We did a little experiment recently with book blurbs. Blurbs are the few words on the back of a paperback that entice you into its pages and are a key tool in selling. Without a good one, the perspective reader will return your book to the shelf and select another author’s. It’s therefore important to find a way for those two-dozen words to make an impact. But how?
Our experiment was prompted when I started to think about blurbs for my latest thriller, The Rival. I eventually came up with 25 words that I felt effectively engaged the reader and I was pleased with the result. For a comparison, I re-read the blurb I’d created for Eavesdrop in conjunction with my publisher a couple of years before and realised that Eavesdrop’s blurb was missing something that the one I had just moulded for The Rival had somehow captured. But why did one feel so much more effective? I read and re-read them before I suddenly realised the difference was in the depth of emotional involvement.
The original wording for Eavesdrop had been search engine optimized; it captured the most important and exciting plot points; it displayed the style and tone of the book; it was short and punchy. But it didn’t engage in the same way. So I decided to test my new theory, and re-wrote it with the aim of putting the reader in the shoes of the protagonist. Instead of saying what he did, I instead asked, what you would do in the same situation?
To test whether my thoughts on this were correct, we then held an on-line poll among readers to get their view on 3 slightly different blurbs for Eavesdrop. We used the original one that had been so highly polished with my publishers, and put it alongside the one that maximized emotional engagement, and threw in a third that I made up in ten seconds. Here they are below in random order. Read them quickly. Don’t analyze them just yet, but simply read them as you would in a bookshop and see which draws you in most:
Smuggling and industrial sabotage leave Customs Investigator James Winter’s career in tatters. Who arranged his dismissal, and what’s their link to Middle East Assassins?
Your Customs Investigator career in ruins, your wife fighting cancer… What do you do when you discover the reason behind your dismissal is a police cover-up, and that there’s a way to prove your innocence?
James Winter’s career is trashed when a Mossad plan to track Syrian assassins has unexpected consequences. His fight for re-instatement uncovers a Middle East plot that suddenly threatens his own life.
So which of those made you most want to open the book and see what chapter one is like? The results in our poll were conclusive, with the middle one a winner by a large margin. The theory I’d stumbled upon merely by observation had been proven.
So, the secret of a good book blurb is to emotionally engage your perspective reader and to get him or her to feel what it would be like if they were your protagonist. As soon as they experience the same adrenaline surge, the same despair, the same anger as the hero, then the blurb has done its job. They are emotionally engaged, and so much closer to buying that book.
About the Author
Ian Coates is the author of a thriller, Eavesdrop, originally published by Bad Day Books, the suspense and thriller imprint of Assent Publishing. He worked in the high tech electronics industry for 30 years, where he specialised in the design of radio communication equipment. His intimate knowledge of that environment always triggered his imagination to think about the mysterious world of spies, and allowed him to bring a unique authenticity to his thriller. Ian is proud to support the British Science Association and donates a proportion of his book proceeds to that charity. He lives and writes in Worcestershire with his wife and two daughters.
The hacker who stumbles over confidential government data, the virus creator who can infiltrate an organisation’s systems and extract sensitive documents, these all offer new plot lines that couldn’t exist in Agatha Christie’s day.
The James Bond films are a good example of this, which for many people veer into unrealism. Think of 007’s Aston Martin Vanquish in Die Another Day for example: it was a car that the touch of a button rendered invisible. The idea for this probably came from technology that even today is still in its infancy. Take an object you want to disappear and coat the side facing you with a full-size colour display. Next, fix a camera array facing away from you to its reverse side. Voila—you now have the ability to make your object disappear at the flick of a few trillion pixels: by displaying what the camera sees over the display, the item can appear to disappear because the user sees instead what is behind that object.
on technology. Wikipedia proposes Alastair Maclean’s The Satan Bug and Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October as good examples of this genre. Maclean dealt with the theft of germ warfare toxins to which there was no known cure; and Clancy chose to deal with an attempt to steal a highly advanced Russian submarine.
style stories harder to site in the modern day. Rather than leading to the death of the thriller, technology simply shifts the landscape that’s available to the writer.
Eavesdrop (originally published by Assent Publishing) is a thriller of assassins, modern-day smugglers, and high-tech spies. Who ruined Customs Investigator James Winter’s career, and what’s their link to a Middle East assassination plot?
ocal police station. The modern writer creating stories based in the 21st century must therefore work a little harder than their predecessors to make crucibles work.
For instance, hacking and virus generation are now sciences in their own right, and the author needs to be aware of what can be done. Think, for instance, of Israel’s scheme to destroy Iranian nuclear plants in 2008. They could have sent F15 and F16 fighters across Saudi Arabia from their Negev base to drop 2000lb bombs on the reactors as they did in 1981. However, twenty-seven years later they took a more subtle approach.
There are frequent cases of industrial espionage, where hackers have succeeded in getting their spying software installed on their victims’ computers. Some years ago, a London couple ran a profitable but illegal business selling trade secrets. Their main tool was a piece of highly sophisticated software (called a Trojan), which they embedded in DVDs containing business proposals, which they mailed to CEOs of a variety of companies. Because their software was so targeted at those individuals, the anti-virus programs failed to detect it, and the CEOs happily inserted the disks into their machines. The Trojan set to work and scanned the companies’ entire computer systems. Anything interesting was copied and sent back to the hackers, who promptly sold them to that company’s competitors.
how the NSA developed an innocent-looking USB lead with a tiny transmitter built into the connector. A spy just needed to break into an office and swap the cable with one already in use (for example to a printer), and they’ve got access to that computer’s data the moment its owner entered their password the next day.
Eavesdrop (originally published by Assent Publishing) is a thriller of assassins, modern-day smugglers, and high-tech spies. Who ruined Customs Investigator James Winter’s career, and what’s their link to a Middle East assassination plot?
