Guidance on making a FanFare book post for the first time

July 23, 2019 2:09 PM

I want to make my first book post! And I'm curious where people get the little blurbs? Are you writing them yourself, copying them from the book jacket, or something else? Thanks!
posted by overglow (10 comments total)

Something will automatically pull in when you put in the title/isbn, but oftentimes this will have a lot of AWARD WINNER! stuff at the beginning and that can put people off. You can always delete the overenthusiastic part and go with what's left, or go to goodreads and copy a summary from there.
posted by dinty_moore at 2:18 PM on July 23, 2019 [2 favorites]

By go to goodreads, I mean copy the publisher's summary/back of the book blurb from there, not like, copy a random reviewers summary of the book. Which would feel kind of weird.
posted by dinty_moore at 2:20 PM on July 23, 2019

I go to amazon and select either the summary there, or read through the reviews/blurbs from official sources (publisher's weekly etc.) and use one of those. Depends on what I think describes the book best and/or will be most helpful to someone trying to decide whether to read it. (Sometimes the publisher's blurb will be hot garbage but the whatever that library journal is that helps librarians decide whether to buy it is succinct and clear and helpful.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 2:56 PM on July 23, 2019

For this one, I just used the auto-populating blurb, because it wasn't bad. (And, confession: I haven't finished the book yet.)

For this one, I think the part in quotes was from the auto-populating blurb, and then there was a bunch of reviews and such, so I deleted them and added the rest.

For this one, the auto-populating blurb was hot garbage, so I wrote it myself.

For this one, I used the blurb, but I think I cut out some reviews and quotes.
posted by Etrigan at 8:01 AM on July 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

I use the blurb from amazon or goodreads and then I post my take on the book in the first comment. But that's just my style, and you can be different!
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 10:42 AM on July 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

I actually really like it when posters use their own descriptions rather than blurbs from elsewhere. Sometimes because those blurbs are weird, misleading, or generic; sometimes because it's not clear if the description is a blurb or the poster's own, and I'd rather know; and mostly because they're often marketing material and I feel like I have enough marketing material in my life.

Mileages vary on this though! (And it's not like I've made any posts so take this for what it's worth.)
posted by trig at 6:26 AM on July 26, 2019 [1 favorite]

I usually rewrite the blurb to try to get more at what I think is important about the thing and to remove blurb-speak. Also I try to work in a more MetaFiltery POV. I recently posted a Neal Stephenson book -- we know who Neal Stephenson is, I can just say that and get it over with.

Sometimes I end up pretty far from the original blurb.

The FanFare post I'm most proud of was for Murder Party because someone said it got them to watch the film. Sold! I'm also proud of the Aubrey/Maturin posts, though I was hoping they'd piss some people off and spark a MeTa, or a FaFaTa I guess.
posted by fleacircus at 3:52 AM on July 29, 2019

I usually write something short myself.
posted by mordax at 11:04 AM on August 5, 2019

(Nothing wrong with copying a blurb though! There's a lot of good ways to do this.)
posted by mordax at 11:05 AM on August 5, 2019

Echoing others, I've done a mix of things, including editing promotional blurbs to remove what I think might spoil elements of the story, and I've included links to excerpts and/or interviews with the author to round things out (and because I tend to add more than less :) ).

And I see you've made your first post -- looks good, and I'm intrigued in the book, so a success on that front, too! :)
posted by filthy light thief at 7:12 AM on August 7, 2019