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

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I enjoyed it, it contained lots of interesting facts and was fun to read, and I trusted the author’s judgement enough to add three of the books she praises to my TBR queue.

Blurb Your Enthusiasm: An A–Z of literary persuasion - CIEP Blurb Your Enthusiasm: An A–Z of literary persuasion - CIEP

Of course, one has to draw the line somewhere, and Willder would like to see fewer shopworn adjectives on book covers, specifically ‘luminous’, ‘dazzling’, ‘incandescent’, ‘stunning’, ‘shimmering’, ‘sparkling’, ‘glittering’, ‘devastating’, ‘searing’, ‘shattering’, ‘explosive’, ‘epic’, ‘electrifying’, ‘dizzying’, ‘chilling’, ‘staggering’, ‘deeply personal’ and the ubiquitous ‘haunting’. 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. If you’re a writer, it’s all about finding your voice. If you’re a copywriter, it’s usually about expressing someone else’s. One is an art; one is a craft (or if it’s an art, it’s the art of imitation). You just have to listen.’ one of the first tactile books for children was pat the bunny , 1940, which featured different textures inside, and was advertised with the great line ‘for whom the bell tolls was magnificent – but it hasn’t any bunny in it.’Author Louise Willder is well qualified to guide you through all this having worked as a publisher’s copywriter for 25 years. This shows in her writing style too, with short, punchy chapters and chatty asides that entertain as well as inform. many people like this kind of thing. (although, according to john carey in the intellectuals and the masses , they actually don’t, and modernism was invented by cultural snobs such as virginia woolf just so that the newly literate classes wouldn’t get it.) 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. 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. Copywriter of hundreds of books, Wilder explores the less is more principle in writing, plus the history of publishing, gender politics in language, implications of typeface and design in different markets, how we read, cliche, punctuation, and so much more.

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

Funder reveals how O’Shaughnessy Blair self-effacingly supported Orwell intellectually, emotionally, medically and financially ... why didn’t Orwell do the same for his wife in her equally serious time of need?’

You wouldn't think you could get a whole book from just talking about blurbs, but actually they make for really interesting discussion. I enjoyed this, though I am not usually a big non-fiction fan. Being about books though helped with that & I enjoyed all the interesting facts and snippets of blurbs and author thoughts about blurbs, publishing insights and funny examples. Or this, talking about thinking one must enjoy “classics”: “My most important classics principle, however, is this: some of them are definitely better than others, and you don’t have to like all of them. Magical realism, 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.’ The ultimate book for any bookish sort, whether that is a reader, writer or collector. Written by an experienced copywriter, this non-fiction book looks in depth at such marketing tools as titles, punctuation, book covers, opening lines, swearing and - blurbs. It literarily is an A to Z of literary persuasion.

Curb Your Enthusiasm review – Larry’s back, and funnier than Curb Your Enthusiasm review – Larry’s back, and funnier than

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’. Writing briefly means every word must earn its place. Use fewer and make them better. Don’t make the reader do the hard work; be on their side. Never be boring. Ask, why should anybody care? There are more tips inside my book. (It’s an unputdownable tour de force.)It is the history of a revolution that went wrong – and of the excellent excuses that were forthcoming at every step for each perversion of the original doctrine.