Hi there fellow wallowers,

It’s my birthday this week, spooky season is at its peak, and I already wrote a gigantic newsletter about The Way We Haunt Now this month, so I’ll keep today’s short and sweet!

This month in debut author land, I found myself reaching out to a handful of other authors to ask for early blurbs. What’s a blurb, you ask? It’s the praise you’ll find on the cover or sometimes the first few pages of a novel. Things like:

An absolutely rollicking punch in the gut. NAME’s debut novel will have you laughing and gasping and glued to the page until the very end.

–– Author Name, Award-winning Author of BOOK TITLE

Asking someone to read––and effusively praise, if possible––your novel is… anxiety-inducing and awkward and maybe a teensy bit exciting, but mostly the other things. I drew on my experience asking for academic letters of recommendation and followed a fairly simple formula:

• Greeting and personalization

• The ask

• Why I was asking them specifically (aka, why I thought they might be interested in the novel enough to read the whole thing)

• A very short description

• The timeline

• An acknowledgement that I knew they may need to say no and it would be fine if they did (“Thank you so much for considering, either way!”)

After the whole process was said and done (almost everyone said yes!) I stumbled across Gabino Iglèsias’s “Asking for blurbs is weird,” which is an excellent guide to blurb requesting, should you need it.

Receiving blurbs, it turns out, is also weird––in the best way. Various friends have read and critiqued various versions of the story, but this is the first time I’m getting a sense of how people react to HIGHER MAGIC as a book that will be out in the world next year. Seeing it, however briefly, through their eyes is such an unexpected gift.

October Recommendations

• I read an ARC of C.J. Dotson’s The Cut recently and described it as The Shining X Rosemary’s Baby with a modern sensibility and fantastically squicky monsters. It’s out next April and you can pre-order here!

• I’ve been on a little bit of a murder mystery kick, lately, and I found Benjamin Stevenson’s Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone (and the sequel) absolutely delightful. For fans of golden age mysteries and narrators who irreverently break the fourth wall.

• Speaking of mysteries! Chris and Jen Sugden’s High Vaultage is out in the US this week. It’s set in an alternate version of 1850s London and follows Archibald Fleet and Clara Entwhistle, Even Greater London’s first private investigators on their first official case.

• I have been super into Geo Rutherford’s haunted hydrology series on Instagram this month. Apparently October is spooky lake month, who knew?

• There’s a new interview with the inimitable R.L. Stine on V.E. Schwab’s No Write Way podcast and I loved every minute of it.

Thanks for wallowing with me!

Courtney