The three moves

The hook: one sentence that puts something at risk. Not the setting, not the world's history — the risk.

The stakes: what will be lost, and who will lose it. Name the character, name the cost.

The promise: the shape of the experience your genre's readers came for, without spoiling how it is delivered.

What to cut, always

Cut the prologue's worth of world-building. Cut every proper noun a stranger cannot place. Cut adjectives doing the work verbs should do. Cut the second paragraph of setup entirely and see whether anything was lost.

The blurb is also a script

Read it aloud. A blurb that reads well aloud becomes the spine of your trailer, your audiogram and your film book's opening — the same twenty seconds working in three places.

That is how this house builds: the words that sell the book and the words that open the film are the same words.

Asked and answered

How long should a blurb be?

100 to 200 words for most fiction. Shorter almost always outperforms longer on a storefront page.

Should the blurb spoil the twist?

Never. Promise the shape of the experience; withhold its mechanism.