As any author can tell you a book's blurb is vital to it's success. Aside from the cover, that little blurb is all an author has to draw the reader's attention and get them to actually start reading. Problem is, they're deceptively tricky to write.

I mean if you will, imagine spending an indeterminate amount of time writing between 100,000 and 120,000 words and then being faced with the task of summing that up in a few hundred! A few hundred that can't, by the way, give away the story but have to somehow pique curiousity. It's daunting, for this author at least.

This past week I found myself with a bit of a conundrum surrounding the blurb for Realm of Shadows, my third book to be released concurrently with Taken. I realized that the blurb for Realm gave away major plot points of Taken.

Were they not being released together, this might not be such a huge problem but given that they are something had to be done. As such I found myself faced with the dreaded rewrite and it got me to thinking.

Readers love blurbs. It allows them to pick up a book and at a glance decide whether they want to read it or not. That in itself is amazing to me; a few hundred words or less is all a reader needs.

Writers on the other hand hate blurbs, maybe for the exact reason stated above. We spend so much time and effort writing the book and if that one little paragraph doesn't work...all of our work is for naught. It's, in a word, frustrating. More than that, as I said, it's hard to do. It's hard to condense a story into a single paragraph. Especially if it's a complex story.

And yet it's what we must do. And while the writer in me loathes it, the reader in me has to admit that a well written blurb can give you chills and make you excited to read the rest.

So take heed fellow scribes, don't neglect that most important step on the road to publication. Spend quality time on your blurbs and make sure they represent your absolute best effort.

Before I sign off, I'd like to offer special thanks to the rowdy bunch of great authors over in Wealth, Writing, World for helping me find my way through sublurbia this week. Their sage advice and many helpful suggestions made all the difference.

Excelsior!