In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. There are also elements of do I really have to do this shit. In writing, at least in writing for publication, every published or aspiring to be published author I've ever talked to has said in one form or another that the shit parts of being a writer are the promotional copy. Except the ones who are lucky enough to have people to do it for them.
The good news is, there's a certain pattern to the promotional copy you need to write. If you're trying to sell it to agents and publishers, generally they'll want something that's either one or three pages. If it's one page, they'll want a summary, if it's three pages, an outline. These are all different terms for the same basic thing, what is your story from beginning to middle to end. Including any twists you might have at the ending, because you're trying to sell them on the whole of your story, not induce them to read what's on the next page. Regardless of what the agency or publishing company wants, you're going to have to write a cover/query letter, so you're going to need to distill your work down to one to three sentences. This may or may not have a closed ending, and I'd actually recommend writing several different versions of it if your work is big enough that you can vary it that much. The odds of you having to write over five different query letters are pretty high, if your courage holds out. Finally, you'll also want a couple paragraph synopsis from beginning to middle to end as well, in case your submission requirements permit a longer query letter, or in case you want to vary your one page summary some.
That's your selling to agents copy, but there's also a school of thought that says you might want to self-publish someday, so you might want to write some promotional copy. As the room lets out a collective groan, yeah, I hate promotional copy too. I hate selling myself in text, I can write fiction till my wrists go numb and my hands fall off, but ask me to write promotional copy for my own work and I will do laundry or empty the catbox before I sit down to do it. I will cut raw cold slimy chicken, that's how much I hate it. But it's a good thing to have. Once again, there will be places (Twitter comes to mind immediately) where you'll need to summarize your work in the shortest terms possible, so figure this out first, because it's hard. Not only do you need to summarize, you need to do it in a way that will make people want to click and see what it's all about. Write several variations, then run them by your circle of first readers (you do have one by now, don't you?) to see which ones are accurate, which ones are most interesting. Hopefully the two will be the same, one thing you do not want to do is alienate potential readers by promising them one thing and handing them another. You want to have several kinds of accuracy: tone, factual, focus. Bait and switch very rarely works, so my best general advice to you is don't. You can put up these short blurbs on Twitter, on Nanowrimo, on your social media profiles preceded by "Author of [Your Title Here], [blurb]."
Next you'll tackle the longer blurbs. You'll need a back of the book style blurb, maybe a paragraph of plot that trails off before you reveal the ending and with the goal of inducing the person to want more, and then you'll want another few sentences summarizing the mood and setting. This will go either on the back of the book, in any flyers or postcards you might be passing out. Some publishing companies want you to submit them a back-of-the-book style summary in addition to your summary, they want you to sell them on the book. You might also put it at the closing of guest posts on blogs, "Author is currently writing [blurbspiel]" or hand it out for other authors to put on their blogs following a review "the book is [blurb]". If you're very lucky, you might be able to construct a book trailer using this type of blurb as a script. Fortunately, this is where this type of promotional copy stops, because promotional copy meant to be seen by potential readers rarely gets longer than that, and only in specific circumstances. Still, you should have a back-of-book length blurb, and, again, at least two variations. If you don't know how long to make it or how it works, look on the back of books similar to yours, see how it's structured. Then apply it to your own work.
That's the what, now for the tricky parts, the how and the when. Personally, I hate doing this like poison, so I get it over with as soon as possible. This means after I have the detailed outline of the work, because I'm a planner, and at the latest after I've started the novel and am still in the wild and crazy beginning, when I'm brimming with enthusiasm for the project. This gives me the momentum of new-project glee as well as the structure of having that outline, therefore knowing what the book is going to be. I cannot protest strongly enough against writing a book blurb based on that idea you have. When you outline it in detail, your chances of it becoming a workable idea in the same form as the inspiration drop drastically. Once you have an outline, you have a structure, and your chances are much better that the finished product will resemble your promotional and query copy. And if it doesn't by the time you have a first draft, you can go back and edit that copy while you make your first round of edits. Because you wouldn't send an unedited manuscript to a publishing house or agency, would you?
That's for planners. For panters, as Nanowrimo calls them, I'm afraid there may be nothing for it but to write the copy after you've written the first draft. But do it immediately, straight out of that first flush of holy crap I did it all and, again, for the momentum. The advantage this gives you is that you can see what shape your work takes, and your chances of your copy text matching the final work are about the highest they're going to be. So write the copy down, and then go back into edits flush from the success of having done all that tedious shit already!
Right now, I'm working on a project called Black Ice. It's less of a novel and more of an anthology or, as I heard Mike Stackpole once call it, a braided novel. You may have seen me bitching about it on Twitter in various places. And it's something I'm self-publishing, so unless I have the money to hire someone more interested to write the promotional copy for me (hint: I don't) I have to write all the damn promotional copy myself. I still hate it more than cutting up cold slimy chicken. But in my folder of documents for Black Ice I have a file called "Black Ice Outline and Support Docs," and in that file on each page for however many pages it goes on is my chapter/story outline, an editing checklist of how far into it I've gotten, and my support docs. In this case, it's almost all promotional copy because I haven't tried selling this to an agency or publishing company, since it's not a traditional book model. So I have a one-sentence summary of Black Ice, a few sentence summary, a back of the book blurb, and eventually I'll fill it up with copy for the rest of the more idiosyncratic promotional type things I end up doing. The sequel project to Black Ice, called White Lightning, doesn't even have a full, finished rough draft yet (the bulk of it does, and I have the outline, but not the revised first draft), but it already has a "White Lightning Outline and Support Docs" file that consists of mostly outline right now. Thus do I remind myself that there are shit tasks ahead.
If you are one of the people who enjoys and can easily write promotional or query copy, I bow before you because you are a better person than I am. If you're like the rest of us, well, scutwork comes with every job, and there's not much to do but accept it and slog through the mud till we can get to the really fun stuff. Like editing. Oh joy.
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