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

Product Information

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

Willder looks at the history of book marketing, how blurbs started and gives us insights into the book publishing process. Some authors love blurbs, some hate them, and sometimes readers get frustrated when the blurb doesn't seem to match the book's contents. She also covers areas I've always wondered about - for example differences across countries and, does the blurb writer always read the full book?Ugaz’s case is all too familiar in Peru, where powerful groups regularly use the courts to silence journalists by fabricating criminal allegations against them.’

Blurb Your Enthusiasm by Louise Willder | Waterstones

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.’ I love all that and loved the book. (And anyway, anyone who says that Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker is a masterpiece, that her new favourite detective is DI Manon Bradshaw and that Sue Townsend is a stone cold comic genius can Do No Wrong in my view.) Blurb Your Enthusiasm is a real gem and anyone with any interest in books will enjoy it immensely, I think.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. A delight… She is a delightful and amusing guide to the subject. One for the book lover in your life.’ 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.

Killer crabs and bad leprechauns: how the best book blurbs

always ask yourself, what’s really going on here? Why should anyone care? And how do we make them care?” king charles I on himself: ‘Eikon Basilike or the Pourtraicture of His Sacred Majestie in his Solitudes and Sufferings.’ 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. Following the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, the idea took hold that Austria had been the first casualty of Hitler’s aggression when in 1938 it was incorporated into the Third Reich.’ Hamm (oy, Hamm of all names?) accuses Albert Brooks of being a shanda when an embarrassing secret is discovered at the end of the episode, one of the only references to Covid. David’s decision to largely put the pandemic in the rearview fits perfectly with the tone of the series, which has always shoved aside life’s bigger and more realistic problems and focused on the frustrating aggravations of minutiae.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’. A delightful bibliophile’s miscellany with a great title – not just for the play on words, but also for how it encapsulates what this is about: ways of pithily spreading excitement about books. The first part of the subtitle, “An A–Z of Literary Persuasion,” is puzzling in that the structure is scattershot rather than strictly alphabetical, but the second is perfect: from the title and cover to the contents, Louise Willder is interested in what convinces people to acquire and read a book. It’s also about quotes, titles, first lines, hooks, adverts, puns, swearing, plots, someone called Belinda and much more. It answers questions such as: