Jennifer Lane Books Blog

If you want authors to shudder with fear and revulsion, ask them to write a BLURB. What's a blurb? It's a brief summary of a story. The best blurbs hook the reader without giving away too much. We writers are a verbose bunch and it's tough for us to pack our narrative into a pithy punch. This is where critique partners and editors come in handy! What characterizes your favorite blurbs? I've been drawn to starting with a sentence or two from the first person point of view. However, I wrote the blurbs for my first two books in the Blocked series in the third person, and wanted to stay consistent for book three. I found a compromise for SPIKED (Blocked #3) by adding song lyrics to the blurb to capture the first person perspective of the hero Mateo, who's a singer / songwriter. SPIKED (Blocked #3) They say University is the time To find yourself But I don’t need to find myself Just want to find you   After watching his older siblings fi...

Have I mentioned how much I love the editing team at Omnific Publishing? Jessica Royer Ocken has taught me so much about the right way to write. Mostly I'm grateful for this knowledge. But there are times when I think I've learned too much, like when typos and grammar gaffes interfere with my enjoyment of a novel. I'll be happily reading a story with good plot and characterization but then halt, wide-eyed, with horror. Blond is an adjective, BLONDE is a female noun! A comma doesn't belong there, people! It's e ffect, not a ffect, when describing a noun. Editing know-how also drives me up a tree when friends make an error in language. I mean, really--who cares ? I'm nowhere near perfect at the spoken or written word. Yet when a colleague says something like "It's the same for her and I", I want to shout "Her and ME! It's ME, not I!" Today my psychotherapy client told me she "could care less" about something...

Why do authors complain about writing summaries of their novels for the book jacket? Because it's TOUGH. Waaaah! A good blurb captures the voice of the novel. It entices the reader without giving too much away. We're starting to edit my fourth novel On Best Behavior (The Con duct Series #3), and we need the book blurb for a press release. Here was my first effort at writing the blurb: On Best Behavior is the third and final book in The Con duct Series—romantic suspense with a psychological twist. Following a pardon by the Governor of Illinois, ex-cons Sophie Taylor and Grant Madsen are free to pursue their love. But planning a wedding is never easy, especially when the Russian Mafia want you dead. Grant fights the forces that have hurt his loved ones by working undercover for the FBI to infiltrate the Russian Mafia in Chicago. Sophie dives into swimming with Grant’s nephew Ben, and into a career as a psychology professor. This time it’s Ben’s turn to hea...