Bonus BPB 4: Jacket Copy Cheats and Hacks

Kids, this is a Blueprint for a Book Summer Challenge Bonus Episode. I’ll be dropping these weekly throughout the Summer 2022 Challenge. Some of you are already signed up and challenging away, turning in weekly assignments and pushing yourself to get this done.

Some of you are #AmWriting supporters who’ve put your $$$ where your <3 is (that’s an old school pre-emoji keyboard heart, in case you’re wondering). We appreciate you—and so you’re getting these bonus episodes too.

This is a longish episode in the hopes of offering you some shortcuts to writing a short thing—that often feels super-hard.

Here’s my shortcut to a starter sentence for your logline for fiction/biography or narrative nonfiction (read on for memoir and prescriptive non-fic):

On the verge of/About to/Just after/Just before CURRENT LIFE, a NOUN who HAS A PROBLEM discovers/is drawn into/some other action THE INCITING INCIDENT/PLOT PROBLEM and STAKES, but when TWIST, s/h/the/y must SOLVE INTERNAL PROBLEM to SOLVE PLOT PROBLEM.

Here’s my current one. I can transform this into jacket copy by adding some proper names and sparking it up—but starting with a terrible run-on sentence like this can be really helpful.

On the verge of losing a chance to start over in the small town she loves, a woman who believes her flaky mother destroyed her life by depending on fortune-telling and magic discovers that cookies with the images of the family heirloom Tarot cards she stole long ago have the ability to change her life and the lives of others, but when her attempts to control the cards play right into the hand of a witch more powerful than she’d ever imagined, she must recognize that true power lies in letting those you love make their own choices in order to save her daughter from sacrificing herself to a destiny that might not be her own.

For memoir, it’s similar but a little different.

On the verge of/About to/Just after/Just before/description of where author started, AUTHOR AND WHY WE CARE ABOUT/RELATE TO THEM (usually includes dramatic core narrative or how core narrative is universal) does/endures/experiences THE PLOT and learns THE CHANGE in order to survive/grow up/find something/achieve something.

Finally, for instructive/prescriptive nonfic:

AUTHOR/EXPERTISE offers a guide to/provides lessons in/ demonstrates/shares THE OSTENSIBLE THING BEING TAUGHT and gives readers/shows THE REAL TAKEAWAY FOR LIFE.

These are really logline cheats (and the Publisher’s Marketplace stuff I promised is WAY below)—but you can do the same thing by grabbing your comp books, looking at the jacket copy and then taking out all the specifics and replacing them with generalities, then use the various transitional words—on the verge of, but when, forced to, faced with or studied, learned, translated, to help readers, readers will learn—to make your own awful Frankenstein monster version.

How to listen: if you’ve listened to any previous Bonus episodes or Minisodes, this one should already BE in your podcast feed. If not, click on the link to listen and you’ll find yourself at amwriting.substack.com. You COULD listen there, but we’re guessing you’d rather get all subscriber episodes, from now on, in your usual podcast-listening app. It’s easy, and you only have to do it once to get every #Minisode from now on right where you want it.

So click “listen in podcast app.” You’ll get an email with a link in it. Click the link—ON YOUR PHONE—and you will get a menu of the most popular podcast apps. Chose yours and click, and you’ll have a new “private” podcast feed for supporters only.

If your favorite listening app isn’t included, fear not. There’s an RSS link in the email. Your podcast app has a way to add that—it’s probably a “+” sign somewhere on your main page. Add the link once, and any time we do a #SupporterMini, you’ll get it without having to do a thing. (Trust us, it’s easy. This is WHY we chose Substack.)

What follows (and will be too long for the show notes, you’re going to have to click through to the website to see it) is the Publishers’ Marketplace from 7/20/22. DO NOT LET IT WORRY YOU. Sure there are lots of CEOS and second-time authors here (and a neurosurgeon, jeez) but there are also debut authors and plenty of people you’ve never heard of. I love these, they’re very informative about what the INDUSTRY is looking for. It’s all there, fiction to memoir to non-fic to children’s and YA down at the bottom. Heck—bonus in the form of some agents and editors you might be interested in. The links probably won’t work, though, as I think they require a PM subscription.

Fiction

Debut

Emily Jane's ON EARTH AS IT IS ON TELEVISION, in which the world is rocked by the arrival of alien spacecrafts that appear over major cities only to disappear as suddenly as they arrived, leaving humanity to wonder why they came and what happens next, to Adam Wilson at Hyperion Avenue, for publication in summer 2023, by Holly Root at Root Literary (world). Rights:[email protected]

General/Other

Author of THE WIFE UPSTAIRS Rachel Hawkins's THE VILLA, a dual timeline Gothic suspense following two women on a trip to Italy, where they uncover the deadly legacy of their rental villa, tracing back to one unforgettable summer in the 1970s whose events reverberate into the present day, to