Publishing Erotica Part 9 – Writing Blurbs

Click here for Publishing Erotica Part 8 – Designing Your Cover

If covers are the most important marketing tool, then blurbs on the next most important. After your sexy cover has lured the reader in, it is your blurb they will read to find out what your story’s about. So it better be hot and passionate, brimming with all sorts of naughty possibility. You want your reader to be wowed, to get so wet or hard they have to read your story.

And that is why writing blurbs sucks!

They are terrible. So much is riding on a few paragraphs. The smallest amount of writing and yet so vastly important. You may have written the sexiest, steamiest, and dirtiest erotica in the history of mankind, but if your blurb sucks how would they know and why would they bother reading it?

Blurbs have to be punchy. Exciting. Short sentences, action verbs, enticing adjectives. No passive voice. Clear, concise thoughts explaining why your story is sexy. You have a few paragraphs to sketch out the bones of your erotica and what it is about. What are the kinks? Who are the characters? What is the situation they find themselves in? All of that needs to be in the blurb. Don’t hold back because you want the sex scene to be a surprise.

The sex is the point of the story. If your readers do not know what’s in the book, they won’t know if it will make them hot.

This is hard to do. You need to be careful. Start with a single sentence telling what the barebones of the story is. If it is a shifter story, “A hot, naughty librarian discovers primal passion in the arms of a werewolf!” or “The alpha werewolf takes the innocent librarian hard for the first time!” With your opening sentence, you establish the kink (werewolf, sexy librarian, and virgin with the second one). You know who’s fucking whom. This sentence is its own paragraph. It will be at the top of the blurb, standing out, the first thing read.

The hook to get them to read more.

Now in the next paragraph, set the stage. Who is the librarian? Give a bit about her circumstances. Why does she need to be taken hard by her werewolf? Who is the werewolf? Tease the reader with the initial events leading back to that first statement. I usually do two paragraphs, often with a single sentence between them or at the end, always punchy. You’re trying to bring your story to life and show your reader these are two (or more) characters whose sex will be blistering hot.

Sex they have to read.

Lastly, end on a call to action. Another exciting, punchy sentence. Maybe it’s a roadblock to them fucking. Maybe it’s a tease of what the fucking is. As I mentioned in Formatting Your Interior, tell them the story is so hot they should Look Inside (an Amazon feature, but most ebook vendors have a way to read a sample) and see just how passionate the story is. That is why you have a hot snippet of the action as a the sneak peak right after your copyright page.

Now my very last paragraph is a list of kinks and how many words the story is. I put everything I can think of and won’t get me in trouble with amazon. You can get away with using words in the blurb that you can’t in the title. Is there oral sex, included, anal, yep. Ass to mouth, well throw the A2M in your kink list. Fisting, pegging, sex toys, exhibitionism, voyeurism, masturbation, public sex, group sex, double penetration (DP), creampie, spanking, bondage, and more. Let your reader know just what’s in there. If it’s a kink they find hot, they’re more likely to read it. And if it is a kink they don’t, then you won’t disappoint or offend your reader leading to returns, complaints, and nasty reviews.

One last note, if you’re writing an extreme kink, let your readers know in someway. Most things, girl-on-girl, anal, oral, exhibitionism, sex toys, spanking, light bondage, etc. won’t offend the average reader. But if you sell your book as a lesbian tale and then it turns out one of the girls is transgender and still has a cock, a person into lesbians and not transgenders could have all eroticism sucked out. Plus, the person into transgender doesn’t know that’s what your story is about. Pegging, gender-swap, extreme BDSM (edge play, heavy masochism/sadism), bisexual (MM not FF), cheating/cuckolding, and monster are examples you want to let your readers know that’s what your story is about.

It’s all about marketing your book to the people who want to read that kink. If they don’t know it’s in there, how can they read it? Your twist that the heroine’s new boss is really a demon tentacle monster and she’s going to discover the joys of being wrapped up and fucked with tentacle-dicks is a shocking surprise, but the fans of tentacles won’t know about it if you don’t advertise it.

Lastly, for those who publish on Amazon, they allow limited forms of HTML coding. I would recommend only using <strong>YOUR TEXT</strong> to make bold and <em>YOUR TEXT</em> to make italicized. You can use the <h1>YOUR TEXT</h1> to make headers on your first sentence, but Amazon made a change to their display format that cut in half the amount of your blurb seen by readers without clicking the read more button. Since headers make your text bigger, don’t bother with that tag.

To make use of HTML tags, if you don’t know how, just put your text in between the tags exactly as I have them above. I always bold my first sentence, then I pick words or sentences out of the rest of the blurb to bold, like references to the kinky sex, to make them jump out to the reader. I only use <em>italics</em> for the word innocent (my code for virgin). I think italics are less effective than bolds for making text stand out.

Remember, blurbs suck but are vital. Short, punch sentences. Action verbs. No passive voice. Be as sultry in describing your erotica while skirting your publisher’s (Amazon probably) censorship rules.

Click here for Part 10: KDP Select

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