The three mamaloshen terms were beshert (meaning “meant to be,” often as a descriptor of a loved one), tsuris (meaning “troubles”), and shanda (which is a good way to describe someone who gives tsuris to your beshert.) Gotcha, didn’t it? That line got me too. It’s from a blurb for The Plague, and the nameless copywriter deserves a plaque. Those five words conveyed all the ominous menace of the book and got there a lot faster than Camus, bless him. Louise Willder has worked in publishing as a copywriter for 25 years and she’s written more than 5,000 blurbs. She seems eminently qualified, then, to guide us on ‘the outside story of books’ (as the book’s own blurb puts it). This is a good description, as Willder doesn’t limit herself to exploring blurbs – there are lots of elements that combine to produce a book’s cover and most of them are touched on here. Or this, talking about thinking one must enjoy “classics”: “My most important classics principle, however, is this: some of them are definitely better than others, and you don’t have to like all of them. Magical realism, the Beats and most ‘Great American Novels’ have never done it for me, and I am at peace with that.” Whether you agree with her taste here or not, that’s a sensible, humane and, for me, helpful and encouraging approach.

Blurb Your Enthusiasm eBook by Louise Willder | Official Blurb Your Enthusiasm eBook by Louise Willder | Official

Every clich�� and hundred-times-told story or anecdote about books and publishing is repeated here. Never mind if some of those tales are untrue, because this is not a serious book, anyway. Nothing to see or learn here, just a few jokes, jokes, and jokes, it's like ten late-night monologues in a row.

Featured Reviews

This is a book lovers book, it is a love letter to all things book. I loved it. Being super bookish it was a book made for me and my follow bookworms. If you’re a writer, it’s all about finding your voice. If you’re a copywriter, it’s usually about expressing someone else’s. One is an art; one is a craft (or if it’s an art, it’s the art of imitation). You just have to listen. You wouldn't think you could get a whole book from just talking about blurbs, but actually they make for really interesting discussion. I enjoyed this, though I am not usually a big non-fiction fan. Being about books though helped with that & I enjoyed all the interesting facts and snippets of blurbs and author thoughts about blurbs, publishing insights and funny examples. This is a prodigious, monstrous, stupefying, indescribable book (from T S Eliot’s blurb for The White Goddess by Robert Graves) I think Rebecca Solnit nails it when she says ‘a book without women is often said to be about humanity, but a book with women in the foreground is a woman’s book.

Blurb Your Enthusiasm: The A-Z of Literary Persuasion by Blurb Your Enthusiasm: The A-Z of Literary Persuasion by

PDF / EPUB File Name: Blurb_Your_Enthusiasm_-_Louise_Willder.pdf, Blurb_Your_Enthusiasm_-_Louise_Willder.epub Wilder enjoys a good digression. She is a huge Orwell fan, so she spends some time on his rules of writing. She discusses the rest of the outside of the book. What makes a good cover? What about illustrations on the cover? Do the American kind of blurbs sell books? She also gives a bunch of hints on writing blurbs which are actually hints on good writing. The authors Jonathan Franzen and Jennifer Weiner have been duking it out over the issue of seriousness since 2010, with Weiner criticising the ‘Franzenfrenzy’ that greeted the publication of his novel Freedom. In her eyes, women writing about domestic situations were seen as limited in their appeal, but when Franzen ‘writes a book about a family … we are told this is a book about America’. Or her take on the sort of Literary Fiction where nothing really happens: “You know the kind of book. They win prizes. There generally isn’t much in the way of a plot. Or if there is, it’s something along the lines of woman goes away and finds herself, someone thinks about an event from their past, or sad middle-aged man has an affair – or even just considers said affair and doesn’t go through with it.” Followed a little later by “... Thomas Pynchon’s notoriously ‘difficult’ (in other words, mainly read by show-offs) novel Gravity’s Rainbow…. I wonder how many people have read it and then not told anybody they’ve read it? Zero, I suspect. Because the point of books like these is that they are an Iron Man literary challenge, and once you’ve been macho enough to read them you can boast about it.”I really liked this book, what would have been great was a reading list of the books mentioned at the end along with the bibliography , that would have taken it to five stars. specificity is key. vague waffle, in fact most description – whether of a character or the book itself – should be avoided. Written by a professional copywriter who really knows her stuff, this is an immensely interesting book about all aspects of publishing (including cover design, marketing etc), taking as its focus the difficult job of attracting the widest range of readers using just 100 or so words, keeping as close as possible to the tone and spirit of the author.

Louise Willder | Oneworld

A delightful bibliophile’s miscellany with a great title – not just for the play on words, but also for how it encapsulates what this is about: ways of pithily spreading excitement about books. The first part of the subtitle, “An A–Z of Literary Persuasion,” is puzzling in that the structure is scattershot rather than strictly alphabetical, but the second is perfect: from the title and cover to the contents, Louise Willder is interested in what convinces people to acquire and read a book. john yorke: ‘the shape of all stories; the enduring pattern of how someone is found by being lost.’ always ask yourself, what’s really going on here? Why should anyone care? And how do we make them care?” Louise Wilder has fascinatingly lifted the lid on the art of blurb writing, in as crisp, amusing, and informative a way as Diana Athill did for the story of publishing and editing in StetAlthough Willder admires blurbal perfection, she has also put together a ‘little cabinet of horrors’ – blurbs so deliciously bad that we suspect the copywriters were impaired or never read the books. She describes these productions as ‘unhinged’, ‘barking’, ‘bats’, ‘deranged abominations’ and ‘a big “screw-you” to the reader’. A standout in that last category: ‘This is a Lord Peter Wimsey story. Need we say more?’ Well, yes.