“Blurbs are hard!”

“I hate blurb writing”

“How come I can write someone else’s book description, but not mine?” 

Comes the cry of many a self-published author. 

But I want to let you in on a secret…

It’s not the blurbs that are hard… 

The hardness comes from an expectation that they’re easy. 

Like, you’ve just smashed out a 70 thousand word novel, so how come you can’t cram it into 200 words just as easily? 

It's time to think about it another way…

Let’s say you need some cash to buy groceries. So you go to the ATM…

You expect to stick your card in the machine and the ATM will spit out some cash, right?

Easy. Job done. On you go to the store. 

But… What if, when you turn up to that ATM, it’s broken? 

Super frustrating. What a pain in the ass that is because now you’ve got to find another ATM. 

You expected it to be easy to get your cash out. But it wasn’t. And now you’re annoyed about it. 

It’s the same with blurbs. 

As a copywriter, I EXPECT to write a dozen variations of the same headline, sentence, or call to action. 

Case in point, I wrote the bullets for a podcast episode (the bullets are the teaser sentences enticing you to listen in). I needed 10 bullets, but I wrote 25. 

Of those 25, I rewrote each one somewhere between 8 and 12 times. 

When you do the maths, we’re talking a minimum of 200 hundred variations to get down to just 10.

I shuffled the words around, played with different angles and hooks and picked the strongest. 

That may sound like a lot of work, but that’s the effort (and the expectation) that copywriters—the good ones—put into writing sales copy. 

These things take time to boil down. 

When you understand this, and what it takes to write good sales copy, you can shift your expectations. 

But if, after shifting your expectations, you still think blurbs are hard, perhaps I can help.

Short form copy, like book descriptions, are one of my favourite things to write. So send me an email and we can talk about what you need. 

Angie

If you spot any typos or run on sentences or dangling thingamies, please be kind and let it slide. Save your energy for something better.

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