You’re on every book cover. You’re the same woman, with different hair. But I cannot relate to you, and neither can anyone else. You are annoying me. A lot. And so I write this open letter to you, 20-year-old faceless girl who does not represent either me or the characters who speak beneath your covers.
It is a little-known fact that the old trope of a piano falling on someone’s head was inspired by every Irish person ever who felt proud of themselves for even five minutes. In this post I deal with misplaced pride, indie publishing scams, bogus bestsellers, my difficult childhood, and why if you want to be original, you should never read anything written by anyone else. Ever.
Have you ever read a book and thought – there’s something not quite right here, but I can’t put my finger on it, so I might just go and watch that thing everyone’s been talking about on Netflix instead? Me too. And as usual, I’ve been looking for people to blame. You’re welcome.
I want to blow my mind with a book, but the publishing world is consistently offering me the literary equivalent of aspirin. Unfortunately, what I want doesn’t seem to fit into those narrow marketing categories which now dictate everything we read. Don’t they know that the biggest blockbusters of the last few decades didn’t fit in either, and that’s kind of the bloody point?
I’m always banging on about book marketing and book sales, the good and the bad, the glaringly obvious and the borderline insane. But if this blog were a book, how would I sell it? Would I be able to sell it at all? Of course I wouldn’t. In other news, the blog gets new pants.
Dear Mister Publisher, I have written the best book. My book will be bigger than the bible. It will make cynics laugh, optimists cry, and toast. Before he died, David Bowie said he wished he had written it. Anyone who does not want to read my book is a potential terrorist.
In the third and final part of ‘what the hell is a book blurb and how am I supposed to write one’, we explore the genres of Short Stories – from both famous and less famous authors; Self-Help, and Literary Fiction. Sort of.
In the second part of ‘what the hell is a book blurb and how am I supposed to write one’, we explore the genres of Crime, Historical Fiction, and Science Fiction/Fantasy. Sort of.
What is a book blurb and how the hell do you write one? Is there a magic formula? Well, as it happens, there kind of is. And I’m sort of going to give it to you.
How would some of the world’s best-loved classic novels have been marketed if they’d been written by women? Might their blurbs have read differently, or other themes have been pushed forward? I don’t know. But I’m going to make jokes about it all the same.
