Blurbs

A Fan Fiction Writer's Guide

Make sure your blurb catches your reader with the first sentence because what's shown to a reader searching for a story to read is that hook. If you notice on AFF, you see that, when you are scrolling through multiple titles, usually it'll only give you a one sentence preview of the actual blurb itself.

If you have a blurb like:

this is my first story of asian fanfics! please read i would appreciate it.

 

And you're wondering why you aren't getting much attention well, here's why:

One, you aren't writing with proper English. Your grammar may be on point, but if you do not have capital letters, it's a turn off for readers. Many want to see someone who put effort into their story. This brings me to my next reason. This doesn't hook the reader at all. It's so uninteresting and so attention seeking that people will skip over it. If you really want to reel someone into a story, you have to make that one sentence interesting.

For example:

Baekhyun is a government's secret experiment gone wrong.

I don't know about you, but I would check out a story with a line like that becaus just reading the sentence gives me so many questions like, "What was the experiment?" "What went wrong?" "What exactly was the government's ultimate goal?" "Are there others like him?" "Does the failed experiment affect Baekhyun mentally, physically, or both?"

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iexoeris
#1
Chapter 41: In chapter 41, the first sentence is grammatically incorrect. In the first sentence, the 'me' should be 'my' instead. It is a very common mistake that I see, even in popular books. I think this grammar rule will change. Also, I am in middle school too and I love EXO. PS- Rick Riordan is my favourite writer. Did you fall in love with PJO, HOO, TOA, Kane Chronicles or Magnus Chase?
tokyeoul
#2
Chapter 36: This is what I call fun in learning! This is a really good, humorous, straight-to-the-point guide (I made sure that I used correct punctuation on that sentence okay). You are way younger than me but I am just a newbie writer so this helped me a lot. I am still not finished and I am actually reading this at midnight. No surprise there haha! Anyway, thank you so so much!
BaekYeolChanBaek
#3
DUDE WE'RE THE SAME AGE
JKNewsandDavidSo #4
Chapter 55: Lol Alternate Universe if you haven't found out it the few months that you've written this chapter xD
JKNewsandDavidSo #5
Chapter 19: Wow middle school, what grade r u now? I'm in middle school too!
LeaMon
#6
I know right, when people don't capitalize properly, spell properly, has bad punctuation or use bad grammar, I immediately stop, because my eyes hurt. I became a grammar nazi, because whenever my friends and I use bad grammar or those other things, she subtracts our discipline points. Now, the things I mentioned above will just make me annoyed and somehow judge people quietly... It's pretty bad, but I can't help it.
hermion8
#7
Chapter 58: Just dropping by to say I totally agree with what you wrote. I tried to write something like this before, although unfortunately, I lost my list of commonly misused words and had to focus on college. Maybe I'll resurrect that soon...
One thing I hate the most though, aside from mid-chapter POV shifts and profiles, is when the author tries to excuse not proofreading by saying "English is not my first language." I understand that not everyone perfects grammar and all, especially one they don't use all the time, but proofreading is a way to learn, right?
I'm babbling here. Haha. I hope more people actually read things like this... There are a lot of plots with potential but... :/
dreamshade
#8
Chapter 57: I'm gonna miss this and you, too. Hope that you'll come back and give me and the others more useful tips in writing fanfic. Thank you for sharing too ^^
MissLalaMoon
#9
Chapter 28: I agree with this. It really annoys me when I see some Korean words that are simple to use in English (does that even make sense?). One time the entire sentence was in Korean and I had no idea what they were saying. I thought at the end of the chapter they we going to explain what they said, but they didn't. So I stopped reading the story, since most of the story consisted of the characters talking in Korean and I could not stand it. The only Korean word you could say that I use a lot is “yah” since it has been in my vocabulary even before I got into KPOP. I use some other ones, even though I don't like to, but sometimes when I write it English it looks weird. But I don't write full sentences, it just looks odd and I don't even know how to. I only know (and use) the simple terms such as “oppa,” “hyung,” “umma,” and etc.
Milielitre #10
Chapter 55: au stands for Alternate Universe, a story in which your characters are not what they are in real life. The opposite would be cannon, or alternate reality, a story in which your characters are still idols.