Bonus BPB 4: Jacket Copy Cheats and Hacks

<p>Kids, this is a Blueprint for a Book Summer Challenge Bonus Episode. I’ll be dropping these weekly throughout the Summer 2022 Challenge. Some of you are already signed up and challenging away, turning in weekly assignments and pushing yourself to get this done.</p><p>Some of you are #AmWriting supporters who’ve put your $$$ where your <3 is (that’s an old school pre-emoji keyboard heart, in case you’re wondering). We appreciate you—and so you’re getting these bonus episodes too. </p><p>This is a longish episode in the hopes of offering you some shortcuts to writing a short thing—that often feels super-hard.</p><p>Here’s my shortcut to a starter sentence for your logline for fiction/biography or narrative nonfiction (read on for memoir and prescriptive non-fic): </p><p><em>On the verge of/About to/Just after/Just before CURRENT LIFE, a NOUN who HAS A PROBLEM discovers/is drawn into/some other action THE INCITING INCIDENT/PLOT PROBLEM and STAKES, but when TWIST, s/h/the/y must SOLVE INTERNAL PROBLEM to SOLVE PLOT PROBLEM.</em></p><p>Here’s my current one. I can transform this into jacket copy by adding some proper names and sparking it up—but starting with a terrible run-on sentence like this can be really helpful.</p><p><em>On the verge of losing a chance to start over in the small town she loves, a woman who believes her flaky mother destroyed her life by depending on fortune-telling and magic discovers that cookies with the images of the family heirloom Tarot cards she stole long ago have the ability to change her life and the lives of others, but when her attempts to control the cards play right into the hand of a witch more powerful than she’d ever imagined, she must recognize that true power lies in letting those you love make their own choices in order to save her daughter from sacrificing herself to a destiny that might not be her own.</em></p><p>For memoir, it’s similar but a little different. </p><p><em>On the verge of/About to/Just after/Just before/description of where author started, AUTHOR AND WHY