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The Three Paragraphs That Sell Your Book (No Matter How You Publish It)

by Elijah J Mears

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an unpublished writer in possession of a good manuscript would rather peel off their own skin than market that manuscript. But alas, no matter how you plan to publish—whether you’re going for the long slog in the querying trenches or the lonely shout into the void of self-pub—if a book falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, it does not, in fact, make a sale.

We’ve all been there. I’m there right now. As I wrap up what I hope will be one of the final pre-querying drafts of my own first novel, I’m also staring down the barrel of (gulp) submitting to the mortifying ordeal of being known.

For a long time, I hemmed and hawed over just how I wanted to go. I’ve got a lot of friends in the indie publishing space who’ve tempted my inner perfectionist with the promise of total control and freedom from the whims of agents and publishing houses. On the other hand, even though traditional publishing has changed a lot in the last few decades, it can still be hard to beat having the muscle of a Big Five imprint behind your book, assuming you can get it.

(And I mean, what speculative fiction novelist doesn’t fall asleep at night dreaming of a big fat publishing deal at Tor?)

No matter what path you choose for your novel, your best ally on the path to success is knowledge. But learning things once, frankly, isn’t enough in our industry. Publishing is constantly in flux—what worked well five years ago could be disastrous today. Any wisdom I could give you in this blog post might be dangerously out of date a month from now.

So instead, I want to share some of my teachers with you. These are voices I’ve come to trust during my own writing journey. Even if the specific resources I’m linking to end up going out of date, I know I can count on these fine folks to think fast, adapt, and steer me in the right direction.

These are the people I know you can trust to teach you about the most critical piece of copy you’ll need in your marketing arsenal, no matter which route you take.

That’s right. I’m talking about your book blurb. I mean pitch. Or, uh, your hook. Premise?

Maybe we should start by defining some terms.

Premises, book blurbs, and pitches: oh my!

If you’ve ever looked up how to write a back cover blurb or how to write a query letter, you’ve probably encountered a myriad of terms for what is fundamentally the same concept.

On the indie side of the table, I almost always see these three paragraphs called your “book blurb.” Although occasionally I see the less ceremonious moniker of “back cover copy.” This can still get confusing because traditional publishing often uses the word “blurb” to mean something else entirely. But my friends pretty universally use that word for these three paragraphs. If you self-publish, you’ll use this pitch on your back cover, your sales page on Amazon or Kobo or Itch or wherever else you sell, and basically anywhere you’re trying to convince someone to exchange money for a copy of your book.

For traditional publishing, we get a little messier. I like the word “pitch” for this piece of copy, mostly because it’s the word I first saw someone else use for it, and I’m sentimental like that. Nostalgia aside, there’s really no standard here—I’ve seen it called a hook, a story premise, a book description, and probably a few other things. But all these words mean the same thing: the three-ish paragraphs of your query letter where you try to get an agent to jump up and shout, “That sounds amazing! I simply must read it and sell it to a publishing house for a bajillion dollars.”

And while back cover blurbs and query pitches might appear in slightly different places, what I’ve come to realize as I’ve researched how to write them is… they’re basically the same thing.

What all these terms boil down to is this: if you’re going to get someone sufficiently invested in your book to either buy a copy or offer you representation, publishing as an industry has decided that the best way to do this is to condense your story down to a 200-300 word pitch that sets the scene, introduces your protagonist, their stakes and the conflict they’ll face, and leaves your audience with an understanding of why your novel is going to rock their world. Generally, this shakes out over three-ish paragraphs. Although, especially with your back cover copy for self-published books, you have some wiggle room.

Crucially, your blurb or pitch is not your synopsis, which covers the whole book. The key here, whether you’re putting your ebook together yourself in Vellum or tearing your hair out combing through QueryTracker, is that these three paragraphs really only cover the first 25% or so of your book. Their job isn’t to explain your entire plot. It’s just to convince an agent or prospective reader that yes, if they put in the time to read your novel, this is the way it’ll make them care and suck them in.

That said, there are some differences between the pitch and the synopsis. That’s where it’s really useful to have trusted resources you can rely on to teach you the basics and then keep going. So, without further adieu, let me introduce you to some of my trusted mentors on the hero’s journey of publishing.

Jessie Cuniffe of Book Blurb Magic

If there’s one person I can think of who knows a thing or two about writing indie book blurbs, it’s Jessie Cuniffe over at Book Blurb Magic. She’s written literally hundreds of blurbs and has boiled back cover copy down to an art and a science. What I love about Jessie’s resources is that, while she’s definitely running a business over at BBM and isn’t afraid to make a sales pitch for her services, she’s still very invested in teaching and empowering people to write blurbs on their own.

I happen to have taken her course on the subject (and can absolutely recommend it). But frankly, I’ve learned nearly as much just by paying attention to her social media and her newsletter. She emails more or less daily, and while there may be a sales pitch at the end, each one also contains valuable knowledge about the art of the blurb.

The other thing that’s really valuable about Jessie is that, because Jessie writes back cover copy for a living, she stays well on top of the pulse of an ever changing industry. In addition to general advice on blurb-writing, I can always count on her newsletter and socials to keep me apprised of what’s current and upcoming, like the rise of first person blurbs in the romance genre, or the trend toward shorter, more efficient blurbs as people’s attention spans shrink and our time becomes more precious.

You can find Jessie dispensing knowledge and hot takes over on her Threads account. I can also recommend signing up for her newsletter, which includes a free “Anatomy of a Book Blurb” cheat sheet.

Lewis Jorstad of The Novel Smithy

So, a very short story: when I first decided I wanted to get serious about finally writing a novel like I’d always said I wanted to (this was the middle of COVID, everyone was doing it), Lewis’ blog over at The Novel Smithy was the first resource I stumbled across when I asked Google, “Ok, how do I do that?” Honestly, his blog is full of lots of advice on the entire writing process, but for our purposes, I want to especially highlight his excellent post on how to write a back cover blurb.

The reason I like this resource so much—and, frankly, all of Lewis’ resources— is because it’s so darn simple. Lewis is an excellent teacher who is great at explaining difficult concepts in ways that make my brain go, “Oh, of course! Why didn’t I realize it was that simple?” Plus, he always provides strong real-world examples of the concepts he’s explaining so that it’s easy to see how craft concepts apply to reality.

Alyssa Matesic on YouTube

Let’s dive headfirst into our first resource focused more on the querying side of things than on back cover copy. Alyssa Matesic is a publishing industry professional and developmental editor who has handled hundreds of queries during her time in the publishing industry. I’m a huge fan of her free forty-minute query letter course on YouTube (as well as her other videos), which I watched and then immediately ran to strengthen my own draft query of my work-in-progress novel. While the video is meant to cover the entire query, it focuses mainly on the pitch section because the pitch takes up so much of any query’s word count.

Something I thought was really strong about this video course was that a significant chunk of its runtime is spent walking through several different versions of a query for the same book. I thought this was really helpful for looking at my own pitch and identifying possible areas of weakness because Alyssa’s video didn’t just show several examples of weak pitches. It also shows how you can improve on the weaknesses in your pitch over successive drafts.

Janet Reid of Query Shark

This is the odd one out of my resources because, unfortunately, Janet Reid (may her memory be a blessing) passed away last year. Unlike the other teachers on this list, as publishing continues to change, her website won’t be able to keep up with the times. That said, over the years, Query Shark published and evaluated hundreds of query letters. And it’s still hands down the best resource I know for getting the gist of how queries work, including the pitch section.

Janet spent more than twenty years as a literary agent in New York, and Query Shark was one of many ways she gave back to the publishing community. Combing through her archives, you’ll find hundreds and hundreds of query letters with Janet’s editorial feedback on what is or isn’t working. Even as publishing changes, I suspect the fundamentals of what makes a good query letter will remain mostly the same, and many of Janet’s query critiques focused on helping authors get their story onto the page.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll lose hours reading through Janet’s archives. But you’ll come out the other side with a much clearer sense of what it is that really makes a standout query, especially how to write a pitch that can sell your book.

Find Janet’s pearls of wisdom (and snark) at QueryShark.blogspot.com.

Jane Friedman of, well, she’s Jane Friedman

Last but absolutely not least, is Jane Friedman. The former President and CEO of HarperCollins has basically made her name synonymous with keeping up with what’s happening in the publishing industry. Best practices for pitches, queries, back cover copy, and everything else is absolutely included with that. I could probably write several articles just about the different resources she has available. But thankfully, she’s compiled her best stuff into one friendly resource hub that you should absolutely check out.

The most useful things here for those of us who are learning about pitches (Jane uses “story premise” and “hook” for these—as I said, this industry is terrible about consistent terminology) are the story premise and hook problems pages. She also has an entire category on her blog for queries and synopses that is well worth a read. There are ample resources on self-publishing as well, including a guest post on back cover copy that—even if it never quite says it explicitly—does a good job of showcasing that your query pitch and your back cover blurb are very, very similar things.

These teachers have done wonders for me. As I get ready to start querying my own novel, I know that my pitch will be stronger because of having their advice and wisdom. If things change down the road, and I decide that self-publishing is ultimately the right path… I’ll be able to take that leap knowing that one of my most important pieces of marketing copy is basically already written. So I hope that, whatever publishing path you choose to take, these resources will help you to feel empowered and ready to take on the next step in your writing journey with confidence.

Source: The Three Paragraphs That Sell Your Book (No Matter How You Publish It)