This is the resources page to accompany my book Blurbs & Book Descriptions (2025)
This one doesn’t fit under any of the headings below so I’ll just include it here – The Comic Book Sound Effect Database contains over 2,900 onomatopoeic words along with some great examples of comic book art featuring them
Images & Bibliography Not in the Audio Version
Sales funnel image from Chapter 4
Screengrab from Microsoft Word showing Readability Statistics from Chapter 6
Here is the bibliography from Blurbs & Book Descriptions (2025)
Cheat Sheets
List of Values – Appendix 4 from Character Creation
List of Emotions – Appendix 2 from Character Creation
This is a list that I refer to in the book — it is taken from Part 3 of Spinoza’s Ethics with modern dictionary definitions added by me. I’ve included it as a PDF here in case you want to use it for inspiration.
Example of a Review Request
How to Write Fiction Book Blurbs
Lewis Jorstad (May 2021) has ‘A Handy Formula for Writing the Perfect Book Blurb‘ over on The Novel Smithy
Ricardo Fayet (May 2023) has written ‘How to Write a Book Blurb (+ Free Template)‘ over on the Reedsy blog.
Editor Alyssa Matesic has a post and a YouTube video titled ‘Writing a Blurb for a Novel: Dos and Don’ts‘
Awais Khan wrote ‘How To Write A Blurb That Intrigues Your Readers‘ for the Jericho Writers site
Dave Chesson’s May 2022 post on Kindlepreneur ‘Keywords in Your Book Description: Do They Help?‘ tackles a topic I didn’t write about – definitely worth a look
Derek Murphy has a couple of useful articles over on Creativindie – the second one has links to a couple of tools you might want to try out…
‘How to Write a Blurb that Hooks Readers and Converts to Book Sales‘
‘How to Write a Blurb, Pitch or Synopsis for Your Novel or Book‘
Open Loops
Dickie Bush & Nicolas Cole over on the Ship 30 for 30 website have ‘85 Open Loop Methods To Hook Your Reader And Keep Their Attention‘ for copywriters
Magic Words
Kristen McCormick (April 2025) offers ‘120 of the Best Words and Phrases for Marketing with Emotion‘
Headlines & Subject Lines
There is debate over how long a headline should be. Here is Andrew W. Morgan’s blog post ‘The Ideal Length of a Headline‘ from December 2016
Alice Truong wrote a post titled ‘These Are the Words People Can’t Resist in a Headline‘ (July 2015) for the Quartz website.
MailChimp has some advice here: ‘How to Write Catchy Email Subject Lines‘ and MailerLite also has an article on the same subject: ‘How to Write the Best eMail Subject Lines and Boost Engagement.’
Jennifer Butler Keeton’s December 2024 article on OptinMonster offers ‘90 Game-Changing Headline Examples to Boost Your Click-Through Rate!‘ and Céillie Clark-Keane (April 2025) says ‘These 88 Headline Examples Are Total Click Magnets‘
Taglines
IMDb has pages containing the various taglines that have been given to a movie. Here is an example for the 1975 movie Jaws.
Movie Trailers – Links to Resources
Here’s the link to Alex Zarfati’s YouTube video ‘How to Make a Film Trailer: Concept, Editing & Sound Design‘ that I mention in Chapter 9 of the book. There is a lot of great content on his channel for filmmakers.
There are two good videos on the Vanity Fair channel on YouTube:
How Movie Trailers are Created
Movie Trailer Expert Breaks Down 5 Trailer Styles
Writing Query Letters
Jane Friedman’s article ‘The Complete Guide to Query Letters‘ covers submission letters for novels – it contains a link to her article on writing a query letter for a non-fiction book
Marketing for Introverts
Lindsay Pietroluongo offers ‘A Simple Guide to Marketing for Introverts‘ (March 2023) on the Elegant Themes website.
Additional Blurb Dissections
In Chapter 8 of the book I take apart some of the blurbs I’ve written for my novels in various genres. The link below will take you to a page with more of the same.
PAUL TOMLINSON 
