My review of ‘How to write a fantasy book description’ will follow, but first take a look at the blurb.

Blurb

Do you find it difficult to write the blurb for your book? Do you hate writing book descriptions? 

If your synopsis always comes out bland and boring, with no chance of leading to more book sales, then this guidebook is for you.

How to Write a Fantasy Book Description is a step-by-step approach. It lays out everything you need to know in five simple and effective steps.

Learn how to hook readers by:

• Writing incredible taglines that grabs attention
• Escalating the tension throughout your blurb and captivate readers
• Using spellbinding words to dazzle customers
• Learning how to avoid meandering into subplots and instead make your blurb a joy to read
• Understanding how long your blurb needs to be and how to use cliffhangers effectively
• Discovering easy methods to format your blurb before uploading to online retailers like Amazon

In addition, you will find bonus chapters on how to write book descriptions for series, box sets and non-fiction.

If you like easy to follow instructions, sprinkled with helpful examples, then How to Write a Fantasy Book Description is for you.

Jesper Schmidt is a fantasy author. He is the creator of several how-to books, like the bestselling Fantasy Map Making and Twitter for Authors.

My Review

I follow Jesper Schmidt’s newsletter and when he asked for people to join his launch team for this book I jumped at the chance of an ARC. I have read both his other How to books and found them very helpful. Here’s my review of Twitter for Authors.

Fantasy Map making is a book I plan to use in the future and I will review it once I have created the world maps for my Silent Sea Chronicles trilogy.

I find writing book descriptions very difficult and with the publication of my second book looming, the timing of this how to guide was perfect. Mr Schmidt starts with how important book descriptions are and gives 5 common mistakes authors make.

He then talks us through 5 steps to creating a great blurb including tag lines and character introductions. He uses examples of current blurbs on Amazon to showcase his points and there are task lists at the end of each chapter to help you keep focused.

What I found really helpful was the author using his own fantasy book blurb and walking us through the process of how he came up with his killer blurb, including his mistakes.

After helping you draft your blurb, the book focuses on the editing stage and gives you areas to check like repetition and boring middles.

There are a couple of extras which are handy – blurbs for box sets and series, formatting and an appendix of words relevant to fantasy.

The whole process of writing a book description feels much less daunting when following these steps. I highly recommend this book to all fantasy authors out there.

Amazon link

On a personal note – I  used the knowledge from this book to update my blurb for The Lost Sentinel before I ran a kindle countdown deal on Amazon. I’m glad to say that I sold more copies than I had with previous promotions!

Check this how-to guide for yourself on Goodreads