Blurb
Louise Willder, author of Blurb Your Enthusiasm
Episode 1.
Our first ever guest is author and copywriter Louise Willder, and we are talking about blurbs – those little snippets of promotional text on the covers of books.
Louise has been a copywriter at Penguin for more than 25 years and estimates she has written around 5,000 blurbs. She is the author of Blurb Your Enthusiasm: An A-Z of Literary Persuasion, which details her experiences as a copywriter.
We discuss the rules of writing blurbs, troublesome authors, revisiting Lolita, Lace by Shirley Conran and much more. This episode will particularly appeal to anyone in the copywriting business as we also discuss the best first lines in literature and memorable movie taglines, including Alien’s “In space no-one can hear your scream.”
Many thanks to Louise Willder for agreeing to be interviewed for a podcast that didn’t yet exist.
Numerous books are mentioned, including:
Blurb Your Enthusiasm by Louise Willder
Lace by Shirley Conran
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Couples by John Updike
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany by Bill Buford
Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh
Overdue: Reckoning With the Public Library by Amanda Oliver
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann