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Blurb Your Enthusiasm: A Cracking Compendium of Book Blurbs, Writing Tips, Literary Folklore and Publishing Secrets

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Gotcha, didn’t it? That line got me too. It’s from a blurb for The Plague, and the nameless copywriter deserves a plaque. Those five words conveyed all the ominous menace of the book and got there a lot faster than Camus, bless him.

Blurb Your Enthusiasm: An A–Z of Literary Persuasion by Blurb Your Enthusiasm: An A–Z of Literary Persuasion by

I absolutely loved Blurb Your Enthusiasm. It was a recommendation and I wasn’t sure I’d be all that keen, but it’s fascinating, laugh-out-loud funny, very perceptive and completely compelling.Willder is an English copywriter. She has written hundreds of blurbs. She has blurbed bestselling romance books, reprints of literature classics, self-help books, mysteries, and more. She considers the blurb to be one of the minor arts of publishing. The authors Jonathan Franzen and Jennifer Weiner have been duking it out over the issue of seriousness since 2010, with Weiner criticising the ‘Franzenfrenzy’ that greeted the publication of his novel Freedom. In her eyes, women writing about domestic situations were seen as limited in their appeal, but when Franzen ‘writes a book about a family … we are told this is a book about America’.’ There are things that writers have always suspected. An emotional hook, concrete imagery, simplicity, a mystery withheld, a story: these entice readers and, according to psychologists, create the most activity in our brains. Read a blurb, or any persuasive copy, and feel your neurons fire with joy.

Blurb Your Enthusiasm: The A-Z of Literary Persuasion by Blurb Your Enthusiasm: The A-Z of Literary Persuasion by

This was such a delight! I literally laughed out loud during the chapter on literary fiction blurbs. "Does anything actually happen in this book?" PDF / EPUB File Name: Blurb_Your_Enthusiasm_-_Louise_Willder.pdf, Blurb_Your_Enthusiasm_-_Louise_Willder.epub Writing something longer than 100 words has been a novel and joyful experience,” she said. “I’m thrilled to share what I’ve learned about the art of literary persuasion over the years, and to impart a bit of publishing gossip on the way. I hope Blurb Your Enthusiasm will enlighten and delight readers – and maybe raise a few eyebrows in the trade too.”A New York publishing CEO joked that Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog would be an optimal title to appeal to readers (respected president + health + animal), but there are actually now six books with some variation on that title and all were presumably flops! I couldn’t resist Louise Willder’s Blurb Your Enthusiasm when it popped up on NetGalley many months ahead of publication. That wordplay, of course, only added to the attraction. Willder’s book is all about those 100 or so words, so important in persuading us whether to read a book or not. She should know, she’s been writing them for twenty-five years. Uproarious, gossipy and utterly fascinating: a masterclass in how to judge a book by its cover. It makes words seem weird and wild again.’ it can be easy to forget that a potential reader hasn’t read it: they don’t know anything about it. You can’t sell them the experience of the book – you have to sell them the expectation of reading it; the idea of it. And that’s when a copywriter can be an author’s best friend.

Blurb Your Enthusiasm: An A-Z of Literary Persuasion Blurb Your Enthusiasm: An A-Z of Literary Persuasion

I think Rebecca Solnit nails it when she says ‘a book without women is often said to be about humanity, but a book with women in the foreground is a woman’s book. George Orwell worried over his blurbs in detail with his editor, and his original description of Nineteen Eighty-Four as “the history of a revolution that went wrong” is still used on many editions today. The Italian author Roberto Calasso, who beautifully dubbed the blurb “a letter to a stranger”, wrote hundreds of blurbs for the publishing company Adelphi, and even produced a book of them. TS Eliot noted “what a difficult art blurb-writing is”, and sweated over countless blurbs for Faber – although I doubt his interpretation of Robert Graves’s The White Goddess as “a prodigious, monstrous, stupefying, indescribable book” would get past a marketing department today. A reply as true as Steele, to a Rusty, Rayling, Ridiculous, Lying, Libell; which was lately written by an impudent unsoder’d Ironmonger and called by the name of An Answer to a foolish Pamphlet Entssuled. A Swarme of Sectaries and Schismatiques. The Divill is hard bound and did hardly straine; to shit a Libeller a knave in graine. The authors Jonathan Franzen and Jennifer Weiner have been duking it out over the issue of seriousness since 2010, with Weiner criticising the ‘Franzenfrenzy’ that greeted the publication of his novel Freedom. In her eyes, women writing about domestic situations were seen as limited in their appeal, but when Franzen ‘writes a book about a family … we are told this is a book about America’. specificity is key. vague waffle, in fact most description – whether of a character or the book itself – should be avoided.

This isn't about blurbs ... well, alright it is. But it's about more than just that and amounts to nothing less than an impassioned love letter to the world of books in general. Author Louise Willder has worked in publishing for twenty years and knows a lot about books, what sells and what doesn't and this thoroughly enjoyable book is choc-full of interesting facts and choice titbits of knowledge about the world of books and how they are sold. Louise Willder has been a copy writer for over twenty years and really knows what she’s talking about. She has read a huge number and a vast range of books, and both her knowledge and her engaging love of books shows through consistently. She is quite brilliant on the use of language, I think, quoting some excellent examples and analysing what makes good writing in a variety of contexts. She also has a very clear-eyed view of publishing and isn’t reverential where she thinks pomposity or pretence needs to be punctured. Willder] is a charming guide not just to blurbs, but to first lines, hatchet jobs, puffs … I couldn’t, as the cliché goes, put it down.’ Apparently not. It turns out there are smoke and mirrors galore in the book-blurb marketing world, including more spin than the earth’s axis and more puff than rough pastry.

Blurb Your Enthusiasm by Louise Willder | Waterstones

She also discusses first lines (Stephen King is a bit of a star here), why titles and covers matter, Anglo-American differences, why blurbs and the world of publishing are often sexist, when and when not to do puns and much more. The book is funny and readable throughout. it's never a story (heaven forfend), it's a meditation, an exploration, a reflection. It is a 'tour de force.' I could quote the whole chapter so I had better stop. So is there such a thing as blurbing karma? Let's see. Ellis, one of my favourite writers, was memorably blurbed for his first novel Less Than Zero by Richard Price, who found it "filled with a languid comic terror". Price, of course, has been blurbed for his novels: for instance, Dennis Lehane blurbed him as "the greatest writer of dialogue, living or dead, this country has ever produced". I love that unnecessary, yet resounding, "living or dead". I pulled out my copy of Jim Crace’s Quarantine to see how Willder managed to write a blurb about a novel about Jesus without mentioning Jesus (“a Galilean who they say has the power to work miracles”)! We delve into the origins of the blurb, then move onto classic literature to modern classics to nonfiction and most genres in between. The only quibble I had when it came to genres was she seemed to squash science fiction and fantasy into one genre, then skipped between them, confusing me a bit.

The author does a stellar job of taking us through the history of publishing and the development of the blurb, the authors who hate it, those who burn it, the hyperbolic nature of Americans and the French who have a habit of avoiding the commercial nature of it. Highlights include the changing blurbs to attract new audiences to classics such as Jane Austen and the reflection of society's norms and expectations when it comes sexism and sexist tropes in books and publishing, the derogatory comments about women writers and their areas of focus, where men write on what really matters, for everyone, whilst women write for women! Do not be surprised if after reading this, you find yourself venturing into reading a genre you normally avoid, and wanting to read a pile of other books that you had not anticipated, that is how good this is. Hooray! Publishers (and reviewers), take note. I never could understand ‘incandescent’. Even light bulbs aren’t incandescent anymore. And while we’re at it, I’d like to blue-pencil the noun phrases ‘rite of passage’, ‘coming of age’ and ‘richly woven tapestry’. This is an enthusiastic and opinionated review of the world of blurbs. She skewers lazy blurbs. "Moving", "compelling", "brilliant", etc., are empty words that add nothing. Good blurbs latch onto one or two specific things that explain why you should read the book. Spoilers do not belong in the blurb. The tone of the blurb should match the tone of the book. A humorous blurb works for a humorous book, it does not work for a serious literary novel.

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