Write Yourself a Power Blurb

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

As you know, I’m a fan of the old pulp magazines. They sold like hotcakes to a reading public that wanted their stories fast and entertaining. The key to sales of these mags was, first, an attention-grabbing cover. Since men were the primary readers, tough guys and fetching femmes were prominently featured. The imaginative Weird Tales, for example, specialized in scantily-clad women from other worlds.

Then it was up to the story titles and/or author names to close the sale. An intriguing title like Murder in the Ring or a popular name like Gardner, Chandler, Hammett, or Ballard would incentivize the buyer to part with two bits.

In the 1950s, covers got steamier. A trendsetter in this regard was Confidential Detective. The stories inside, accompanied by photos, were nonfiction (“Every Story True!” the cover blared). But the selling principle was the same. Grab with a cover, entice with a title and a blurb.

Check out this cover from April, 1960. Alluring blonde prominently featured. Titles appealing to our insatiable curiosity about the criminal mind, especially with a sex angle.

The table of contents for this issue had the following blurbs:

BIG-TIME MOBSTER AND THE BLONDE MURDER JINX
She was a gorgeous bundle of hard luck—especially to racket bosses and Murder, Inc. hoods. But Little Augie wasn’t scared—till the night her jinx worked on him.

SHE STABBED HIM—RATHER THAN SHARE HIM!
With a swift motion, she drove the knife into his chest—up to the handle. Then she yanked the phone from his hand and yelled to the blonde at the other end: “Listen to him moan…I killed him!”

BACK-DOOR LOVER’S DOUBLE-DEATH REVENGE!
Behind every blind in town, and in every bar—there were whispers about the judge’s pretty wife. Then, one night the gossip was confirmed—in bullets and in blood…

TORCH-SLAYING HELLCAT
The fire that ate her love rival’s body roared for hours, but it didn’t consume all the evidence of the blonde’s furious passions.

PARADE OF THE GRAVE-BOUND REDHEADS
One by one, Frankie promised his girls the moon—love, marriage…But when they tried to collect, he paid them off—in cold murder.

JEALOUS FURY KILLS THE NIGHT-CLUB HOSTESS
“Put down the gun,” she begged. “I’ll never, never look at another guy…”

“THE DAMES ALL DIE FOR ME!”
The startling story of a first-class heel who used lies, bigamy, even murder to keep his women in line.

There were marketing people for these mags whose main task was to come up with what I call “power blurbs.” What a job! Come into the office in Manhattan and hammer out a few headlines. Grab a three-martini lunch. Come back to the office, nap, write the subheads.

And it got me to thinking, what if I were tasked to come up with similar allurements for some famous novels? How would I entice the browser to make the purchase? Eschewing the martinis, I knocked out a few:

The Silence of the Lambs

“HE ATE A CENSUS TAKER FOR DINNER—AND I DON’T LIKE THE WAY HE’S LOOKING AT ME!”
The brilliant psychiatrist with a yen for human flesh tried to outfox a young FBI trainee who was haunted by dreams of slaughtered lambs. Was there any hope for this couple?

The Old Man and the Sea

MAN-EATING SHARKS SURROUNDED HIS BOAT—AND DEMANDED TO BE FED!
He was just a little old fisherman with the catch of a lifetime—but jaws of death weren’t going to let him keep it!

The Great Gatsby

OBSESSED WITH ANOTHER MAN’S WIFE!
“She’s mine, Old Sport,” he told his friend. “And I mean to get her back!”

1984

“THEY SAY HE’S MY BIG BROTHER, BUT HE WANTS TO MAKE ME HIS SLAVE!”
He thought two plus two made four—until they messed with his mind.

Then I gave it a whirl with one of my own:

Romeo’s Rules

THE BAD GUYS BET THEY COULD KILL HIM—SO HE MADE THEM PAY!
“I was tied up. My hands behind me. I was in a semi-fetal position on a hard floor. That’s when I got mad.”

It seems to me that writing out a power blurb can really help you nail the selling point of your novel. If you do this early in your writing it will keep you focused as you create your scenes. Or it can be used as a laser beam when it comes time to edit a first draft. Heck, you might even use it as the lead for your book description on Amazon. Why not? “WE WANT TO SELL BOOKS,” SAID THE AUTHORS GATHERED AT THE BAR. And they were willing to do just about anything to do it!

Anyway, it’s fun. Why don’t you try it? Give us a power blurb for a famous novel. Or one of your own if you like. Make us part with two bits!

36 thoughts on “Write Yourself a Power Blurb”

  1. Thanks, Jim. I too love those old detective magazines. I used to read them in the barbershop when I was in grade school.

    My humble contribution:

    The Da Vinci Code

    THE GAY ARTIST’S MESSAGE FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE!

    “She was giving out more than loaves and fishes!!!”

  3. Murder at the Vicarage

    A HOLE IN THE OLD MAN’S HEAD AND HIS BLOOD ON THE PREACHER’S DESK

    A young artist stops painting scantily-clad wives in the preacher’s backyard when someone sets him up.

  4. SHE STABBED HIM—RATHER THAN SHARE HIM!
    With a swift motion, she drove the knife into his chest—up to the handle. Then she yanked the phone from his hand and yelled to the blonde at the other end: “Listen to him moan…I killed him!”

    You’ve made me curious and I’m going to take a swing by Amazon & see what kind of one liners people use as the top blurb on their fiction. I can see the appeal of the pulp magazine blurb examples, but the above strikes me as an example that gives too much away. Granted, I’m not a reader of pulp fiction, but we already know how they’re going to die and the motivation, so my first thought was “Great. I don’t have to read it. I got the Cliff Notes for the story.”

    I prefer your Romeo’s Rules example:
    THE BAD GUYS BET THEY COULD KILL HIM—SO HE MADE THEM PAY!
    “I was tied up. My hands behind me. I was in a semi-fetal position on a hard floor. That’s when I got mad.”

    An enticing blurb. You do give away the ending in a sense–that the good guys win, but we know that inherently anyway. But the key thing this blurb does that almost all the pulp examples didn’t do for me is make me curious enough to read & discover for myself.

    Of the pulp examples, the only one which struck me with curiosity is this one:
    BIG-TIME MOBSTER AND THE BLONDE MURDER JINX
    She was a gorgeous bundle of hard luck—especially to racket bosses and Murder, Inc. hoods. But Little Augie wasn’t scared—till the night her jinx worked on him.

    In that example, there’s enough left to be curious about to see what happens.

    I went to Amazon to look at my favorite category, westerns, but many don’t even use a one liner blurb unless it’s a publisher note along the lines of “the tenth book in the popular series by author name.”

    I went to Thrillers & Mysteries bestsellers for 2021–most of the first several pages don’t have books with an opening one line blurb, but I finally found one for the book “The Guilty Husband” by Stephanie DeCarolis, whose opening line is: “It only takes one lie to destroy a marriage.” I wouldn’t say I immediately want to read it but it does raise curiosity.

    I’m curious to hear if most TKZers typically DO read the several paragraph descriptions provided as blurbs for most books? Many seem long, but then again, I’ve seen fiction with little or no blurb which is not helpful to gauge the book.

    You’ve made me curious & I shall have to search & compare more blurbs. This does seem like an excellent way to stay focused as you draft & hone the story as you edit.

    • BK, you remind me that many paperbacks of the 50s would put on the back or the front page a clips from a scene inside the book. That seems to me a perfectly good practice…and no, it doesn’t have to be several paragraphs. IMO, shorter and punchier is better.

  5. Thanks for the reminder, Jim, of those drugstore spinner racks with lurid headlines and salacious illustrations. But when I snuck a read of the stories inside, they rarely lived up to the blurb’s promise.

    From my WIP, UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY:

    An innocent father in prison. A guilty rapist set free. A surprise son from the past.
    For investigator Tawny Lindholm and her attorney-husband Tillman Rosenbaum, DNA holds the answers to these problems. But those answers trigger a crisis that threatens their careers, their marriage, and their lives.

  6. Rich, spoiled young girl knows how to snap her fingers and gather a crowd of lusty men around her. But can she snap her fingers and save her family home from the Union?

    And mine:

    She has one more day to live. Unless she can stop it.

    (This was hard!) 🙂

  7. You’re so right, Jim. Those copy writers of yore really had a knack for knocking out killer blurbs. A high-octane exercise to super charge our stories, and our own book blurbs. Here goes:

    Empowered: Agent
    SHE SWORE SHE’D NEVER USE HER SUPERPOWER AGAIN, THEN THEY THREATENED HER FAMILY!

    Mat would do anything to protect those she loved, including join a secret agency and work for a cold-blooded murderer.

  8. My WIP is called The Smoke Eater

    Survival In a New Age of Extremism.
    When terrorist radicals got thrown into the mix, Reid new job turns deadly.

  9. THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME

    “Young Dorothy survives a tornado only to find herself stranded in a strange land. With the help of three of society’s outcasts, she fights witches and monkeys to find her way back home.”

  11. Somebody else’s book:

    HE HAD IT ALL: A BOAT, FRIENDS, EVEN A MERCEDES . . . UNTIL THEY FRAMED HIM.

    But Big Ed never forgot who set him up, waiting, counting the years until he got revenge in a big way, taking them all down, one by one.

    My book: [In the Mouth of the Lion]

    HE WENT TO GERMANY TO STEAL HITLER’S DEEPEST, DARKEST SECRETS.
    Could Agent 488 succeed, armed only with a single shot .22 and a steno pad? If Mary had anything to do with it, he just might.

  12. From Book Three of my Lions and Lambs series:

    Don’t Mistake Innocence for Weakness.

    A child who can heal – or destroy. An enemy risen from ashes. Who will live and who will die?

    This is hard, even though I love writing blurbs!

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