So You Want to Write a Book? Crucial Advice for the First Time Writer

Revising your book description--a step by step process.

Okay. Before I start I'd just like to say that I'm sure a lot of people will be tempted to skip this chapter. After all, it isn't YOUR book description I'm working on. But PLEASE give it a shot. There is a lot of useful advice in here--I promise. And I promise you can take the lessons throughout the revisions of Gambit and apply it to your own book description. 

Also, I am going to include this formula for writing a query both at the beginning of this chapter, and at  the end, because I think it's an excellent formula and I don't want anyone to miss it. So, before we even begin, here is the perfect formula for writing your book description. (As told to me by an actual literary agent) 

"When (character) discovers (catalyst/conflict), he must (goal) or else (stakes)."

Stick to that formula, and you should be able to come up with something great!

And now back to the book blurb at hand: 

BOOK BLURB for GAMBIT by @XxX_Crimson_XxX

When timid, beautiful Amarie Holland accidentally pucks an unusual rose from an old abandoned garden hidden in the forest, she makes her greatest mistake yet: she has set a GRUDGE against the Noir's Shadow King and he offers her an ultimatum: Either come willingly or by force and have the skys of Impire darkened by his demons to procure her.

 Amarie with those odds stacked against her she accepts. She must--not if her younger sister has anything to say about it. Wild and bodacious Soleil takes a gambit--take her sister's place and kill the monster that seems to only move in the Obsidian Keep's darkness--for her sister and county's lives. She is the huntress and the Shadow King is her prey but... what if her heart is his?

***

Okay. There are a lot of interesting things going on in here, and it sounds like a very cool story, but there is SO much going on that, by the end of the query, I am completely lost. One of the problems is that this really needs to be simplified. Also, some of the word usage is wrong, so parts of it don’t make sense.

If you are writing a book description, ALWAYS have someone read it for you before you post it. Make sure you used all the words correctly.  I know there are a lot of people on Wattpad who speak English as a second language. SO impressive…I can barely manage one language, much less more. Haha. BUT, for those of you who don’t speak English as your native tongue, double-checking to make sure words are used correctly is even more important.

So, with this query, I’m going to take it apart line by line. I loved some of the stuff going on in the first line, but it was WAY too long. The use of the colon to tie the sentences together made one sentence last for four or five lines. One sentence cannot be five lines. It’s way too difficult to read. There are SO many details that the reader gets completely lost in them. And when the reader gets lost, guess what they do? They stop reading.

IMPORTANT RULE: Whether in writing a query or writing a book, SIMPLIFY. Get the reader from point A to point B in the most straightforward way you can. You can still make it pretty and poetic. But don’t put too many details in a sentence. Don’t give us too many different things to focus on at once, or else we we will lose interest. I would say a good rule of thumb is no more than two lines per sentence—and that’s a LONG sentence. Most should be between half a line and a full line in length. No longer.

So, the original first sentence: When timid, beautiful Amarie Holland accidentally pucks an unusual rose from an old abandoned garden hidden in the forest, she makes her greatest  mistake yet: she has set a GRUDGE against the Noir's Shadow King and he offers her an ultimatum: Either come willingly or by force and have the skys of Impire darkened by his demons to procure her.