Anatomy of a blurb

Girldrive cover via Girldrive blog

Thought you might want to see how a blurb becomes a blurb. My editor at Seal Press, Brooke Warner, asked me to check out Girldrive. I will post more about it closer to the pub date, but here's what I sent her:

"Girldrive is a fascinating, fiery, dramatic whirlwind tour through modern-day women’s lives. Aronowitz and Bernstein treat feminism both as sacred and something that can, and is, being refashioned, and in some cases, dismissed in favor of other ways of advancing change. Thankfully, they don’t only talk to self-described 'feminists,' but to all sorts of women of different ages, races, sexualities, and belief systems. Girldrive is very likely to make you excited, impassioned, and, at times, infuriated--and that’s a good thing. Rather than handing you preformatted answers, Girldrive lets its diversity of opinion speak to you, rather than for you."

I knew this was pretty long, but I have trouble cutting myself down, so this is what they went with:

"Girldrive is a fascinating, fiery, dramatic whirlwind tour through modern-day women's lives. It's likely to make you excited, impassioned, and at times infuriated‹and that's a good thing. It lets its diversity of opinion speak to you rather than for you."

I've been thinking about blurbs as I gather them for Peep Show: Tales of Voyeurs and Exhibitionists, which is kindof my birthday book, because it's coming out in November, and my birthday is November 10th. I realized that they're not just for the back cover of the book. I'm going to put mine on the book's postcards, on the blog, have my publicist put it on the press release.

I'm also just a book nerd, and like reading blurbs, like this one for Danny Evan's Rage Against the Meshugenah: Why it Takes Balls to Go Nuts:

"A sort of self-help book on crack, for the modern man.”
—Rebecca Woolf, author of Rockabye

I'd buy that, even though I'm not a man (and interestingly, the other blurb on Amazon was also from a woman).