Worst. Blurbs. Ever.

[elf]

I love me some Smashwords. You know that, right? I'm strongly in favor of self-publishing, of non-DRM'd ebooks, of pricing flexibility, of wide distribution of artistic efforts in general. I'm not too fond of the Meatgrinder it uses to format the books--there's problems with any instruction manual that says "if you have X problem, you can probably fix it by doing Y, but if that doesn't work, scratch everything and start over and you should be okay." But I love the Smashwords business model, and its promotion of self-publication as a viable creative and business outlet.

But sometimes... I'm just baffled at how much LACK OF PROOFREADING goes into things. I'm not even talking about the books themselves. I have a rule: if the promo blurb makes me wince, or jars me with bad phrasing or lack of punctuation, I don't even consider getting the book, no matter how fascinating the plot sounds. If the author can't be bothered to get their basic ad copy coherent, I don't trust their editing skills either.

Excerpts from Smashwords blurbs
No links. No names. No un-seeing; sorry about that.

The mountains of rural Georgia will never be the same after a series of viscous murders rock the area to its core.

What, the viscosity of the murders sinks into the mountain core?

Krystyne discovers she's a witch-a powerful witch. Jodi wants something only her ability can render. Sorcery + blood & Hecate is roused into action.The curtain to hell is open.With all his power he can't prevent Ba'Gatz from crossing over. Sanaphae is near by she's a succubus thirsty for sentience-of the most erotic kind=double trouble! Jade's twisted dreams portend all.

Six characters in less than sixty words! Run-on sentences! Punctuation that should be spelled out! Fragments! Incoherent transitions! Don't bother with the book itself; the teaser is enough to push any good English teacher into therapy sessions.

Chris Deacon: a man who survived the horror of a bomb attack only to learn he has been robbed of the ability to speak. A man plagued by strange phantoms; a man who hears Voices in his head. You can't escape what is in your head.

Nothing says "buy this book" like random 2nd person point-of-view sentences. Bonus points for the sentence fragment with the capitalized word in the middle.

In the Abduction of Mary Rose by Canada's master of suspense Joan Hall Hovey published by Books We Love, following the death of the woman she believed to be her mother, 28-year-old Naomi Waters learns from a malicious aunt that she is not only adopted, but the product of a brutal rape that left her birth mother, Mary Rose Francis, a teenager of Micmac ancestry, in a coma for 8 months.

Okay, so names and titles are in this one, but I couldn't cut them out... that's all one sentence. 71 words (73 if you count the hyphenated words as 3) of info-dump is more likely to exhaust readers than intrigue them.

Cooking columnist meets her match in the Florida Keys, as she battles a crazed killer along with a raging hurricane.

Ooh, I just hate it when killers team up with hurricanes! That two-on-one action is just not fair!

...And now the bad news. Those were all from the Thriller/Suspense category, all novels, which I found by sorting by "most downloads." (Some were several pages in.) That means they were *popular.* Now I'm gonna show you the ones that aren't necessarily popular.

A fable about lost identity, the American Dream... and death. The desperate narrative written by a man locked inside the labyrinth of his own mind... A fast-paced descent of the slippery slopes of morality into the inescapable Abyss...

A literary novella... with lots of pauses... to make it seem longer... so you can enjoy it more.

This volume includes letters to Original Energy, Imhotep, Harriet Tubman, and Dr. Phil Valentine.

"And I'm selling them to you because the postage to send letters to most of them is, like, astronomical. Or astrological."

Soon, teammates, opponents, the media, the cynics turn on him. Is Homer for real? You don't have to be a baseball fan to enjoy this page-turning novel of an American hero.

Fourth wall? What fourth wall?

We all have personal demons. Am I insane? I need to fuck. What is wrong with me? I need to fuck. Am I the only person on the planet feeling this way? I need to fuck. I cannot control this demon inside me. I need to fuck.

TMI, dude, TMI. Get a damn blog. And a Fleshlight.

Sandra Ashton is a witch who suddenly finds herself dating three vampires. So, what do you do when you’ve got three immortal beings professing their undying or is that undead love for you?

I hire an editor who knows when 2nd person POV is useful and when it's distracting.

The Gypsy. An Airship traveling around Europe with five belly dancers onboard, that also happened to spy for Queen Victoria. They are Lady C, Lilly, Gertie, Penny, and Sera.

The airship spied for Queen Victoria?

The boy had to keep running, had to find a way out of the nightmarish building that had entrapped him for years now, but then he found someone, someone who could use his help in the fight for her life, and maybe, just maybe, help him in the fight for his freedom.

Keep running! Run some more! Run that sentence ON and ON and ON!

It is said that one night they set up camp in the mountains after a stage coach robbery and as they were counting the stolen money around the campfire they were ambushed by another gang of outlaws known as the Smith and Wesson brothers.

WARNING: Author soaks keyboard with comma repellant.

In the year 2057, in a post-apocalyptic world where three quarters of the population has been wiped out by a global pandemic, and a polar shift threatens the remainder of earth’s inhabitants, sixteen-year-old genetically altered teen, Lily Carmichael, faces bigger challenges—escape capture by a rogue government agency, save her family, and avoid falling in love.

It's okay; I think I found where they wandered off to.

Guardians of the Throne Part III, picks up where the last book left off. After William and Isabel are seperated from Owen; they try to find their way back to each other as they continue to face danger.

Er, nice try? "Hey look, I found the dangly-bits keys?"

Now that Ana can see, her summer has taken on a new direction. Instead of shopping and going to the beach with friends, she has to register with the Seer’s Council.

Such a clever twist on words! That won't confuse or annoy readers at all--using a common verb for a special talent requiring registration with a council!

It gets worse. I've been avoiding fantasy and science fiction, because "Unpronounceable the Alien and his Robot Dog Spot" (or the fantasy equiv, Unpronounceable the Fae Warrior and his Soul-Steed, Iggy) are annoyingly common. But I figure that, since I do browse those genres sometimes, I might as well share the pain.

Betrayed by her best friend and banished to the unforgiving Desert of Bones, fifteen-year-old Sanyel is shocked to learn that the human-sacrificing Spood have crossed the desert to enslave her tribe. With the help of recently acquired friends Javen, Brilna, and the remarkable one-armed Izzy, Sanyel will undertake a perilous mission to the heart of the Spood Empire to rescue her friend.

Spood. Empire. At what point, in an author's budding career, does he say to himself, "I shall name my race of antagonists 'the Spood,' and grant them an empire?"

The Earth is dying after an unspecified disaster. The land is cold and barren, hostile to the life it once nourished.

Well, that's one way to avoid the "Spood" problem: just don't mention what caused the problems your protagonists have to face.

Dubya's Apocalypse is the eleventh revision of my Pazuzu Trilogy. The most distinguished feature of this revision is I've placed the story in Post-Apocalyptic America. I've given contemporary Republicans their dream – and consequently, all good has abandoned the planet. This is the world they're left with. I've also changed the names of the original characters into those of popular, public figures.

At least it's free. Anyone want to read a quarter-million words of political ranting thinly disguised as science fiction?

A journey to another world for a small reason, could mean the difference between life and death. These four men will face more then they would've ever wished to bargain for. Will they live to see another day, or die trying?

I see we're improving from the "unspecified disaster." At least this one has reasons. Or, "a small reason." Why *else* would you journey to another world?

The book you are about to read consists of all the Dancing with Darwin stories and novella's. What kind of world would it be if everyone had a Mental Disorder? What if there were no people who were Sane?

Aaaaaand I'm done now. No, I'm not looking at the sample (6% of 46k words... my, he has a low opinion of his writing, to think that giving out 15% samples would spoil his profitability) to find out just how much ablism is actually in the story (stories; 3 "novella's"). An author who thinks sanity and mental disorders are such EXOTIC concepts that they need to be capitalized... no, wait, he's positing a world in which "mental disorders" (no idea what he means by that) are universal. We don't usually capitalize universal traits.

Note to aspiring authors: Have someone non-sympathetic, like a random co-worker, read your blurb. If they frown at it, you did it wrong. If they laugh, and your story is not supposed to be funny, you did it wrong. If they say, "I think that comma belongs over here instead... you did it wrong. Even if the comma is in the right place. If what they noticed was the comma, and not the Compelling Tale Which They Should Immediately Want To Read, your blurb is not what it should be. Fix it.

Comments

[isis]

The cooking columnist one, if deliberate, is funny, and I'd read it. But yeah, oog on all the others.

[elf]

The cooking columnist is an adventure-thriller novel. It's supposed to be tense and adrenaline-inducing, not funny.

[montanaharper]

There's a difference between actual second-person PoV and choosing "you" over "one" when it comes to indefinite pronouns.

[elf]

There is, but doing it in a single-paragraph blurb, with no extra context to make the tone allow for that kind of informality, is disorienting. It comes across as sloppy, not friendly.

If the whole blurb were in 2nd person, that'd make more sense. I've seen a few of those, mostly, on pretentious philosophical nonfic. But the standard 3rd-person-universal used for ad copy slamming into the informal "generic you" grates on me.

[tameiki]

Oh my... *hold sides, doubles over laughing*

Thanks, I really needed this after the day I had at work. Most of these were truly cringe-worthy but funny as hell! I especially loved your comments and opinions. :)

[rebecca2525]

Thanks to the first one, I'm now imagining murderous blobs of gel.

And the ... fable about lost identity ... needs to be read ... by William Shatner. :D

[everbright]

This, along with the fact that's impossible to navigate into the depths of the site, is what has kept me from really 'getting' smashwords. Man, I know there has to be some jewels buried in there, but I just do not have to spoons.