The Best Marketers of All
On Grabbing Up Great Blurbs and Editing Them
By Carolyn Howard-Johnson
I am in the throes of editing the second edition of my popular and very complete How To Get Great Book Reviews Frugally and Ethically and couldn’t help excerpting some of this for WritersontheMove visitors to have now before they start their holiday marketing campaigns. That book will be released late fall by Modern History Press.
The process for excerpting isn’t something most of us were taught in school. It seems such a nonissue that many have no idea how to do it and don’t realize they need to figure it out. Without a few guidelines, it can go miserably astray. Some won’t try excerpting at all because they are unsure of themselves. I’m not sure which is worse for the success of an author’s book.
Blurbs may be so neglected and misunderstood because there is confusion about what they are. I have heard them called endorsements, testimonials, praise, quotes, blurbs, and sometimes bullets because they are frequently printed on the back cover of books set off by little BB-sized dots and most of us relate them to reviews because that is where we authors usually find them.
When my husband solicited blurbs from VIPs in the Asian community for his first book What Foreigners Need to Know about America from A to Z, he was going to skip the process. He had me to…mmm, nag him. He ended up with endorsements from the ambassador to China from the United States and his counterpart, the ambassador from China to the U.S. This, by the way, illustrates why authors (anyone?) shouldn’t listen to naysayers who think approaching influencers with requests for blurbs is futile. I just happen to think excerpting them from reviews and capturing them from fan mail is easier. Just know you can do it and you can do it effectively.
Authors who misuse or underuse excerpts from their reviews are at a disadvantage. Not only are blurbs or one of the best tools in your marketing kit, but review excerpts are often your only chance to use the credibility of a prestigious review journal as part of your panoply of credit boosters.
The excerpting process is easy and a lot of fun once you know how to do it. Let’s say you have a review that includes some praise or even a word that made you happy or you could use to illustrate point you’d like to have your audience know about your book Perhaps (yikes!) it doesn’t include your name or title! Or maybe it just plain makes memorable reading. Perhaps the rest of it wasn’t all you’d like it to be. Here’s how to proceed:
§ Put on your marketing bonnet and reread your review thinking “soundbites” as you read. Or select the phrases that remind you of the praise you see on movie posters or ads. Many of them are excerpts or clips from advance reviews of that film.
§ Choose gems that make you glad you wrote the book. Some will be short. Even one word. Shorties are used as blurbs for everything from restaurants to sports cars because they emphasize the raves that are…mmmm, over the top when publishers and authors use them about their own work. These no-nos are usually strong adjectives like awesome and first-rate. But you can use them as blurbs because someone else thought so!
§ Don’t neglect some of the praise that points out the benefits readers get when they read your book.
§ When you must leave something out of the sentence you choose to keep short or because it is inappropriate, let ellipses (three little dots…) take the place of those missing words.
§ Sometimes you need to substitute for purposes of clarity or brevity. If the blurb says, “If there is any justice in the world, this book is destined to be a classic,” delete the words this book and replace them with the name of the book: Put the squarish brackets around the part you insert yourself so it reads “…if there is any justice in the world, [Jendi’s poetry book Two Natures] is destined to be a classic.”
§ Use them liberally. Use them everywhere. Put them between quotation marks. Indent them if you wish. Always credit them to the reviewer or publication where they were originally used.
Note: You want to avoid sacrificing the original intent of the excerpt you choose while using minor and approved editing techniques to meet your purposes.
§ So you have the reprint rights or a review journal like Midwest Book Review notifies you when your review has been posted that you have permission to reuse it—a very nice service that benefits both Midwest and you. Don’t lose it. Put it in a special file and stow it in a folder dedicated to your book’s title. To avoid confusion later and make using any one of them a quick copy-and-paste process, include the accreditation at the end of each blurb you extract.
§ It is handy to know that copyright law allows us to quote without permission for certain purposes and in certain amounts if you write commentary, satire, criticism, academic material, or news reports. The number of words you can use without permission depends upon the size of the copyrighted work as a whole. Guidelines differ from genre to genre. Find specific guidelines at the Library of Congress’ website or let a research librarian help you. For novels and full books of nonfiction, Amazon uses twenty-five words as a guideline for novels, and I trust they have great copyright attorneys advising them.
Note: Those who want to learn more about copyright law as it applies to authors will find help in Literary Law Guide for Authors: Copyrights, Trademarks and Contracts in Plain Language by Tonya Marie Evans and Susan Borden Evans with a foreword by my deceased friend and book marketing guru Dan Poynter.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carolyn Howard-Johnson is the author of the multi award-winning series of HowToDoItFrugally books for writers including USA Book News’ winner for The Frugal Book Promoter. An instructor for UCLA Extension's renowned Writers Program for nearly a decade, she believes in entering (and winning!) contests and anthologies as an excellent way to separate our writing from the hundreds of thousands of books that get published each year. Two of her favorite awards are Woman of the Year in Arts and Entertainment given by members of the California Legislature and “Women Who Make Life Happen,” given by the Pasadena Weekly newspaper. She is also an award-winning poet and novelist and she loves passing along the tricks of the trade she learned from marketing those so-called hard-to-promote genres. Learn more on her website at https://HowToDoItFrugally.com. Let Amazon notify you when she publishes new books (or new editions!) by following her Amazon profile page: https://bit.ly/CarolynsAmznProfile. Her The Frugal Editor is now in its third edition from Modern History Press. Let it help you edit your work-in-process.
