We all know that, despite sayings to the contrary, books are guaranteed to be judged by their covers. However, there’s another important component in getting readers to hand over their hard-earned cash: sales blurbs. Whether on the back of a physical book or the top of a web page, these blocks of text must be both short and appealing. They can’t describe the entire book, so they must describe the idea of a book instead. Or maybe they could just tell you the book’s great and leave it at that. Is it true? No one knows!
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Phoebe Pineda. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.
[intro music]Bunny: Hello and welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Bunny. And with me is–
Chris: Chris–
Bunny: and–
Oren: Oren.
Bunny: Ah, it takes three to make a podcast. Life was normal for struggling high school student Bunny until the day she discovered Mythcreants, a website after her own heart. From that day forward, her life felt pretty normal except she had something more to read on Fridays and weekends.
Analytical and irreverent blogger Chris had run Mythcreants for years doing website things and writing articles about stuff alongside her opinionated and wisecracking co blogger, dad pun Oren. That is until a mysterious new reader going by Bunny appeared in the comments raising their SEO ever so slightly by a macron or two and not really changing much else.
What these three don’t know is that the Great Goddess Podcastia had sent their lives on a very slow, very gradual collision course towards joining forces. Will Bunny depose Wes or will Wes depart on his own? Will the ever vengeful fan ragers simmering on Reddit take Oren out? Will Chris ever launch the new version of the website?
Most importantly, will the Mythcats ever get the scritches they deserve? Listen to this podcast. Or die. Eh? Eh?
Oren: Yeah, I’d buy that for a dollar.
Chris: Honestly, my favorite part is the fact that Oren is opinionated and I’m not. I just state the facts. I just state the facts.
Oren: Just the facts. Nothing but facts.
Bunny: I never said it was a good blurb. I am very bad at writing blurbs. Maybe it was a little misleading, which is a commentary on blurbs.
Chris: No, I think that’s the general reputation that Oren has. He’s the opinionated one. I’m just factual. All of my opinions become fact because I said them.
Bunny: I thought about mentioning a lessons post, the one place in which people will probably agree that you’re quite opinionated. I also thought about calling Oren provocative, but that didn’t seem like the right word.
Chris: We are provocative sometimes. The difference is that we aren’t actually provocative for the sake of being provocative like you would think. We’re just–take our opinions and put them out there without being shy.
Oren: I’m just a very naturally abrasive person, okay. I don’t have to work at it.
Bunny: Oren is just a jerk!
Chris: Also, that was my experience. I’m always a person who is critical of everything and piss people off. That’s just my natural personality.
Bunny: And you do it so well. So that’s why we’ve got a blog going here. And you know, I did actually notice, so we don’t have a sales blurb. The podcast page just says “for fantasy and science fiction storytellers” and not a single mention of the holistic cup of depression, I gotta say.
Oren: Very sad. We really need to update our lore.
Chris: No, here we go. In a world ruled by the Iowa workshop. One podcast offers a holistic cup of depression.
Bunny: One podcast stands against the storm. One podcast speaks out in workshop. But yes, today we’re talking about what makes a good sales blurb. I’m not very good at these, which is why it’s gonna be interesting to discuss, but I have been reading a lot of them lately and have noticed some trends and themes and good things and bad things, and Discord discourse.
Chris: Our specialty is craft, not marketing. So we’ll talk about them, but again, this is not an area where I claim to be an expert.
Oren: I have feelings, okay, and what is a podcast for, if not feelings?
Bunny: Feeeeeelings. Strong feelings.
Oren: It’s like legitimately really hard to measure what effect the blurb has on sales of a book.
Like even though the blurb is a really important part of marketing, it’s like, if the blurb is bad, how much did that affect whether the book was a success or not?
Chris: I think it’s safe to say that the cover is more important than the blurb.
Oren: Probably.
Bunny: The cover is the thing that gets you to read the blurb. At least in my experience. If I think the cover is silly, I probably won’t pick it up.
Oren: Sorry. There are so many books. I have to judge them at least a little bit by their cover. There’s too many.
Bunny: That’s what the cover is for.
Chris: Covers are also actually surprisingly good and most of the time at conveying the general genre of the book, people like a pretty cover. I think speculative fiction fans especially and fantasy fans, especially like a pretty cover.
Bunny: And pretty deckled edges.
Chris: But also if I see a book, it’ll often tell me whether something is speculative fiction or not, and if it’s not, probably not interested, probably not gonna look at that blurb.
Bunny: But looking at the things that I’ve noticed on most sales blurbs, whether they’re done poorly or not, the characteristics that they usually have are the story background or the setup.
So, answering the question of where we are when the story starts, the major characters, so who are we following, what’s their relationship? The setting, where does this take place? This is definitely more important in spec fic than it is in other genres. And then the conflict. So. The throughline in Mythcreants parlance, and then the stakes.
Chris: I’d be willing to bet that a lot of times the back blurb does not actually clarify what the throughline is because it’s just supposed to be intriguing enough to get people to read it, and sometimes the throughline requires some explaining. Again, looking at what you need to engage. A lot of them start with a protagonist and their general starting position, but we’re looking at, what details make you interested in reading about this character or this world?
And then there’s usually going to be a tense plot twist in the blurb somewhere, and sometimes it tells you what the throughline is, but I don’t think it necessarily has to.
Bunny: I don’t think it’s necessary, but it is common. And I think most blurbs are trying to point towards that, at least.
Chris: I think the big question is, does this give you a good idea of what the book is gonna be like? ‘Cause sometimes if it’s misleading and we don’t know that this is a big political intrigue instead of just a thriller, for instance. Like, that might be an important distinction.
Oren: One thing that some blurbs do that I just can’t stand, and so I hope that means it’s less effective–like, sometimes that’s not the same thing. Sometimes things you hate are effective at marketing. What I hope is ineffective is when it tells me what a good book this is.
Bunny: Usually does that in the quotes.
Oren: If they wanna put quotes. Sure. Sometimes the quotes themselves make me go, that can’t possibly be real, even if it is real. Sometimes the blurb itself will be like, “In this heartwarming tale,” it’s like, don’t tell me it’s heartwarming.
That’s, like, a qualitative assessment. I’m the decider around here. That’s my decision.
Bunny: That’s for me to decide. That’s my heart being warmed.
Chris: Obviously those are very telling and flattering. At the same time, I do think that they do play a role in telling somebody what kind of book this is, because heartwarming does indicate tone.
Oren: Yeah, I suppose.
Bunny: It does feel like you should be able to get that from other parts of it though. I don’t know. I kind of feel like that the same way I feel when movie trailers do that, when the narrator comes in and is like, “In this heartwarming tale of friendship and bravery.” It’s also one of those things that’s just quite vague.
Chris: A lot of these sales [blurbs], they start with a bolded line at the top. And I think that’s a good idea because that tells people, okay, if you’re only gonna read one sentence, this is the sentence I want you to read. And they tend to be less descriptive because there’s not much space, a lot more buzzy. And sometimes it is a description of what’s in the book.
Here’s one of the ones that Oren was talking about, and this is for Wintersong: “Dark, romantic, and unforgettable. This riveting debut for fans of Labyrinth and Naomi Novik tells a fantastical story of a young woman’s journey towards love and acceptance.”
Bunny: That’s so vague.
Oren: At least there’s some comps in there, or some comparables, I should say. Like at least Dark Romance is a genre, right?
Chris: Yes. And that is part of it, is we have a lot of these, if they’re not that descriptive, they have, “here’s the other bestselling books that we think you’re reading, that if you read Labyrinth or you like Naomi Novik, just in general, I guess, we didn’t wanna name one of Naomi Novik’s works.”
Oren: They need some help, okay.
Chris: This is for fans of the Temeraire book, of course.
Oren: When I look at a blurb, what I’m looking for is something that will give me at least some idea what kind of story it is and something that will make the case for me, something that will set the story apart, and I tend to judge anything where it just tells me that this is a heartwarming or a pulse pounding story, I immediately discount that because that is just a thing they can say.
They have no shame against putting that on the cover of a book that is actually very boring or not at all romantic.
Chris: [At] the same time, dark, romantic. We have some–we know this is probably romantasy. Naomi Novik has a couple romantasies. Of course, “tells a fantastical story,” it’s like, oh really? I thought this was not fantasy. Is it fantastical?
Bunny: I thought this was going to be Dunkirk.
Chris: But I mean, I don’t know. Somebody might not know it’s fantasy and neither were fantastical there. We don’t know that Labyrinth is a fantasy work.
Bunny: I think the distinction here is not necessarily whether it’s accurate or not, it’s whether you, the reader, find that it would be something you’d want to read. And for Oren, that’s, “you’re preaching to me, you’re just saying things,” but at the same time it is getting at something.
Chris: At the same time, they’re still telling whether or not the book is particularly tense. Like, if they’re advertising an edgy book, they’re not gonna put heartwarming on it. And if it’s like Legends and Lattes, they’re not gonna put “pulse pounding” on it.
Like they could. They could be lying. I can understand the logic if you have your one sentence teaser of putting descriptors in there to identify the type of book as opposed to the longer blurb, which has more room to actually give you details about the story and show rather than tell things like that.
Make it sound heartwarming. Make it sound pulse pounding. But if you’re doing one little line, I can see how that would be harder to do.
Bunny: I also think that one little line is much harder to just do well in general. Like, I was grabbing books on my shelf to see how they did their blurbs. And one of my favorite books, The Girl From the Sea, [the] one liner is, “One summer can change everything,” which is extremely vague and not what I would highlight about the book.
Chris: Is that a speculative fiction? That doesn’t sound like–to me, that does not sound like speculative fiction.
Bunny: It is. So The Girl from the Sea, and this is a graphic novel, so you’d know kind of from the cover, it’s a selkie romance essentially, and it happens at a whirlwind over the summer, which is what they’re getting at.
But you can’t really tell anything about the book from that phrase. Like, I guess that phrase is supposed to be, I guess, a theme of the book, but it’s not very helpful for someone trying to decide to read the book. The rest of the description on the back for that one is fine. It’s nothing special, but it never mentions anything about the fact that this has fantasy elements.
We know that Morgan, the main character, is queer, and that Keltie, who turns out to be a selkie, is mysterious. But the fact that she’s a selkie, which is a big selling point for me, is not mentioned.
Oren: Sometimes there is, of course, the fear of spoilers in the blurb. So if her being a selkie was a mystery, I can see why they wouldn’t put it in there. If it was revealed right away, yeah, I get it. I could see.
Bunny: For this one, so you can kind of tell from the cover that there is something mystical about Keltie, and from her first appearance, it’s pretty clear that she’s not just an average person, but when Keltie shows up, she’s like, I’m a selkie. And of course Morgan is like, no, you aren’t. But you as the reader are like, oh, she’s a selkie.
Chris: Sometimes they don’t specify things like that because they don’t think it’s competitive. They don’t think that selkies are drawing in readers, and so they wanna leave it vague and be like, oh, maybe people will think she might be a mermaid, ’cause mermaids are more popular.
Bunny: They’re wrong. They’re wrong! They’re wrong! Selkies are in.
Oren: In with the bunny demographic specifically.
Bunny: Yes. Demographic of one. Selkies are very in.
Oren: One thing that I guess we should have mentioned earlier is that the nice thing about blurbs is that if you’re traditionally published, you almost certainly don’t need to care about them because your publisher will probably make it for you, or at least that is my understanding of how the traditional publishing industry works.
Chris: I wouldn’t be surprised if you, especially if you have a small press, if somebody runs ’em by you. That also means if somebody does a bad job, it’s gonna be hard to get it changed
Oren: And that’s a problem. But at least you don’t have to come up with this.
Chris: Although, honestly, I do think that there’s a significant overlap between the way that you need to write for your back blurb and how, if you wanna query. So if you are interested in querying, I feel like it has some of the same, you need to write a teaser version of your story and figure out how to condense it down into something that sounds interesting. And I think you could probably reuse some of the same stuff in your query, and not everybody’s querying either.
Bunny: Definitely the Novik comparison feels like something out of a query letter. Back in the day I was trying to query, and in hindsight a book that would never have been picked up by a publisher. I was just optimistic about it. So I had written a couple of query letters and read some of the literature and how you’re supposed to write them.
And one thing you are supposed to do is situate it in the genre, like, “what are its peers?” So saying “this book is like this other book and this third book” is definitely the sort of thing you’d put in a query letter. And so I kind of wonder if that blurb was drawing straight from that query letter.
Chris: Well, I think that’s actually–can be kind of normal to draw from query letters because again, usually a query letter also has a little synopsis, not necessarily a synopsis, so much as a teaser, very similar to what you see in these back blurbs. Because if you’re querying, you’re trying to get the agent intrigued about your book, just like a sales board is trying to get the customer willing to buy the book, right?
You’re still trying to sell the book’s merits, and an agent is going to be primarily concerned with whether they can sell the book to an acquiring editor and how pitchable it is, whether it has a high concept and all those other things. “Do we have an interesting premise?” And so you kind of still want to do very similar things in a query letter.
Oren: What birthed this topic was some discourse over on our Discord server–which you can join by becoming a patron. Plug!–about comparing blurbs that either did tell you a lot of what the throughline was, at least theoretically going to be, versus ones that just hinted at it and built atmosphere.
And my hot take is that those can both be good. Specifically we were comparing Piranesi to Where Peace is Lost. The first one is by Susanna Clarke, and the second one is by Valerie Valdes. Now I’ve actually read Piranesi. I love it. It’s one of my favorite books. And this blurb, it hints at what the plot is, but it doesn’t really say.
What it does is try to build atmosphere about this strange place that this protagonist lives in and this weird other who he talks to. Whereas Where Peace is Lost has a much more detailed like, “and this is what the plot’s about.” And assuming that is accurate and that it’s not a lie, ’cause sometimes these lie, I also love this. This is a great blurb as far as I’m concerned. I would definitely read this book. In fact, I’m planning to.
My hot take is that I think either of those can work. If you’re describing the plot, make it sound exciting. And if you are not doing that and you’re building atmosphere, make the atmosphere sound intriguing. That’s the best advice I can give.
Chris: Well, this is also where comparables come in handy. Look at books similar to yours and see what their blurbs sound like. And I feel like that’s gonna be your best guide to what your blurbs should sound like. I still think that even with Piranesi, you see the kind of same rhythm of, we start by setting up an interesting premise and character, and then we set up one plot twist that adds some tension to the blurb, and then we end with like a vague teaser about the future.
We put a little bit more word count into the kind of starting premise because Piranesi has such a kind of unusual and interesting premise. If you have some novelty in your story, you want that in front, but just don’t forget to add the details because it’s the novel details that really matter, not just like the general concept.
So for instance, a good example is Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking. So our kind of starting paragraph that adds the novel premise and you know, gets people interested in this character says, “14-year-old Mona isn’t like the wizards charged with defending the city. She can’t control lightning or speak to water. Her familiar is a sourdough starter and her magic only works on bread. She has a comfortable life in her aunt’s bakery making gingerbread men dance.”
Now, some key things about this paragraph, and it’s just the same skills you build as a storyteller in miniature, honestly. First, we have some, a little bit of sympathy and spinach with Ramona, because she doesn’t like the other wizards, she can’t control lightning or speak to water. Giving her some spinach, some sympathy that makes her more likable. Then we have the novelty when we have specific details. A familiar that’s a sourdough starter. Magic that works on bread dancing, gingerbread men.
And if we’re just like, oh, she does baking magic, it would not be the same. We have to give those details. It’s those details that bring out the novelty of the premise.
Oren: Yeah. Without the details, it would’ve been half baked.
Bunny: [groans] I need to delete “wisecracking.” And just put it with “dad puns.”
Oren: We’ll get the audio editors to deal with that.
Chris: And then it proceeds with our tense plot twist of the teaser. “But Mona’s life is [turned] up upside down when she finds a dead body on the bakery floor. An assassin is stalking the streets of Mona’s city, preying on magic folk, and it appears that Mona is his next target.” Then we have the tension. It’s funny because on Goodreads, this book had the word “cozy” attached to it, which people seem to be putting on everything.
And yes, it has the baking magic, which does resemble a cozy fantasy, but the assassin, it just– it [does] not qualify.
Bunny: There aren’t usually that many assassins in cozy stories.
Chris: And then we have our vague teaser that’s about what comes next. “And in an embattled city, suddenly bereft of wizards, the assassin may be the least of Mona’s worries…” Dot dot dot. But that kind of like, I see that same structure in just a lot of them, right. And that also works for querying when you’re giving an idea of what your book is about.
Bunny: And this also still hits those five notes that I identified. We start with a character, so Mona. We get the setting, there’s a city full of wizards. The setup is that she has a comfortable life in her aunt’s bakery, making gingerbread men dance.
That’s the setup. That’s where we are. And then we have a conflict. Mona’s life gets turned upside down. There’s a dead body, there’s an assassin, and then the stakes, Mona might be the next target. And then also this bigger thing about the embattled city. We have all of those points there.
Chris: I do think that the key here is to just use the same storytelling skills that you normally use to create novelty, to make your protagonist likable, to add tension, do all of those things. Just do them in little miniature bits.
Bunny: That’s our tip. Do the same things in little.
Chris: Little, which is not easy.
Bunny: Little is harder in my experience.
Chris: Admittedly, ’cause trying to explain the story without putting in tons of details that are just logistical, like even Piranesi, the back blurb has some parts of it that just feel like they’re there as logistical details to set up the twist. And sometimes you can’t get away from that. But the idea is to try to simplify that as much as possible.
Oren: Or, and we could address the elephant in the room, which is what I sometimes call black hat blurbing, where you’re just making something that sounds neat.
It just does not reflect the book at all. I don’t like it. I can’t say it doesn’t work. But I hate it. I will be disappointed in you if you do this. An example is on the Amazon sales page of the Three-Body Problem. It makes this big deal about how it’s set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution.
A secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens, and then it talks about the aliens a little bit. And it says different camps start to form on earth about whether to welcome or fight them. And let me tell you, that is not what this book is about. The Cultural Revolution stuff is briefly there in the prologue, and the aliens are there, but they never show up.
We occasionally get some interludes with them, and then the camps they’re talking about is the tiny cult of alien lovers and everyone else. And that’s it. That’s not really what dividing into camps typically means. If there’s 5,000 people in one room and three in another room, you wouldn’t call that two camps.
Bunny: Two camps, Oren. I’ll have you know that the world is divided into two camps. One camp, which is–in which selkies are out, and one camp in which selkies are in, and I am the only one in the second camp. Two!
Oren: Looking at this blurb, you would have no idea that most of the story is an extremely slow mystery trying to uncover why a bunch of scientists are dying by suicide and spending a lot of time in a weird MMO.
You just wouldn’t have any idea that’s what the book’s about by reading this blurb. The blurb does not sound like that kind of book.
Chris: I do think it’s hard for them to advertise a book where people are dying, but it’s still boring. It’s like, what do you say at that point? They probably try to make it sound like it’s a thriller or something because people are dying, but it’s not.
Bunny: It’s a boring book with boring death.
Oren: You can also look–there are some warning signs to look out for in blurbs. Anything that has two different characters who are just described as doing their own thing. Because at that point the book’s just telling you that it has a fractured story. ‘Cause if they couldn’t make the characters feel like part of the same story in the blurb, the book almost certainly isn’t doing that. Unless you are okay with that sort of thing, stay away from that book.
Also, if, if the blurb feels really vague, you read it and you’re like, what does any of that mean? That probably means that the story is really unfocused and whoever was writing the blurb doesn’t know what to do with it. “How am I supposed to tell them what this is?” And they don’t wanna lie, unlike whoever wrote this Three-Body Problem blurb.
Chris: I would take a book that had a back blurb that was like a romance and had a little intro paragraph for each character, and then the next paragraph was like, “oh yeah, and here’s how they end up meeting each other.” Because if it’s a romance, I know that they’re gonna spend their time together. They’re not gonna be on other sides of the world generally.
No, that’s not true. We have seen epistolary letter romances, but that would be unusual.
Bunny: That’s pretty common in romance.
Oren: They’re writing letters to each other, right?
Chris: They’re still interacting.
Bunny: They’re interacting. Romance also shows a case where what counts as a spoiler varies from genre to genre. If there’s a teaser for a romance and it’s like, “X has feelings for Y. Will X and Y start a relationship?”
If this is a romance novel, then yes. It’s romance. So suggesting a “will they, won’t they” isn’t really a spoiler because it’s like, well, we know where this goes, but you can’t reveal a huge source of tension in the story. You can’t reveal a reveal in the teaser. That’s a big one. If part of the tension comes from who’s the villain, and we have a secret villain, you can’t reveal who the villain is in the teaser.
Trailers do this sometimes. One of the recent Mission Impossible trailers, I think for Mission Impossible: Fallout, spoiled that Henry Cavill was the villain because the trailer had a shot of him shooting an AK 47 at Tom Hanks [actually Tom Cruise], and it’s like, “Ooh, he’s a baddie.” But that’s supposed to be a twist in the movie.
Don’t do that. Sorry. Spoilers, I guess, for a several years old movie.
Oren: Oh, no. Rude. Sometimes there’s no option there. Like if we’re talking about trailers now, like the movie Abigail, the trailer gives away the entire twist that the first, at least 40 minutes of the movie is building up to, but on the other hand, without the twist, there is no reason to see this movie.
It’s just a kind of average movie if you don’t have that twist, and I have no idea how you would advertise it without mentioning the twist.
Chris: We have a blog post coming out about this. It talks about the fact that sometimes people wanna make the basic premise of their story a reveal. And that leaves you with nothing to advertise and that’s a big problem.
I think the thing that Abigail should have done was plotted the story like Megan, because Megan, it’s similar in that the thing that’s the big draw–
Bunny: The title that’s a girl’s name?
Chris: Well, Abigail is about a ballerina vampire who kills people, and Megan is about a doll who kills people. I do think that they appeal to a very similar audience.
But, in Megan, the beginning of the story is written with the idea that people will know that Megan is gonna turn into a killer. So it uses that to build suspense, whereas Abigail is trying to hide it and build up to it as though it’s a reveal. So then it’s just an underwhelming reveal and we’re not seeing any of this ballerina vampire ahead of time.
Bunny: There’s a larger issue of blurbs that set up the reader to just wait and wait and wait, wait for the things in the blurb to happen. And this is a peeve of mine. The way I approach blurbs, and maybe this varies from person to person, but the way I approach it is like, this is giving me the general sense of where everyone is when the story starts. Two thirds of the blurb is usually like, “here’s how things are normally.” And then the last third is like, “and here’s what’s changed,” and that’s the story. So I hate it when it takes 150 pages for the story to fulfill the things it promised in the setup.
Chris: I do wonder if some of these books are just under some constraints. Piranesi has a really novel premise that it can spend a bunch of word counts on the back blurb, and then it’s just kind of a contemplative story. Whereas if you had a story that kind of goes places and you couldn’t tell from the beginning moments what kind of story it’s gonna be, I can see the temptation to add more events to give a better idea so that people know that this is a war story, ’cause it doesn’t seem like a war story early on.
Now granted, that’s also a thing the storyteller could proactively address, but sometimes we’ve got the story we’ve got and we’re just trying to advertise it the best we can. I can see there being issues there, but I generally agree that it’s better to not go halfway into the book with your plot twist, if you can avoid it.
Bunny: I’m gripey about this because I’m reading a book called Swamplandia and I’m 150 pages into it, and the blurb promised me four things. One, the main character’s mom dies. Two, her father withdraws. Three, her sister falls in love with a ghost. Four, her brother goes to work at a theme park. And then it says that the main character goes on a mission to save them. And I’m 150 pages in. Those events happen in a different order. The mom’s death happens in the first couple pages and the brother leaves, and then the sister falls in love, and that’s just happened, and I’m still waiting for the mission to save them to start.
Chris: Here’s a question. [Does] the story feel slow?
Bunny: I don’t know. It’s one of those stories that’s definitely trying to be literary, so yes.
Chris: Sounds like yes. This might be less of a complaint if the story wasn’t slow. And again, that might be why the back blurb pulls in so many later events is because actually, the story is kind of slow and doesn’t have enough tension, and we’re trying to make up for that by taking later events and pretending they happened earlier so it seems like a tenser book than it is.
Bunny: It definitely has been like 70% the father withdrawing and then the rest of those other three things.
Chris: But it sounds like a more interesting book if you imagine all of those events happen in the beginning. So the real issue here is that the book is not engaging enough.
A salesperson is always gonna have an incentive to mislead, to get people to buy the book. And some of ’em just want sales. But I think they also hope that if we just trick enough people into buying it, that some of them will become true fans and the book will succeed anyway. Because it’s hard for a book to succeed without word of mouth, I think, or become real big without word of mouth.
Bunny: Wow. I’m gonna have to erase “irreverent,” and replace it with “cynical” in your blurb, just to be more accurate.
Chris: No!
Oren: So we’re definitely out of time. We’re like five minutes over time. It’s time to call this, the blurb has gotten too long.
Bunny: But we were complaining, Oren!
Oren: I do love to do that. There’s more I could complain about, but we don’t have time.
Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, support us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jabar. He is an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek.
We will talk to you next week.
[outro music]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.