Taking the Plunge: Jacket Copy Doctoring

So I was hanging out in my monthly writers' Skype group the other day and got into another session of shortening and untwisting someone's jacket copy for a query they were about to send out to some agents.

What's "jacket copy", you may ask? The BookBaby blog calls it "that briefest of descriptions which must, at quick glance, convey to a potential reader all the brilliance and complexity of your book". Sometimes called a "blurb" (which seems to have evolved into a catch-all word for half a dozen book-related things), jacket copy is the teaser text either on the back of a paperback's cover, or printed on the inside leaf of the removable book jacket. It summarizes the central characters and the main conflict of the story in a couple of brief paragraphs.

Anyway, apparently I'm pretty good at it! Chris Ruz suggested that I should do it officially, for a small fee (most authors that do this, do it for upwards of sixty, seventy bucks), so I decided to take him up on that and offer it as a service.

Getting ready to self-publish your novel and need some help writing the teaser copy for the back cover or the Amazon listing?

Maybe you're pursuing traditional publication and need help writing the jacket copy for the query. Perhaps your jacket copy is too long, or awkwardly worded.

Well, I'm here to help you untangle it for just twenty bucks. We'll sit down and go over what you've got and see if we can't shrink it down, or clarify those wonky sentences.