Most writers spend months on the manuscript and an afternoon on the blurb. That imbalance shows. The blurb is the one part of your book a browsing reader is guaranteed to see, and it has to do its job in seconds: on a phone screen, in a thumbnail, alongside a dozen similarly dressed covers. The twelve problems below turn up again and again in submissions and self-published listings. None of them is fatal. All of them are fixable in an evening.
Vague Hooks and Borrowed Phrases
1. The hook that could belong to any book. "An ordinary woman discovers an extraordinary secret." "Nothing will ever be the same again." Lines like these feel like a blurb because we have read them a thousand times, but they carry almost no information. The fix is specificity. Swap the abstract noun for a concrete one: not "a devastating secret" but "the unopened letter her mother left in the piano stool". If your hook could be pasted onto someone else's novel without anyone noticing, it is not a hook yet.
2. Clichés doing the work of description. "Unputdownable", "a rollercoaster ride", "heartwarming", "gripping from the first page". Readers' eyes slide straight past these, and they give no clue whether the book is for them. Keep them in your draft if they help you get started, then delete them and describe what actually happens and how it feels. A useful test: could this sentence appear on any other book in my genre? If it could, rewrite it.
Writing About the Book Instead of the Story
3. Describing the contents rather than the story. "This novel explores themes of grief, memory and identity through three generations of one family." That is a contents list, not a reason to read. Blurb copy works best in the present tense, inside the story's world: "Ruth has not spoken to her sister in eleven years. Then the hospital rings at two in the morning." One describes; the other invites.
4. Giving no genre signal. A browsing reader is really asking one question: is this the kind of book I want right now? Cosy crime, historical romance, literary fiction, psychological thriller, memoir. Each has its own register, and the copy should sound like it. A thriller blurb ought to feel tense. A comic novel should contain at least one line that raises a smile. If your blurb could belong to any genre, it belongs to none of them once it is on the shelf.
Spoilers and Misjudged Pacing
5. Spoiling your own best scene. A workable rule: cover the opening quarter to a third of the book, then stop. Set up the character, the disruption and the stakes, and get out. Never resolve a question you have raised in the copy. "She finds a name she recognises in the file" pulls a reader in. "She discovers her brother is the killer" hands over the midpoint and deflates the whole second act.
6. Front-loading backstory. The first paragraph should not explain the family tree, the war, or the childhood that shaped everyone. Start at the moment the ordinary breaks. Backstory can arrive later in fragments: a clause, a telling detail, one loaded sentence. A reader will happily hold a mystery for a page. Nobody will hold a genealogy chart.
Blurbs That Go On Too Long
7. Letting the copy run and run. A long description on a shop listing becomes a wall, and walls get skipped. Aim for roughly 150 to 250 words: enough to establish character, problem and stakes, short enough to read in a minute. Then trim to the three or four load-bearing sentences and let the rest go. When you cut, the usual casualties are:
- adjectives stacked three deep on every noun;
- rhetorical questions ("But what if everything she believed was a lie?");
- the sentence that explains what the previous sentence just said;
- job titles and place names that never come back.
8. No shape on the page. Readers scan before they read. Short paragraphs, line breaks, and a tagline at the top if you have one. If a paragraph runs to six lines on a phone, break it or cut it. White space is not wasted space; it is what makes the hook visible.
9. Naming the whole cast. Six names in a blurb guarantees that nobody remembers any of them. Name two, possibly three. Everyone else can be "her landlord", "the detective" or "the boy next door". Roles stick; names without context do not.
Missing Stakes and Slipping Voice
10. Stakes nobody can feel. "Her life will change forever" is not a stake, it is a shrug. A stake is specific and personal: what does she stand to lose, and why does it matter more than anything else in her life right now? Give the reader a cost, a deadline or a choice, and the final line of the blurb will do its work.
11. Tense and point-of-view drift. Blurbs wobble. One sentence is present tense, the next is past; one is close to the character, the next reads like a reviewer. Pick present tense and stay in it, keep the copy inside one viewpoint, and read the whole thing aloud. Anywhere your voice changes, a reader senses a seam.
One Last Housekeeping Pass
12. Skipping the proofread. A typo in the blurb reads as a warning sign about the pages behind it. Check names, dates and spellings against the manuscript, make sure the promise you are making is the promise the book keeps, and be careful with comparison titles: use authors or books that genuinely match in tone, and never claim a similarity you cannot support. If your blurb hints at a mystery, a romance or a twist, the book must deliver it.
Five Checks Before You Publish
- Read it aloud. Anything you stumble over, a reader will skim.
- Cover the title. Give the copy to someone without the cover or genre label. Can they tell you what kind of book it is and who it is for?
- Count the names. More than three, and you have some cutting to do.
- Delete the last sentence. Draft blurbs usually end with a line that restates everything. Remove it; if nothing is lost, leave it gone.
- View it on a phone. That is how most readers will meet it. If the hook is not clear in the first two lines at that size, move it up.
Run those checks and your blurb will already be better than most of what sits beside it. Then leave it for a day, come back with fresh eyes, and ask whether the first line still makes you want to turn the page.
Photo: cottonbro studio / Pexels
