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When self-publishing a book, you do not have a publicity department to write your book blurb for
This was a struggle I ran into when self-publishing my recent short story collection
This was exasperated by the fact that my Googling couldn’t find a guide or how-to for
) So I was faced with figuring it out through experimentation and reverse-engineering blurbs from other short story
If you can’t summarize one story, and summarizing all of them is not feasible, you instead
It may be genre, theme, setting, protagonists, or some combination of the sort
That vibe, that genre, that unifying factor needs to be conveyed to the readers through the blurb
Brainstorm a list of the genre and subgenres that cover your stories; a list of themes and
While you will not summarize one story for your collection, you can summarize (in brief) multiple stories
Brainstorming a list of quick ways to describe stories, or story elements will aid you in writing
As I mentioned in my titling a short story collection article, you really need to make it
However, that it is a short fiction collection is often enough for most situations
However, I think they are a useful tactic to start out the blurb
If you need examples of taglines, go to Goodreads, click on some titles, and see the ones
As you are likely not doing a mini-summary for a collection, there are several, alternate tagline options
You can create your own tagline that goes explains the vibe of the collection
If you’ve gotten to the point of publishing a short story collection, you should have some
You will see how they use brief story summaries in combination with whole collection descriptions (themes, adjectives,
There is not one single template, but different elements are common
One element is often explicitly introducing a list of brief story snippets
Another element is the words and statements that set the vibe
As for the facts… make sure to include that this is a short story collection somewhere
It can be in the beginning, at the end, in a sentence on its own, or at
It usually will fit in naturally somewhere as a segue into a list of story snippets or
How do you know the world still exists when you’re not looking?
This is the type of tagline that I hope is intriguing enough to entice the reader’s
I really played into explaining the title, because while “object permanence” is a real thing, “object impermanence”
All the vibes I list in my object impermanence definition (i
They weren’t in early blurb drafts, but as it evolved, I wanted to make sure all
I list four specific story premises (and no duplicates from the subtle ones in the paragraph above)
You might have the vibes and story elements more intermingled
This is just one example of how a person (this person: me) could do it so that