Your blurb is not a synopsis
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R. S. Breed Founder
Most indie blurbs I read have the same problem. They try to tell me the whole book.
A blurb has one job, which is to get someone to open the sample. That's it. It doesn't have to be fair to your subplot, mention the twist in act three, or explain the magic system.
What usually works:
- Open with a person, not a world. A name, what they want, what's in the way. The worldbuilding can wait for chapter one.
- Get to the trouble fast. If the problem isn't in the first two or three sentences, most browsers have already gone.
- Make the stakes specific. "Everything she holds dear" means nothing. "Her brother's parole hearing is on Friday" means something.
- Stop on a choice or a question, not a resolution.
- Match the genre's tone. A cosy mystery blurb that reads like a thriller is a promise the book won't keep, and the reviews will say so.
Things to cut: rhetorical questions stacked three deep, a roll call of every character, comparisons to bestsellers you'd blush to say out loud, and the word "journey".
On length, somewhere around 150 to 200 words suits most fiction. Long enough for a hook, a problem and some stakes. Short enough to read on a phone without the reader losing interest halfway down.
One exercise I'd recommend: write it in one sentence first. Then three. Then expand. If you can't get it into one sentence, you probably don't know yet what the book is selling, and that's better to find out now than after you've paid for ads.
Also read the blurbs of the top 20 books in your subgenre and copy the shape, not the words. Readers of a genre have been trained by those blurbs. The blurb isn't the place to be original. Save that for the book.
Post yours below if you want a second opinion.