing is someone very lowly, who is very good at that.

They've done a great job of making it so mysterious, seems so much more mysterious and so much more thrilling.

I mean, the book is thrilling, there's so much that's going on.

But they've distilled it to the most important, buttery parts.

And it sounds like they've captured the emotion, like it's thrilling, not in the way that it's covered, but it is thrilling, whereas if you read that book and it was all like, comfy and calm and cozy, you would feel betrayed by the blurb.

But even though the blurb isn't actually the same, exactly what happens, it's got the same emotional tone.

Yes, and so many more things happen in the book than is described on the blurb as well.

So it's, the blurb basically says she's going to go and look at these, like, watch these secret societies and see what they're up to.

But there's also a dead girl on campus, and she's looking into what's happened.

And that kind of seems like just two events that happen in the book, that might be what the whole book's about.

But there is so much going on.

There is so many twists and turns.

And those two incidents of, like, her being involved in the secret societies and the girl and the dead body that shows up are literally the, like, the two smallest parts, the two smallest parts of the whole book.

But they're enough to grip you, right?

You read that and you were like, oh, absolutely, I'm reading that.

Secret societies, Yale, dead body.

And then sinister and extraordinary things happening.

And trying to bring down the rich and powerful.

So many things I want to read.

Yes.

Yeah.

It's not even my job when I absolutely want to read that.

It's a masterclass, I think, and it's one that I want to learn from.

And so today, we're talking about blurbs.

And I have recently changed one of my blurbs on Amazon, but I didn't particularly like it.

I just updated it for the sake of it, just for something to do.

Because, you know, why not?

And then going off this particular book, we decided we were going to write our own blurbs in this style.

And I do think that mine now sounds better in this kind of style.

Yeah, I really think it might be that I've...

There's a huge benefit to copying somebody's writing almost like...

It was an exercise that I did.

I did a master's in creative writing at Manchester University, and the main task that we did that stuck with me was one where you took the opening paragraph to somebody's work and say it was the opening paragraph and it was about someone's falling into a river.

And you take the exact sentence structure.

So it might be frontal adverbial, followed by a noun phrase and then something with like two adverbs in sequence, describing a very small simple noun.

So like literally that's the exact sentence pattern and try and retain the feeling like in terms of level of like urgency or tone, but make it about a whole different topic.

So instead of being about someone falling into a river, it could be about somebody making a cake and you have to keep the exact sentence structure and the exact tone, but change every single word.

It's incredibly effective to help you see the mechanics of language in a way that like I think we're often very good at as writers, we know, no, we can do it, but we don't always know what we're doing.

And I think it's a particularly good test to do with writing types that you maybe don't practice that much like blurb writing.

We don't write blurbs that often.

And it can be hard to switch between the long form of novel writing into this like short pithy marketing speak, like where you're not trying to say everything, you're not trying to clarify things or set a particular introduction, you know, beginning, middle and end structure, you're trying to just entice.

So I always think it's really helpful if you find a good example of something to try and model it as close as possible, because then you can always change it.

So we have done today, we copied the model as close as we possibly could with our next book, knowing that we can go in and change it.

And also figuring out when we were doing it, we read them bit by bit to each other, figuring out the bits that didn't work for our books or for our particular genre, and figuring out where we might want to change it and why.

But having that as a model to use was much more helpful than what I've done in the past, which has always been to look at other blurbs in my genre and copy that.

But I think the problem with that is, because that's always the advice, right?

It's like, see what works well in your genre and do the exact same thing.

Often there are people who are very popular, not because of their blurbs, because they're nothing through their blurbs, and actually can be terrible blurb writers.

And they are really good at other marketing things that then bring people into their books and make their books very popular.

And if you copy their blurb, it's actually the worst thing they do.

Like they might be fantastic at social media, terrible, you copy their blurb, your book is tanking.

Or maybe their blurb is great for their really specific audience.

Like they have maybe got quite a slightly off center audience for cozies that you haven't necessarily understood, because you don't maybe know the work that well.

There's lots of reasons why copying blurbs, I think, doesn't always work.

And also I have tried copying different blurbs and changing it.

And they don't feel quite right, other ones in cozies.

And I think having changed them, it didn't necessarily move the needle.

And so I really wanted to try this, where we found something that was not in my genre at all, and just figured out, like, I really want to try something emotional, because it ties into what we talked about with Butter before.

Like, I really want to see if we can find an emotional hook, rather than, this is the exact right structure.

We need the structure where you introduce the, like, I think a lot of blurbs are beginning, middle and end.

They'll be like, set the scene, give the crisis, end with a like, oh, can she fix it?

But I, I think that Leigh Bardugo one was so impactful because of Butter, and it made me want to read it.

It made me desperate to read it.

I have got no time in my life.

I want to read that book on a holiday, just like you.

I think it is a perfect holiday book, so I did not, did not accept your generous offer to lend it to me, because it would set my bookshelf and I'd be annoyed at it, because I'd have time to read it.

I want to take it on a holiday at some point, and just like, I want to read it in 24 hours.

I want to just like, hole up in a little like, caravan with, or cabin with like, rain on the roof, and I'm in bed, and I'm just reading that book and doing nothing else.

Maybe getting up, getting a hot chocolate, that's it.

Yeah.

Just because of that blurb.

That is how this book should be read.

Just because of the blurb.

Yeah.

I think you're right as well.

I have in the past copied other people's blurbs, and I've taken books that I know have sold well.

Not even like of indie books, but just like Chad published books, and some of my favourite books.

And I've read the blurbs and copied the style, and assumed that was enough, but it wasn't.

I just trusted that that was like the thing to do, and that was the thing that was going to make the blurb good, but it wasn't.

It wasn't the thing.

I didn't know why the blurb was good.

I couldn't really copy it.

Whereas with this, this Leigh Bardugo one, because it ties in so closely to what we've been doing, I know why it's good.

I can see every word choice, so that when I want to choose my own word, I can pick the right sort of word to go in there.

And in fact, I had a blurb that I quite liked for my upcoming book.

I had spent a long time thinking about this series and this new book, and I really had distilled down.

I really wanted to make it about the things that I absolutely love.

So it's about baking and set in a street for the bookshops.

And it's got a sort of wayward child who's a bit of a rebel who's gone away and like, you know, gone against the grain of a family.

And then she's the only one that can fix the family's problems when a murder happens in the street.

So it's got things in that I absolutely love.

And it's even got, I absolutely love Christmas more than anything.

And it's got a Christmas bookshop.

So it's like, oh gosh, do I want to put that in?

And do I want to mention some specific cake?

So I got all the things in that I like.

And I fed that into AI.

I use Gemini.

I think it's better than track GPT for things that I like writing anyway.

So for when I do like marketing type writing, I feel like Gemini comes out better results.

So I put it into Gemini.

I put all kinds of things in the book in there and I asked it for two versions.

I asked it for one version that was full of book related puns and one version that was full of cake related puns because the book is kind of a mashup of the two.

And then I just took bits and pieces of the two different verbs and put them together to make one that kind of captured both those things.

And it was like much better than any of the verbs I've written before, really leagues ahead because it wasn't trying to, because AI, Gemini doesn't know the book inside out, it knows what I tell it.

And then it can turn that into enticing persuasive language.

So I like my verb.

And then when we were at the Leigh Bardugo one, I was so desperate to read that book that I was like, okay, I want to rewrite my verb using that same structure just to see how impactful it is.

And also kind of just interested to see, so that is a sort of urban fantasy type book.

And it's quite, it sounds like a similar drama to Cozy Mystery, but it's actually a mile away from Cozy Mysteries, even though they're both about broad strokes, similar things like small clothes environment, amateur sleuth.

They're worlds apart.

So I was like, oh, it couldn't possibly be the same blurbs which couldn't really work.

But it was really good to do, and I think the blurb is excellent and feels much better here.

So I've now got two versions.

I think I will go kind of a combination of the two, put them together.

And I even took things from my original blurb and put it into the Leigh Bardugo one while we were writing it, because of this part, I think really captured it, even though it's not the same structure as hers, it's got the same essence.

So now I've got two, and I think we talked about maybe reading our two blurbs, original and then transformed.

Do you want to go first with yours?

I'll start, because mine is the longer one.

So the blurb that I currently have on Amazon for my book Curse of the Wild.

And that's book one of the series.

One that I did, and this is book one of the series, so book two is out later this year.

And I did take to Gemini to help me write this.

And when I first pulled it through and tweaked a little bit here and there, I enjoyed it.

I thought it was a good blurb.

But then looking back, like a week later, after the Gemini mist had parted, you know, it's like, it's just so exciting.

Like, oh, wow, Gemini, you've managed to sell me my own book.

And then reading it back, I mean, it's like, it's so fast.

It's so fast, like, it's something you would have agonized about for hours until like, did it in two seconds.

Oh, gosh, it must be good.

Yeah.

Yeah, like, oh, this is like so much better than what I had come up with, like, took me ages.

So my current blurb is, yeah, very wordy.

So I will read this, and I'll read my own.

Defying their pact's laws, werewolf sisters Lucy and June embark on a desperate mission, save their sister from the untameable wild, horrifying curse with only one escape, death.

Their hunt leads them to a desolate, desert town, shrouded in secrets.

Here, distrust is as thick as the sand, and whispers of dark magic fill the air.

With danger at every turn, Lucy and June must navigate a web of suspicion.

An unlikely alliance with the wise woman and her enigmatic grandson offers a glimmer of hope to what the clock is ticking.

As they delve deeper, the sisters uncover a sinister truth.

The wild might not be a disease, but a weapon unleashed by a hidden enemy.

Unleashing their own wild fury, Lucy and June fight to expose the truth and confront the darkness before it claims their sister, and unleashes a terror far greater than any curse.

So wordy.

Yeah, but it feels like, oh, it's full of tempting things.

But I think a lot of the wordiness makes it seem very mystical and vague.

And it's a little bit hard to figure out.

Yeah, where is the butter?

I think all the good things are in there, but there's no like this, I'm absolutely dying to read this.

I think there are like some good tropes in here.

Like sisters on a mission, curses, small towns with secrets, a wise woman and an enigmatic grandson.

So you know, like, there are some tropes in there that I think are hooky, but definitely not buttery.

So this is the butter-filled blurb that I wrote today, and this is based on Ninth House.

Lucy Parish is the best tracker in her pack.

She's defied the laws that bind her family, become a teenage runaway, and she has one mission, find her cursed sister.

But the cure comes at a cost.

With barely a penny to her name and the trail turning to ice, she needs allies fast, but who can she trust?

When a body is discovered, Lucy must confront the curse that consumed her sister.

Now the blood has been shed, pack lore dictates one thing only, death.

Can she overcome a magic she doesn't understand and find a cure for the curse of the wild?

It's definitely, it doesn't have half as much detail, but I do think it captures the essence of the book.

Yeah, I think it's got, I do think it has butter.

Yeah, I think there's like keywords in there that really stick with you.

So things like that, like the pack in the first sentence, like the book is going to be about those like tense family relationships.

And I think removing the idea of the the wiser woman and the enigmatic grandson, they weren't giving me anything.

I was like, maybe they'll be good, maybe they'll be rubbish.

I've no sense of like, it's going to be gripping in this way.

Whereas, yes, the sort of the stakes and the consequences in this version feel much more.

I'm much more eager to find out what happened.

And this one in particular shows that it's about a girl who is desperately trying to find, like find and cure her sister.

So it's very more family oriented.

And removes any of the fluff, like any of the kind of just like the drama that you find out when you read the book.

So I think that I do think it's a better version.

I do think I need to maybe tweak it a little bit.

But I think it has distilled it to what the book is about, which is like a family based werewolf drama.

Yeah, and we just wrote these today, so I think we'll give them like, time to rest and then come back and like, okay, I can see where to edit these.

But it does feel like such a useful practice just to get them drafted and to see the process of drafting it to see like where you where you're tempted to like pull out into like lots of details.

So your original blurb is two sisters.

And this blurb is just one sister.

Did you kill one person?

Yes, because it is just, I actually did remove somebody from the book, but they never were in it from like the published one.

But it is just one POV.

So it is just from the point of view of Lucy.

She does have a sister that she is on this mission with.

But she's obviously you don't ever see anything from her point of view.

So I was way too focused on making it seem like just make making it obvious that there was more to it than just one girl.

But as soon as you start reading it, you'd know because it's the first thing on the page is the interaction between the two of them.

As they get off the bus in this town.

So there's no point in putting it in the blood.

It doesn't change the stakes or the butter for her to have a sister with her.

No.

Because in both versions, they're looking for a sister.

It makes no difference because it's like in the first version of like, oh, these two sisters looking for a cursed sister.

So is one of these sisters cursed?

I know that has always been the most difficult part of me when I'm like, my writing of any copy to just trying to do any kind of sales copy.

And I'm always like, oh, two sisters trying to find another sister.

And I've never found a good way to say it.

And now I'm realizing like there was because I didn't need to say that there was two sisters because that's just like, it's not important.

Yeah, exactly.

Is there anything else in there where you've consciously decided to make it not factually correct, but it is like a slight fudging of what's in the book?

I think the I think the line, the cure comes at a cost is a nice buttery thing that probably won't happen the way that it sounds.

So that is that there is kind of a cost to it, but it's not how it sounds in that.

But emotionally how it sounds kind of happy.

Yes, I would say so.

Yes.

The cost is family oriented.

So it's it's fine to put it in.

I don't feel like I'm lying.

Yeah, but it does feel like I'm I'm zhuzhing up something.

But I think it's often just like really simplifying, like to clarify it.

Clarifying it like butter.

Oh my goodness.

Clarifying the butter.

Yeah, I do really love this blurb.

And I think that it's probably not the one I'm going to go with, but it's 90% there.

Yeah, yeah.

So would you like to tell us your original blurb and your new one?

Yeah, so I quite like the original blurb.

I think...

So my book I haven't written, that's also I think significant when putting together this blurb and figuring out what belongs in it and what doesn't.

I've planned most of the book in quite a lot of depth and I have sketched out quite a lot of it and I am about four chapters into writing it, so I'm attempting to know if you're writing it.

I know the book quite well, but I think I am not so hung up on the details as I would be if I had written the book.

So I think actually I prefer writing the blurb before the book now, just because I am such a one for getting really hung up on like, oh, but here's seven people you need to know before you read the book.

It's like you're just trying to get someone to know is emotionally this type of book for me.

They don't need to know the exact name of every person you're going to bring up.

So my original book, so because I haven't written the book, my original blurb I think is already relatively strong on like, focusing on emotional things.

But I maybe also like yours, AI made it quite wordy.

And I think the stakes are a bit low, not buttery enough.

So this is my original.

Agatha Askew, the black sheep with a talent for scones and scandal, has returned to the quaint English book town of Plattenbach Spring.

But Agatha is not following the family's well-worn plot line.

Instead of stocking shelves with first editions, she's making up a store with department paper tea rooms.

The Askew's, a dynasty of esteemed booksellers, are less than thrilled, particularly when a dead body pops up in her father's shop, clutching a note that leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouth.

Determined to clear his name and maybe earn a crumber family approval, Agatha plunges into a world of dog-eared secrets, literary feuds and motives more layered than the lightest milfoy.

Can she unravel the plot before the final chapter is written on her father's reputation?

It's definitely slightly longer than the one I've come up with now.

And less battery.

So this is the new version.

Agatha Askew is the biggest disappointment of her booktown founding family.

A black sheep and bake-off failure with a talent for scones and scandal, Agatha was in desperate need of a fresh start.

But the quaint English tea room she inherits comes with a catch.

She has been tasked with mending the ties that bind her family, a long lineage of literary royalty.

Now there's a dead body in a bookshop clutching a clue that points to her father.

Determined to clear his name and earn a crumb of family approval, Agatha plunges into a world of dogged secrets, literary feuds and motives more layered than the lightest milfoy.

Can she unravel the plot before the final chapter is written on her father's reputation?

So that feels hookier, I think butterier.

I'm still going to work on it, but I think it definitely felt good to follow a clear model and try and make choices consciously based on like how would I make my book fit into this pattern, rather than how do I distill 70,000 words into 100?

Yeah, yeah, I think it definitely the second one has the first one is great because I do I love the first one, but it does seem more of a mouthful, excuse the pun.

And the the second one is a lot more concise, has like so much more, I think emotion to it like it feels much more like this.

I can tell what the stakes are more in the second one.

But I know what you mean because like mine, I feel like yours is probably just missing like the thing that makes it yours.

Like that's why I feel like mine's missing.

I think it's missing a bit of me in it.

I think it's quite fast paced, like for a cozy blurb.

Anyway, I said it 10,000 times.

It feels quite tense because it's not from a cozy blurb.

So I think it's useful to follow this model.

And useful to follow a model from a different genre because then you can more conspicuously see what's being done and not done, rather than trying to copy someone who is maybe only popular because they have been at it for 30 years or they are great at socials.

Yes.

Yeah.

And I think I will keep doing this.

I'll keep maybe looking at different genres of blurbs and following that model and then kind of piecing together a few different ones into a really strong blurb overall, and then have something where I'm really focused on the butter rather than the blow by blow honesty of the book.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's I think that's it.

I think it's fine to have like some of the stuff in there, but you don't have to put everything in there.

That's where I've been falling down this whole time.

And it's probably just left over from when I was trying to write synopses and sending things to agents.

You just learn that you have to put as much upfront as you can to try and get them to see it like the whole picture as quickly as possible to try and convince them that they want to buy the book.

And that I don't need to do that now because now I have to try and think of myself as a publisher who is now selling the product.

I know who I am.

Yeah, I think my next step is looking at the blurbs of Theodora Taylor, who wrote the book on butter literally, who also writes romance novels.

I know she actually does a course on buttery blurb writing, but I think I would really like to start by looking at her blurbs and using one of those as a model and just kind of incorporating some ideas from that and seeing what feels right and doesn't feel right when I'm trying to describe my books using that same structure.

So plenty of things to work on.

Yeah, that's a good plan.

I definitely feel a thousand percent more confident writing blurbs than I did when I first started writing novels, which was just painful and embarrassing.

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to it because I'm going to start writing the blurb for the books I'm editing at the moment, which is out at the end of this year.

And I'm really looking forward to doing it now.

After we've done this, after our meeting today and talking about it and trying a new method, I'm just so like juiced up.

I can't wait.

So I suppose we could wrap this up here and say what we're going to talk about next week, because next week we are starting a new series on books as products.

And our first episode is going to be soda can strategies.

Stay with us on this.

This is something we've come up with.

This is going to be what everyone's talking about.

So what are your thoughts on this at the moment?

If you want to explain it or if we're going to leave it as a mystery and explain it next week?

Oh, interesting.

I think the thing about the idea is it's both very simple and very complicated.

So I think maybe we won't tell people what it's about, because if you kind of link the ideas together, the next series coming up is books as products.

And our first episode in that is called Soda Canned Strategies.

Maybe that will kind of give you some prompts to think about what it might be going to talk about.

And we will get into it.

We will do a deep dive on that next week.

We will be adding to the pantry of book publishing metaphors and getting some...

Yeah, because it's next to the butter now.

So we'll have like butter and soda cans.

Yes, we will be adding to the pantry of techniques.

It does feel uncomfortable to call it soda can because we don't call it soda in the UK, but I think soda can strategies really rolls off the tongue well.

So that is why we've chosen the name.

And if you don't agree, you are incorrect.

No, I really like it.

I think when you said it and I wrote it down, I was like, oh, yes, that's nice.

I also like it.

Yeah, I'm excited to talk about it.

It's definitely a mindset.

It's going to be a mindset episode more than anything else.

So everybody listening, make sure to bring a cup of tea or coffee and just prepare some epiphanies.

I think it's going to be an epiphany episode.

Yes, it will be an epiphany episode for sure.

I will look forward to seeing you then.

I suppose that's that.

Thank you very much.

Goodbye.