Backside Blurb

By Thérèse Roberts – Retired, mother of Emma Kapoor.

Summarising an 80,000-word novel into a 150-word blurb for the back cover was never going to be easy.

We turned to the expert guides for suggestions, but we mostly got a combination of the blatantly obvious and the impossible:

1. You need to make it interesting – it’s the second thing a potential book buyer will glance at – after the cover.

2. You must have a good opening line, ideally with a hook, and a sense of jeopardy if a thriller.

3. You should talk about the key characters, the main protagonist and why you would care about him/her

4. You would want to consider why the book could appeal to different readers

   1. Dark Pools – a psychological thriller

   2. Dark Pools – an exploration of greed, ego, and ambition and the subsequent guilt-infested breakdown

   3. Dark Pools – a study in human manipulation

   4. Dark Pools – a reflection of society’s hypocrisy, our hypocrisy

   5. Dark Pools – an authentic view of investment bank and trading floor/corporate power dynamics, and

   6. Dark Pools – a portrayal of exotic global locations centred on the Swiss Alps.

All in 150 words!

We scoured the back covers on our bookshelves seeking some practical inspiration from the best multi-faceted layered plots:

“A destitute former student, commits a random murder, imagining himself to be a great man far above moral law. But as he embarks on a cat-and-mouse game with police, his conscience begins to torment him and he seeks sympathy and redemption from Sonya, a downtrodden prostitute¹”

Well, it helps if your name is Dostoyevsky.

Having endorsements would have helped – they allow you more space to cover the underlying themes away from the primary text and add some direct plaudits. But for debut authors these can often be dismissed as the work of their agent's working with the profile, through their other clients. And literary giants don’t really need further introduction.

“The greatest novel in any language of the last fifty years²” Salman Rushdie on Garcia Marquez is a bit like Dickens complimenting Shakespeare.

Famous stories allow reflections without even bothering with the plot:

'A supreme theatrical poem that has a language that eats into the soul³’'

Of course, Alexander had no endorsements or plaudits so was left to try to capture what he could in a handful of sentences. The publisher largely left him to it, suggesting that the author themselves know how best to convey the message of their work.

He was happy with his hook line. It allowed him to capture a couple of his central plot themes.

“If love and passion can prove so brittle against greed and ambition, what hope for truth and integrity?”

For the rest he focused on the plot’s jeopardy. With hindsight he felt that the blurb was definitely an area, as with the cover, where he would have benefitted from professional input from someone who had read the book and could see how to market it.

Indeed, a few months later he saw this comment in one of the book reviews. He felt it was pacier and punchier than his own.

“A lie buried in Singapore. A scandal erupting in London. Investment banker Marcus Flint retreats to a Swiss hotel, desperate to outrun an investigation that could destroy everything his career, his marriage, his life. As the truth threatens to surface, he pens a letter to his wife his final confession. Dark Pools is a gripping tale of ambition, deceit, and the price of secrets too dangerous to share.”

Notes

1. Crime and Punishment

2. One Hundred Years of Solitude

3. Macbeth