Karen S Wiesner: Blurbs Series, Part 2: Series Blurbs

 Writing Craft Article by Karen S. Wiesner

Based on Writing Blurbs that Sizzle--And Sell! by Karen S. Wiesner

Blurbs Series, Part 2:

Series Blurbs

This is the second of six posts focusing on writing effective blurbs for your books.

In Part 1, we talked about writing high-concept and back cover blurbs. Let's continue.

Part 3: Series Blurbs

At its crux, a series blurb strives to be a concise, breathtaking summary of your entire series that includes the major internal and external conflicts and the goals and motivations of the main character(s), perhaps as a group or some other concept (the driving force of the story). A series blurb will be a generalized sentence or paragraph that accurately covers, reflects and describes every single book in the series. A series blurb can make or break the sale of an entire set of books. Many publishers and certainly readers buy the first book in the series and every single one after it based on a sizzling series blurb that convinces them they absolutely have to read not only the first book but all of them in that set!

Let's first establish that the point of a series is that readers who follow it from one book to the next will get a richer, more complex, and emotional experience than those who only read a single book in the series. Those readers will understand the subtle nuances that one-time browsers won’t pick up on. For that reason, the author has to make enough vital connections from one book to the next in their series or readers will lose the purpose in reading that series at all. Therefore, the first step to writing a series blurb is to figure out what ties the books together.

Types of Series Ties

If each book in a series doesn’t somehow tie together or have a touchstone that helps the reader figure out how they’re connected, you could hardly call these books a series. There are three distinct types of series ties, but always keep in mind that authors frequently combine one or more of these in a single series.

·         Recurring Character or Central Group of Characters

·         Premise/Plot Series

·         Setting Series

The series ties will also help us figure out what the "who" aspect is of our series when filling out the next section of the Blurb Worksheet.

Finding the Focus of a Series: Story and Series Arcs

A story arc is introduced, developed, and concluded in each individual book of a series. In a series story, a story arc is short-term because it will be neatly tied-up in a single book within the series.

A series arc is the long-term thread that's introduced in the first book in the series, is developed in some way in every single subsequent book, but is only fully resolved in the final book in the series.

The series arc is usually separate from the individual story arcs, but both are crucial and must fit together seamlessly. As an example, in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the story arc is the chamber of secrets plotline. The overall series arc, in the most simplified terms, is good (Harry) overcomes evil (Voldemort)—and that’s true for every book in that series. The series arc runs beneath the individual story arcs in each book.

Certain types of series don’t really need series arcs because they’re open-ended. No clear end is in sight, and therefore there is less need for a tightly delineated series arc that must resolve in the final book. In an open-ended series (such as some sleuth mysteries with a single recurring character—i.e., Hercule Poirot and the like), each book in the series is a standalone.

The series blurb should tell readers how all the books in that series are connected. If the series blurb is done well enough, those sentences will accurately reflect what every book in the series is about in a concise, intriguing summary. If readers don't understand the premise of your series in the blurb, they may not bother try reading the first book.

Now that we know what a series blurb needs to include, we can use a short form to provide the jumping-off point in crafting one of our own on the Blurb Worksheet:

Basic Series Information: Fill out as completely as possible, keeping in mind that you may not use all, much or any of this in your final blurb.

Series Title:

Genre(s):

[Who] Series Tie(s):

       Recurring or Cast of Characters Series

       Premise/Plot Series

       Setting Series

Basic Series Arcs:

[What] Conflict or crisis that sets the series in motion:

[Why] What's the worst case resolution scenario to the crisis situation?

We're going to use a modified variation of our "formula" for the series blurb:

Who

(Series Tie)

What

(Conflict or Crisis)

Why

(Worst Case Resolution Scenario) 

Note that resolutions are not usually needed in the series blurb, since you don’t want to defuse the intrigue or tension, but sometimes a resolution will work well in the overall series blurb. Play with it to see all the alternatives. 

Let's fill out the form and formula, this time with The Expanse Series. The books don't technically have a series blurb--not a definitive one anyway--the way the TV series does, but I've put together a slightly hybridized version below. 

Series Title: The Expanse

Genre(s): Science Fiction

[Who] Series Tie(s): Premise/Plot Series (though it could fit in other categories as well), in this case a futuristic galaxy that humans have developed and colonized. I.e.: Hundreds of years in the future, humans have colonized the solar system. 

Series Arcs:

[What] Conflict or Crisis that Sets the Series in Motion: The U.N. controls Earth. Mars is an independent military power. The planets rely on the resources of the Asteroid Belt, where air and water are more precious than gold. For decades, tensions have been rising between these three places.

[Why] What's the worst case resolution scenario to the crisis situation? A police detective in the asteroid belt, the first officer of an interplanetary ice freighter and an earth-bound United Nations executive slowly discover a vast conspiracy that threatens the Earth's rebellious colony on the asteroid belt. Earth, Mars and the Belt are now on the brink of war. And all it will take is a single spark. 

We're going to use a slightly modified variation of our blurb "formula": 

Who (Hundreds of years in the future, humans have colonized the solar system. The U.N. controls Earth. Mars is an independent military power. The planets rely on the resources of the Asteroid Belt, where air and water are more precious than gold. For decades, tensions have been rising between these three places.) Series Tie 

What (A police detective in the asteroid belt, the first officer of an interplanetary ice freighter and an earth-bound United Nations executive slowly discover a vast conspiracy that threatens the Earth's rebellious colony on the asteroid belt.) Conflict or Crisis 

Why (Earth, Mars and the Belt are now on the brink of war. And all it will take is a single spark.) Worst Case Resolution Scenario 

Here's the blurb for The Expanse Series: 

Hundreds of years in the future, humans have colonized the solar system. The U.N. controls Earth. Mars is an independent military power. The planets rely on the resources of the Asteroid Belt, where air and water are more precious than gold. For decades, tensions have been rising between these three places. A police detective in the asteroid belt, the first officer of an interplanetary ice freighter and an earth-bound United Nations executive slowly discover a vast conspiracy that threatens the Earth's rebellious colony on the asteroid belt. Earth, Mars and the Belt are now on the brink of war. And all it will take is a single spark. 

Remember the axiom we fixed in our minds earlier: If the blurb isn't effectively good, making you want to read the story inside the pages, it won't work. The goal is to get readers to read the book. Apparently, Tolstoy downed a gallon or two of vodka while trying to write the blurb for War and Peace. Truly, here is no better way to test an author's ability to write concisely in a way that engages and entices the reader into wanting more than with these three different types of blurb. Time to get down to that Blurb Hokey Pokey. 

In Part 3, we'll talk about some basics of crafting blurbs. 

Karen S. Wiesner is the author of Writing Blurbs That Sizzle--And Sell!

Volume 7 of the 3D Fiction Fundamentals Collection 

http://www.writers-exchange.com/3d-fiction-fundamentals-series/

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/writing-reference-titles.html 

Happy writing! 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series. Visit her here:

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

Luddites and SF

The term "Luddite" is typically applied to people who oppose technological advances. That's basically what I've always assumed the word to mean. Well, Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS column corrects that misconception:

Science Fiction Is a Luddite Literature

Luddites were textile workers belonging to a secret society in England in the early nineteenth century, best known for destroying the newfangled equipment in textile mills. According to Doctorow, however, their primary objective wasn't the destruction of machinery. That was "their tactic, not their goal." Rather, their goal was "to challenge not the technology itself, but rather the social relations that governed its use." Doctorow details some of the local and global changes that resulted from mechanization of the textile industry. Factory owners could have used the new-model looms to improve employment conditions for skilled craftspersons. Instead, employers chose to hire fewer workers at lower wages. The Luddites imagined and agitated in favor of a different path for the industrial revolution. Doctorow gives several examples of how we, today, "are contesting the social relations surrounding our technologies."

New technology always generates social change, often with unanticipated consequences. Robert Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll" is one story that pioneered the type of science fiction focusing not on aspects such as the technical details of how automated roads work, but on how their existence affects the society that uses them. An obvious real-world example, the automobile, had easily predicted effects on individuals' freedom of movement and the decline of passenger railroads, but few people probably foresaw the impact on courtship customs and sexual mores. With cars, the balance of power in courtship shifted from the girl, who invited the boy to "call on" her in her parents' home, to the boy, who invited the girl on a "date" outside her parents' control. And of course the automobile gave young couples more freedom for sexual experimentation than they had under the old system. Consider the telephone: In his final novel, TO SAIL BEYOND THE SUNSET, Heinlein has the narrator's father, a doctor, predict at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century that telephones in the home would mean the end of house calls. When the only way to get a home doctor visit was to send someone in person to summon him, patients expected house calls only in emergencies. Once they could contact their family physician by picking up the phone, they would call for less and less urgent reasons, and doctors would soon refuse to cooperate. (This decline probably happened more slowly than Heinlein anticipated; I have a dim memory of the doctor's visiting me at home when I had measles around age five, the only time I've personally encountered a doctor's house call.)

Like the mechanical looms in the early stage of the industrial revolution, most if not all new technologies benefit some people while disadvantaging others. The ease of paying bills and performing other transactions online provides great convenience for most while disadvantaging those who can't afford a computer and internet connection or, like my ninety-year-old aunt, simply decline to adopt those "conveniences." Businesses now routinely expect customers to have internet access and hence make transactions more difficult for those who don't. Cell phones have made fast connections everywhere all the time routine, so that people are often expected to be instantly available whether they want to be or not. Moreover, as pay telephones have been used less and less, they've tended to disappear, so when anybody does need one—whether because he or she doesn't have a mobile phone or because the battery has run down or they're in a dead zone with no cell service—a phone booth is almost impossible to find. I actually "met" a person nagging me for contact information on Goodreads who accused me of lying when I said I didn't own a smart phone. (Yes, I have a cell phone for urgent or otherwise time-sensitive communication away from home, but it's a plain old "dumb" flip model.)

According to Doctorow, science fiction is a Luddite genre because both the historical movement and the fiction "concern themselves with the same questions: not merely what the technology does, but who it does it for and who it does it to."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Word Nerd Day

Today, January 9^th (Sunday) is a day to celebrate word-nerdiness.    

https://newsd.in/word-nerd-day/

Word to the wise: if you see some apparently verbose and pretentious use of English in Op Eds today,  pause before beclowning yourself with a snarky comment. The author might be celebrating word nerd day.. as am I.

The Weather Channel celebrated strange and powerful words for wind, this morning: Haboob, and Derecho.

My new word of the day is anosmia, ( loss of sense of smell).

Someone I know tells me that she has lost her sense of taste and smell since getting her 3 Pfizer jabs. (The jabs, not the virus). Dining is reduced to routine mastication, which might be helpful if one wishes to lose weight.

Apologies for brevity. 

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™ 

http://www.spacesnark.com/   

http://www.rowenacherry.com

EPIC Award winner, Friend of ePublishing

 

Karen S. Wiesner: Blurbs Series, Part 1: High-Concept and Back Cover Blurbs

Writer's Craft Article by Karen S. Wiesner

Based on Writing Blurbs that Sizzle--And Sell! by Karen S. Wiesner

Blurbs Series, Part 1:

High-Concept and Back Cover Blurbs

'

This will be the first of six posts focusing on writing effective blurbs for your books.

Cait Reynolds makes me laugh whenever I read her Blurb Hokey Pokey quote: "You put your protagonist in. You leave the best friend out. You put the problem in. You leave the twist out. You do the Hokey Pokey and leave 'em on a cliffhanger. That's what it's all about."

How to write a blurb 101: You put your main character in, you don't need that secondary character. Detail the conflict with just enough to get the questions rising inside the reader's head but not too much that you begin answering those questions or deflating any of the big moments in the book. Hook with a last sentence that drives them panting to open the book and start reading. That's the general idea. But there's a lot more to it because we have to contend with more than just the back cover blurb.

Before we talk about the three types of blurbs, there two things we need to preface with:

1) Ultimately, it doesn't matter a whit if a blurb is long or short or somewhere in-between. We have a misconception these days that being short by definition makes a blurb good and effective while a long blurb is by default in opposition of that, but both flavor-of the-day trends are illusions that you can't afford to rest on. An effectively good blurb means it's both well-written and makes a person want to read the story inside the pages, not just the back--want to enough to actually pay money to do it. Promotional considerations are the major and the main reason for having short blurbs.

2) The only part of that we're going to deal with here is the summary of the book.

How to Write Blurbs

An effectively good blurb has two parts for a single title and three for a series. The discussion on series blurbs is included after the other two that are needed for absolutely every blurb.

Part 1: High-Concept Blurbs The only difference between a back cover blurb and a high-concept blurb is usually length and frequently the high-concept blurb is much more generalized than the back cover blurb. Almost always, it's a single sentence that captures the essence of the story with a solid punch of intrigue straight to the gut. An example of an intriguing high-concept blurb from a book:

The tale of the contestants of a grueling walking competition where there can only be one winner—the one that survives. (The Long Walk by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman)

If you look at this closely, you'll notice this sentence has two components: A who and a what. The who could refer to a protagonist or an antagonist or any general concept. In the book world, this is usually the main character but it could also be a group of people, a culture, a planet, whatever--essentially who has the most at risk that the reader is rooting for--the main driving force in the story, whether good or evil.

This is a basic formula we can use in the crafting of our high-concept blurbs. For a high-concept blurb, the goal is to come up with one to two sentences, something utterly intriguing. Here's the first section of our Blurb Worksheet:

 Who:

What:

Now let's tag the high-concept blurb we mentioned earlier so you can see how it fits into the formula. I've chosen a hard one because literally there isn't a high-concept blurb that can't fit into this two-part-component formula, but it might be difficult to initially figure out who's who and what's what:

The Long Walk by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman:

Who: The contestants of a grueling walking competition.

What: Are forced into a walking competition where there can only be one winner—the one that survives.

 Part 2: Back Cover Blurbs

At its crux, a back cover blurb strives to be a concise, breathtaking summary of your entire story that includes the major internal and external conflicts and the goals and motivations of the main character(s). Let's define the terms that will be on the next section of our Blurb Worksheet:

External and Internal Conflict, and Goals and Motivations

External conflict (plot) is the central tangible or outer problem standing squarely in the character’s way that must be faced and solved by that character. Internal conflicts are emotional problems brought about by external conflicts that make a character reluctant to achieve a goal because of her own roadblocks. In fiction, character conflicts are why plot conflicts can’t be resolved. Your first spark of the story in your mind will usually suggest what the character’s conflicts are, and many times they’re based on someone or something threatening what the character cares about passionately.

Internal conflicts are all about character, and external conflicts are all about plot, but both belong to the main character. After all, if both didn’t affect her in some profound way, they wouldn’t be conflicts for her and therefore wouldn’t even be part of her story.  Additionally, it’s your job as the writer to give the character incentives (specifically, goals and motivations) not to give up until everyone is safe and the main character has what she was fighting for.  Your character can't simply react to conflict--she must act in the face of it. What exactly does she stand to gain if she does something? What will she lose if she doesn't do it?

Focused on the goal, the character is pushed toward the external conflict by believable, emotional, and compelling conflicts and motivations that won’t let her quit before she reaches the goal. The intensity of her anxiety creates worry and anticipation in the reader. Those are the very things you want to highlight in a powerful, succinct way in a back cover blurb.

Now that we know what a back cover blurb needs to include, we can use a short form to provide the jumping-off point in crafting one of our own on the Blurb Worksheet:

Basic Information: Fill out as completely as possible, keeping in mind that you may not use all, much or any of this in your final blurb.

Title of Book:

Genre(s):

Time Period(s):

Main Setting(s):

Basic Character and Plot Information:  Fill out as completely as possible for the major characters in your story (usually no more than two or three main and one villain).

Main Character Role (specify hero, heroine, villain, etc.):

            First and Last Name:

            Age and Job:

            Description of the character's personality/hobbies/physical appearance/

            traumas or hang-ups that factor into his or her story conflicts:

            Internal Conflict (i.e., character crisis or what's in jeopardy or at stake):

            External Conflict (i.e., plot crisis):

            Goals and motivations (i.e., what and why character is compelled to act):

Once you've filled out the form above completely, you can inject your story specifics into this formula (note: you would fill this out for each major character):

Who

(name of character)

wants to

(goal to be achieved)

because

(motivation for acting)

but who faces

(conflict standing in the way).

Let's do this a little backwards and fill out the forms for The Woman in Black by Susan Hill (some sections aren't included if the book didn't have it).

 Title of Book: The Woman in Black

Genre: Ghost story

            Time Period: Presumably during the 1860s.

Main Setting: Crythin Gifford, a faraway English town in the windswept salt marshes beyond Nine Lives Causeway.

Main Character Role: Hero

            First and Last Name: Arthur Kipps

            Age: Presumably young, "up-and-coming".

            Job: London solicitor

             Internal Conflict: The routine business trip he anticipated quickly takes a horrifying turn when he finds himself haunted by a series of mysterious sounds and images—a rocking chair in a deserted nursery, the eerie sound of a pony and trap, a child’s scream in the fog, and, most terrifying of all, a ghostly woman dressed all in black. 

             External Conflict: A menacing spectre haunting a small English town connected to Eel Marsh House, which stands at the end of the causeway, wreathed in fog and mystery, hiding tragic secrets behind its sheltered windows.

Who (Arthur Kipps) name of character

wants (to conclude what he anticipated would be a routine business trip in his goal of becoming an up-and-coming London solicitor but the job quickly takes a horrifying turn) goal to be achieved

because (he finds himself haunted by a series of mysterious sounds and images—a rocking chair in a deserted nursery, the eerie sound of a pony and trap, a child’s scream in the fog, and, most terrifying of all, a ghostly woman dressed all in black) motivation for acting

but who faces (the menacing spectre haunting a small English town connected to Eel Marsh House, which stands at the end of the causeway, wreathed in fog and mystery, hiding tragic secrets behind its sheltered windows) conflict standing in the way

 Here's the final high-concept blurb and back cover blurb for this book:

 A chilling tale about a menacing spectre haunting a small English town.

Arthur Kipps is an up-and-coming London solicitor who is sent to Crythin Gifford—a faraway town in the windswept salt marshes beyond Nine Lives Causeway—to attend the funeral and settle the affairs of a client, Mrs. Alice Drablow of Eel Marsh House. Mrs. Drablow’s house stands at the end of the causeway, wreathed in fog and mystery, but Kipps is unaware of the tragic secrets that lie hidden behind its sheltered windows. The routine business trip he anticipated quickly takes a horrifying turn when he finds himself haunted by a series of mysterious sounds and images—a rocking chair in a deserted nursery, the eerie sound of a pony and trap, a child’s scream in the fog, and, most terrifying of all, a ghostly woman dressed all in black. 

In Part 2, we'll talk about writing series blurbs.

Karen S. Wiesner is the author of Writing Blurbs That Sizzle--And Sell!

Volume 7 of the 3D Fiction Fundamentals Collection

http://www.writers-exchange.com/3d-fiction-fundamentals-series/

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/writing-reference-titles.html

Happy writing!

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series. Visit her here:

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor