Veronica Scott's Blog, page 51
May 22, 2020
Slide Off the Table Weekend Writing Warriors
Now taking excerpts from LANDON: A BADARI WARRIORS SCIFI ROMANCE NOVEL.
Here’s the link to the Weekend Writing Warriors central page, so you can visit all the participants sharing excerpts today…a fun way to sample new books and find new authors! (Also welcome to the Sunday Snippet visitors!)
Punctuation may be wonky to comply with our guidelines here. May be edited a bit from published version.
If you haven’t read any of my Badari Warriors series: Genetically engineered soldiers of the far futu...
Celebrating Mothers in #SciFi Romance – Part One
This post first appeared in the Roswell Daily Record…
When I think of the month of May, I invariably think of mothers and flowers. Not necessarily linked, although as a mother myself, I never say no to some pretty blooms. Science-fiction romance has a plethora of heroines who are also mothers and I thought this was the perfect topic for my May column. I went to the trusty Science Fiction Romance Brigade (SFRB) group on Facebook and asked the 1,400 or so members to recommend books with mother fig...
May 20, 2020
New Releases in #SciFi #Fantasy and Paranormal Romance for Wednesday MAY 20
As always, I recommend sampling before you buy! I have not read most of the new releases listed (although I always end up one-clicking a bunch as I prepare these posts L
OL).
*************************************************
SAVAGE (BARBARIANS OF THE SAND PLANET BOOK 5) by Tana Stone
Waking up with a gorgeous alien barbarian and discovering he’d kidnapped her was bad enough. But she’s also trapped in the middle of a desert where no one can find her. The cherry on top? No matter how much Caro prot...
May 16, 2020
Crack Wide Open Weekend Writing Warriors
Now taking excerpts from LANDON: A BADARI WARRIORS SCIFI ROMANCE NOVEL.
Here’s the link to the Weekend Writing Warriors central page, so you can visit all the participants sharing excerpts today…a fun way to sample new books and find new authors! (Also welcome to the Sunday Snippet visitors!)
Punctuation may be wonky to comply with our guidelines here. May be edited a bit from published version.
If you haven’t read any of my Badari Warriors series: Genetically engineered soldiers of the far futu...
May 15, 2020
Veronica Does A Quiz or Two
DepositPhoto
As my longtime readers know, I love doing quizzes, which for me are actually fun interview questions some magazine or blog gave to a celebrity, and then I do my own take on the Q&A. Today I’m combining a few questions from a recent People magazine interview with Liam Hemsworth and some from an interview my friend Cara Bristol sent me that BookBub did with James Patterson. (Because Cara knows how much I enjoy doing these things – thanks, Cara!)
Last time I sang out loud: Yesterday in...
May 13, 2020
New Releases in #SciFi #Fantasy and Paranormal Romance for Wednesday MAY 13
As always, I recommend sampling before you buy! I have not read most of the new releases listed (although I always end up one-clicking a bunch as I prepare these posts L
OL).
**************************************************
THE MAGNIFICENT CYBORG (CYBORGS ON MARS BOOK 4) by Honey Phillips
W-246 is one of the last cyborgs sent to Mars to work on the terraforming project. While he doesn’t remember how he became a cyborg, he has accepted his new role as a territorial judge. Until he encounters Che...
May 9, 2020
In Need of Transport Weekend Writing Warriors
Now taking excerpts from LANDON: A BADARI WARRIORS SCIFI ROMANCE NOVEL.
Here’s the link to the Weekend Writing Warriors central page, so you can visit all the participants sharing excerpts today…a fun way to sample new books and find new authors! (Also welcome to the Sunday Snippet visitors!)
Punctuation may be wonky to comply with our guidelines here. May be edited a bit from published version.
If you haven’t read any of my Badari Warriors series: Genetically engineered soldiers of the far futu...
October 28, 2019
Why I Wrote WINTER SOLSTICE DREAM
This fantasy holiday romance novella was one of those rare books that actually wrote itself, which is always such a gift from the Muse. I type as fast as I can and hope to get all the words transferred from my mind to the page without losing anything.
There were quite a few factors that went into Winter Solstice Dream, one being I’ve always wanted to write a holiday romance (Regency romances set at Christmas are catnip to me) but since I write scifi romance for the most part, and ancient Egyptian paranormal romances, I didn’t see how I was going to manage that. (Although I did once write a short story about Thanksgiving being celebrated on my luxury interstellar cruise liner, which can be found in the STAR CRUISE STOWAWAY collection of my shorter works. That was a fun challenge!)
A few years ago I published my first book in a projected fantasy romance world I developed, The Captive Shifter and it recently occurred to me I could tell a perfectly good holiday story set in this time and place. I’ve always been planning to write sequels and connected stories for that world, known as Claddare. So I needed to adjust my thinking from a holiday we celebrate to creating a holiday the people in Claddare might enjoy in midwinter.
In creating this alternate world originally, I was partially inspired by Andre Norton’s Witch World series, loving the way she mixed magic and mysteries. My all-time favorite of hers in this vein was Year of the Unicorn and not that I’ll ever write at her level, but I was going for something of the feel of those stories (not the almost science fiction territory the first few in the Witch World series had).
I was also inspired by the classic movie “Ladyhawke” (who isn’t, if you love fantasy?), although my world is entirely fictional, not tied to anything in the actual Earthly Middle Ages. Halvor’s horse in this novella owes a lot to the wonderful steed in Ladyhawke.
And of course “Lord of the Rings”, the movie trilogy more than the actual novels, influenced me.
I love reading great fantasy series, like Jeffe Kennedy’s Twelve Kingdoms books and Grace Draven’s Radiance (Wraith Kings) among others but I’m not up to writing such complex and sweeping novels right now. If ever! So I concentrate on the smaller, standalone stories for Claddare, although I do have a big plot arc in mind for Claddare that I’m working within. Speaking only for myself, I think a writer’s skills grow over time – I’ve moved from writing standalones to also writing my Badari Warriors series with an overarching arc, which was something I never expected when I first was published – which adds to the fun. So I’m confident Claddare will grow into many more books. As always, my problem is never having enough time to write All The Things.
I always enjoy having magic as a plot element and there’s quite a bit here in the new novella, one way and another. We don’t see too much from the Witches of Azrimar themselves this time but Nadelma, my heroine, has her own powers of a completely different sort. I’ve also always been intrigued by desserts containing charms or favors and found a good way to work the concept into this story on a grand scale. But after all, Nadelma is baking a cake for the hundreds who’ll attend the Solstice Night Ball.
Nadelma appeared briefly in The Captive Shifter, but both books stand alone. I felt that she, as the Head Cook in the Witch Queen’s palace, would be an interesting character to learn more about. I loved the idea of making this a Cinderella type tale, complete with those sparkly shoes, although they aren’t key to the Happy Ever After ending. I had to have them in the story though! Readers have asked me for more about Nadelma so it felt good to finally oblige.
The other thing was that the timing was good because we just released Pets in Space® 4, with my novel STAR CRUISE: IDOL’S CURSE included, on October 8th and I didn’t want to ‘compete’ with myself and with PETS by releasing another scifi romance in the same time frame. I’d just released a new novel in my ancient Egyptian series, Return of the Dancer of the Nile, so I realized I had a window to write a new Claddare story without having to feel I was stealing time away from my SFR series.
There were quite a few factors that went into Winter Solstice Dream, one being I’ve always wanted to write a holiday romance (Regency romances set at Christmas are catnip to me) but since I write scifi romance for the most part, and ancient Egyptian paranormal romances, I didn’t see how I was going to manage that. (Although I did once write a short story about Thanksgiving being celebrated on my luxury interstellar cruise liner, which can be found in the STAR CRUISE STOWAWAY collection of my shorter works. That was a fun challenge!)
A few years ago I published my first book in a projected fantasy romance world I developed, The Captive Shifter and it recently occurred to me I could tell a perfectly good holiday story set in this time and place. I’ve always been planning to write sequels and connected stories for that world, known as Claddare. So I needed to adjust my thinking from a holiday we celebrate to creating a holiday the people in Claddare might enjoy in midwinter.
In creating this alternate world originally, I was partially inspired by Andre Norton’s Witch World series, loving the way she mixed magic and mysteries. My all-time favorite of hers in this vein was Year of the Unicorn and not that I’ll ever write at her level, but I was going for something of the feel of those stories (not the almost science fiction territory the first few in the Witch World series had).
I was also inspired by the classic movie “Ladyhawke” (who isn’t, if you love fantasy?), although my world is entirely fictional, not tied to anything in the actual Earthly Middle Ages. Halvor’s horse in this novella owes a lot to the wonderful steed in Ladyhawke.
And of course “Lord of the Rings”, the movie trilogy more than the actual novels, influenced me.
I love reading great fantasy series, like Jeffe Kennedy’s Twelve Kingdoms books and Grace Draven’s Radiance (Wraith Kings) among others but I’m not up to writing such complex and sweeping novels right now. If ever! So I concentrate on the smaller, standalone stories for Claddare, although I do have a big plot arc in mind for Claddare that I’m working within. Speaking only for myself, I think a writer’s skills grow over time – I’ve moved from writing standalones to also writing my Badari Warriors series with an overarching arc, which was something I never expected when I first was published – which adds to the fun. So I’m confident Claddare will grow into many more books. As always, my problem is never having enough time to write All The Things.
I always enjoy having magic as a plot element and there’s quite a bit here in the new novella, one way and another. We don’t see too much from the Witches of Azrimar themselves this time but Nadelma, my heroine, has her own powers of a completely different sort. I’ve also always been intrigued by desserts containing charms or favors and found a good way to work the concept into this story on a grand scale. But after all, Nadelma is baking a cake for the hundreds who’ll attend the Solstice Night Ball.
Nadelma appeared briefly in The Captive Shifter, but both books stand alone. I felt that she, as the Head Cook in the Witch Queen’s palace, would be an interesting character to learn more about. I loved the idea of making this a Cinderella type tale, complete with those sparkly shoes, although they aren’t key to the Happy Ever After ending. I had to have them in the story though! Readers have asked me for more about Nadelma so it felt good to finally oblige.
The other thing was that the timing was good because we just released Pets in Space® 4, with my novel STAR CRUISE: IDOL’S CURSE included, on October 8th and I didn’t want to ‘compete’ with myself and with PETS by releasing another scifi romance in the same time frame. I’d just released a new novel in my ancient Egyptian series, Return of the Dancer of the Nile, so I realized I had a window to write a new Claddare story without having to feel I was stealing time away from my SFR series.
October 19, 2019
Why I Wrote STAR CRUISE IDOL'S CURSE
This past week or so since we released the Pets In Space® 4 anthology has been a whirlwind and yesterday we hit the USA Today Best Seller’s list! I’m beaming and sending thanks to all our readers and everyone who supported the book and spread the word. I’m happy for the charity we support too, Hero Dogs, Inc.
We’ve had some wonderful, fun reviews too!
The events in STAR CRUISE: IDOL’S CURSE, my story in this year’s anthology, take place on my interstellar luxury cruise liner, the Nebula Zephyr. I always have so much fun revisiting my ship and having new adventures there.
Usually I start with the concept of the pet for my PISA stories and develop the plot from what the animal ‘suggests’ to me but this time my jumping off place was legends about bad luck hitting tourists who steal rocks from certain locales.
I’ve always been fascinated by these myths and the tales of bad luck people believe they incur if they ‘steal’ a rock from a certain place. (And when I was researching this topic, I discovered there are various tourist spots where this belief flourishes, not just in Hawaii. The Petrified Forest in northern Arizona is another area where people frantically return rocks to the park after thinking their illicit souvenir has brought them bad luck.) I wanted to be sure I wasn’t doing cultural appropriation if I took this basic concept for my story, so I was relieved to find the modern legend arises in various places and is believed to have been begun in one locale by a tour bus driver who didn’t want volcanic ash and grit from purloined chunks off the beach or mountain messing up his vehicles. Another variation on the story says because it’s against the law to remove anything from a national park, a ranger invented the story to add an additional layer of ‘scariness’ to deter would-be souvenir hunters.
One of the more interesting pieces of research I did was reading Bad Luck Hot Rocks by Ryan Thompson, dealing with the issue as it relates to the Petrified Forest in northern Arizona.
Of course since I’m writing science fiction, I then took the entire topic a step further and gave my ‘rock’ some scary attributes, the ability to do real harm and a bit of carving to justify referring to an idol’s curse in the title.
It seemed to me the idea of tourists and souvenirs fit in very nicely with my luxury cruise ship, and then since an entire deck of the ship is devoted to recreating a beach from the planet Tahumaroa Two, it was logical for the rock or ‘idol’ in question in my story to have come from that planet and need to go back there. This led me to ponder who in the crew would be likely to become involved with returning a rock and I decided it was time for the Cruise Director, Juli Shaeffer, to get her story. She’s been referenced many times in other STAR CRUISE stories but we really never met her. I got to do all kinds of fun research into what exactly a cruise director does on Earth and then embellish and enhance for my starship.
My next challenge was how to put a pet front and center in the story, and to engage them in a meaningful fashion with the action. I decided Juli and Third Officer Steve Aureli had unfinished romantic business, and that Steve has an elderly aunt traveling aboard this particular cruise. Every time I thought about the character of Aunt Dian, I saw one of the Gabor sisters in my head, dressed in pink and a froufrou feather boa, clutching a tiny dog. (The Gabors were famous actresses in their day and Eva from the ‘Green Acres’ TV show is kind of who I was going for, although ZsaZsa did play Queen of Outer space once in a movie.) Of course Dian and Charrli, her dog, have a lot more backstory and aren’t what they seem on the surface. For one thing, they’re veterans of the Sectors Special Forces Z Corps, which means Charrli is very smart and telepathic with Dian. Charrli bonds with Juli and has an affinity for the rock or idol of the novel’s title.
Then I let the events unfold from there!
The blurb: An unusual bequest….
Juli Shaeffer, the Nebula Zephyr’s cruise director, receives a mysterious bequest from the estate of a longtime passenger – a lump of rock taken from a reef on the planet Tahumaroa. Legend states anyone who steals from the ocean gods will be cursed. The passenger’s will requests the rock be returned to the beach so his heirs won’t be affected by the bad luck he believed he’d incurred. Juli doesn’t believe in superstitions and she agrees to carry out this small favor on the ship’s next stop at the planet in question.
Until the rock disappears from her office…
When the rock disappears and reappears in various locations around the ship, and seems connected to a steadily escalating series of mishaps, Juli turns to Third Officer Steve Aureli as the only one she feels she can trust. Along with Steve and his elderly Aunt Dian – a passenger aboard the Nebula Zephyr for this cruise – she investigates the strange series of malfunctions plaguing the interstellar luxury liner. Steve and Juli enlist his Aunt Dian’s dog, Charrli, a retired Sectors Z Corps canine, to help them track the missing rock as it moves about the ship.
Juli and Steve must find the rock, hang onto it and transport it to the planet’s surface, before the alien idol’s curse turns deadly. The attraction between the two of them grows as the threat to Juli becomes more and more focused. Can she carry out her task while he keeps her safe from the alien curse? Will the capricious alien idol bring them good fortune…or disaster?
As one reviewer said, "The rock is complicated..."!!!
We’ve had some wonderful, fun reviews too!
The events in STAR CRUISE: IDOL’S CURSE, my story in this year’s anthology, take place on my interstellar luxury cruise liner, the Nebula Zephyr. I always have so much fun revisiting my ship and having new adventures there.
Usually I start with the concept of the pet for my PISA stories and develop the plot from what the animal ‘suggests’ to me but this time my jumping off place was legends about bad luck hitting tourists who steal rocks from certain locales.
I’ve always been fascinated by these myths and the tales of bad luck people believe they incur if they ‘steal’ a rock from a certain place. (And when I was researching this topic, I discovered there are various tourist spots where this belief flourishes, not just in Hawaii. The Petrified Forest in northern Arizona is another area where people frantically return rocks to the park after thinking their illicit souvenir has brought them bad luck.) I wanted to be sure I wasn’t doing cultural appropriation if I took this basic concept for my story, so I was relieved to find the modern legend arises in various places and is believed to have been begun in one locale by a tour bus driver who didn’t want volcanic ash and grit from purloined chunks off the beach or mountain messing up his vehicles. Another variation on the story says because it’s against the law to remove anything from a national park, a ranger invented the story to add an additional layer of ‘scariness’ to deter would-be souvenir hunters.
One of the more interesting pieces of research I did was reading Bad Luck Hot Rocks by Ryan Thompson, dealing with the issue as it relates to the Petrified Forest in northern Arizona.
Of course since I’m writing science fiction, I then took the entire topic a step further and gave my ‘rock’ some scary attributes, the ability to do real harm and a bit of carving to justify referring to an idol’s curse in the title.
It seemed to me the idea of tourists and souvenirs fit in very nicely with my luxury cruise ship, and then since an entire deck of the ship is devoted to recreating a beach from the planet Tahumaroa Two, it was logical for the rock or ‘idol’ in question in my story to have come from that planet and need to go back there. This led me to ponder who in the crew would be likely to become involved with returning a rock and I decided it was time for the Cruise Director, Juli Shaeffer, to get her story. She’s been referenced many times in other STAR CRUISE stories but we really never met her. I got to do all kinds of fun research into what exactly a cruise director does on Earth and then embellish and enhance for my starship.
My next challenge was how to put a pet front and center in the story, and to engage them in a meaningful fashion with the action. I decided Juli and Third Officer Steve Aureli had unfinished romantic business, and that Steve has an elderly aunt traveling aboard this particular cruise. Every time I thought about the character of Aunt Dian, I saw one of the Gabor sisters in my head, dressed in pink and a froufrou feather boa, clutching a tiny dog. (The Gabors were famous actresses in their day and Eva from the ‘Green Acres’ TV show is kind of who I was going for, although ZsaZsa did play Queen of Outer space once in a movie.) Of course Dian and Charrli, her dog, have a lot more backstory and aren’t what they seem on the surface. For one thing, they’re veterans of the Sectors Special Forces Z Corps, which means Charrli is very smart and telepathic with Dian. Charrli bonds with Juli and has an affinity for the rock or idol of the novel’s title.
Then I let the events unfold from there!
The blurb: An unusual bequest….
Juli Shaeffer, the Nebula Zephyr’s cruise director, receives a mysterious bequest from the estate of a longtime passenger – a lump of rock taken from a reef on the planet Tahumaroa. Legend states anyone who steals from the ocean gods will be cursed. The passenger’s will requests the rock be returned to the beach so his heirs won’t be affected by the bad luck he believed he’d incurred. Juli doesn’t believe in superstitions and she agrees to carry out this small favor on the ship’s next stop at the planet in question.
Until the rock disappears from her office…
When the rock disappears and reappears in various locations around the ship, and seems connected to a steadily escalating series of mishaps, Juli turns to Third Officer Steve Aureli as the only one she feels she can trust. Along with Steve and his elderly Aunt Dian – a passenger aboard the Nebula Zephyr for this cruise – she investigates the strange series of malfunctions plaguing the interstellar luxury liner. Steve and Juli enlist his Aunt Dian’s dog, Charrli, a retired Sectors Z Corps canine, to help them track the missing rock as it moves about the ship.
Juli and Steve must find the rock, hang onto it and transport it to the planet’s surface, before the alien idol’s curse turns deadly. The attraction between the two of them grows as the threat to Juli becomes more and more focused. Can she carry out her task while he keeps her safe from the alien curse? Will the capricious alien idol bring them good fortune…or disaster?
As one reviewer said, "The rock is complicated..."!!!
September 10, 2019
Thoughts on the Art of the Book Blurb
If you follow my blog, you know I do a weekly report on New Releases in my three favorite genres – scifi romance, fantasy romance and paranormal romance. I also scoop up a lot of new books that aren’t strictly in those three categories (urban fantasy, cozy paranormal mysteries etc.) and then I also add what I call ‘releases of note’, which may be hard scifi or other related genres that I find interesting and think maybe the readers perusing my list might be intrigued by.
I typically have 50-60 books each week. This is a curated list, by which I mean I don’t do any automated process and I certainly don’t cover every book released. I have my methods and my sources and I look at factors including but not limited to the covers, the reviews, the author’s past reviews, sometimes I read the “look Inside” feature to see how the author’s ‘voice’ is – I cover books in some areas I don’t personally read often, like dark romance and MPREG but which I do know the readers enjoy and would like to see…now, I don’t necessarily do all that up front checking for every book. I only have so much time and my primary priority is writing my own books! Gotta pay the rent and buy cat food for Jake the Cat…and I trust the quality of books by authors well known to me in those genres. But especially if an author is new-to-me, or has no reviews yet, or has a couple of iffy reviews…
But my main tool is the blurb the author or publisher has provided. This is the book listing’s description of who the main characters are, the challenges facing them, etc.
So today I have a little bit of a rant about book blurbs.
To me, the main purpose is that after your professionally done cover intrigues a reader enough to click on the sales page, they’ll read the blurb and decide YES, they want to one-click this book and read it. Now I’m no authority on blurb writing. I used to have the wonderful Cathryn Cade do mine, when she was the Blurb Queen and since she stopped providing that service, I try to model my blurbs on what she did. I write M/F, so I briefly introduce the heroine, the hero and one paragraph usually about the challenge – escaping the evil alien scientists or solving the mysterious outbreak or defeating the interstellar crime syndicate. I may pose one of those “Can their love survive while escaping this disaster…?” type questions at the end. This approach seems to work for me.
When doing my new releases post I see everything from literally no blurb at all (what???! Yes, really, there are some out there) to a sentence or two, to the 3-4 quick paragraphs approach I use, to lengthy lengthy blurbs that try to give every plot point, to excerpts from the book standing in as blurb.
I kinda ruthlessly truncate the overly lengthy blurbs, frankly. I only want my already voluminous posts to be so long and OMG, just whet the reader’s interest, don’t tell try to tell them everything! (Reminder: This is all my opinion so your mileage may vary, as we authors say BUT I do see a ton of blurbs every week.) I do indicate there’s more blurb on the ebook seller page.
The ones that really puzzle me are typically on the later books in a series where the author blithely assumes anyone checking out their book must have read the entire series to this point and will know what is meant by something along the lines of “Frank and Sallie go to Weird Town to tell the wamluks the silver talzq is broken. Harry rides along.” Huh?
(Shaking my head in sorrow for lost opportunities.) Okay, maybe your loyal readers will snap this up. Anyone seeing a mention of your series for the first time at around book #three to book #ad infinitum most likely won’t. I don’t know about you but I always want new-to-me readers so I try to give an enticing blurb, and maybe (but not always) add a general paragraph about the series itself – here’s what I say about my Badari Warriors, for example: Genetically engineered soldiers of the far future, the Badari were created by alien enemies to fight humans. But then the scientists kidnapped an entire human colony from the Sectors to use as subjects in twisted experiments…the Badari and the humans made common cause, rebelled and escaped the labs. Now they live side by side in a sanctuary valley protected by a powerful Artificial Intelligence, and wage unceasing war on the aliens.
Sometimes, if I’m feeling extra helpful or I loved the cover or I really want a book in that genre to include, I’ll go searching for book 1 in the series and pull part of that blurb, where hopefully the author did explain the overarching concept of the series, and I’ll include that information properly labelled in my Wednesday listing along with the cryptic blurb for the latest book. But not always…it’s not really my job to sell your book.
I may also do this if the blurb really doesn’t explain the scifi or paranormal element of the plot but there’s more information in the blurb for an earlier book. (And no, this post wasn’t inspired by the last authors I did this for – it’s been on my mind for a while!)
But what a missed opportunity to have the hundreds of people who kindly come and view my new releases report every week at least consider your series, all for the want of a little more information to intrigue them.
OK and if you’re on book #37 of a really well selling series, maybe you don’t need to bother with a blurb in any detail but how many of us enjoy that lovely state of being?
I’m not generally in favor of the excerpt approach either. For one thing, that’s what the ‘look inside’ features does to some extent, as far as allowing the reader to sample your style and the flavor of the story. For another thing, it’s often hard to know what to make of a random excerpt from a novel out of context. Personally I have a hard time relating to characters who just start ‘talking to me’ when I’m not invested even a little bit in the story yet.
And I certainly don’t think an excerpt should be your only blurb! If your characters have to carry the load of explaining who they are and the plot and everything else in an excerpt, maybe you have too much backstory and/or ‘telling’ in your novel?
Another thing to watch out for is having typos, misspellings or editing issues in your blurb. Sure we’re all human and mistakes do happen but wow, what a turnoff to a reader (speaking for myself) to see a blurb that commits multiple slips. I’m likely to pass on that one.
I do applaud authors who include a little extra information at the end, whether it’s a serious trigger warning (I’m not getting into the whole trigger warning debate here) or a clarification that the book is reverse harem, or a bully academy, or contains material suitable only for mature readers or has a cliffhanger ending…and some people have funny taglines about general information in the series (mermaids solving cozy murder mysteries and baking cupcakes in a town where it’s always summer solstice [which I just totally made up]).
After the cover, your blurb is your most important tool to get your book into the hands of the readers (or onto their ebook readers) so even if you loathe writing blurbs (and there are still people who write them for a fee out there by the way), be sure you have a nicely polished not-too-long, not-too-short piece of prose to make us highly intrigued and need to know more!
Readers – what do you think? What kind of blurbs work or don’t work for you? Any tips for authors, including me?
And here’s my latest, by the way:
REEDE: A BADARI WARRIORS SCIFI ROMANCE NOVEL (SECTORS NEW ALLIES SERIES BOOK 9
Lt. Fallyn Damara was sent by the Sectors to investigate a strange transmission from an isolated planet and determine whether the residents of a vanished colony had been transported there by alien enemies. Fallyn’s ship crashes and she’s taken prisoner by the Khagrish scientists, to await her fate in the slate of horrifying experiments being conducted.
Reede, the second ranking enforcer in the Badari Warrior pack, volunteers to be recaptured by the Khagrish in an effort to locate and rescue Fallyn inside the deadly lab complex.
While a prisoner Reede discovers Fallyn is the woman destined to become his fated mate but the moment is bittersweet because Fallyn will be leaving their world at the first opportunity, to report back to the Sectors. He refuses to complete the mate bond, believing to do so will lead to nothing but lifelong misery for them both, separated by lightyears and interstellar politics.
For her part, Fallyn wants to shake up the rule-bound enforcer and persuade him to take a chance on love.
But first they have to escape the Khagrish.
I typically have 50-60 books each week. This is a curated list, by which I mean I don’t do any automated process and I certainly don’t cover every book released. I have my methods and my sources and I look at factors including but not limited to the covers, the reviews, the author’s past reviews, sometimes I read the “look Inside” feature to see how the author’s ‘voice’ is – I cover books in some areas I don’t personally read often, like dark romance and MPREG but which I do know the readers enjoy and would like to see…now, I don’t necessarily do all that up front checking for every book. I only have so much time and my primary priority is writing my own books! Gotta pay the rent and buy cat food for Jake the Cat…and I trust the quality of books by authors well known to me in those genres. But especially if an author is new-to-me, or has no reviews yet, or has a couple of iffy reviews…
But my main tool is the blurb the author or publisher has provided. This is the book listing’s description of who the main characters are, the challenges facing them, etc.
So today I have a little bit of a rant about book blurbs.
To me, the main purpose is that after your professionally done cover intrigues a reader enough to click on the sales page, they’ll read the blurb and decide YES, they want to one-click this book and read it. Now I’m no authority on blurb writing. I used to have the wonderful Cathryn Cade do mine, when she was the Blurb Queen and since she stopped providing that service, I try to model my blurbs on what she did. I write M/F, so I briefly introduce the heroine, the hero and one paragraph usually about the challenge – escaping the evil alien scientists or solving the mysterious outbreak or defeating the interstellar crime syndicate. I may pose one of those “Can their love survive while escaping this disaster…?” type questions at the end. This approach seems to work for me.
When doing my new releases post I see everything from literally no blurb at all (what???! Yes, really, there are some out there) to a sentence or two, to the 3-4 quick paragraphs approach I use, to lengthy lengthy blurbs that try to give every plot point, to excerpts from the book standing in as blurb.
I kinda ruthlessly truncate the overly lengthy blurbs, frankly. I only want my already voluminous posts to be so long and OMG, just whet the reader’s interest, don’t tell try to tell them everything! (Reminder: This is all my opinion so your mileage may vary, as we authors say BUT I do see a ton of blurbs every week.) I do indicate there’s more blurb on the ebook seller page.
The ones that really puzzle me are typically on the later books in a series where the author blithely assumes anyone checking out their book must have read the entire series to this point and will know what is meant by something along the lines of “Frank and Sallie go to Weird Town to tell the wamluks the silver talzq is broken. Harry rides along.” Huh?
(Shaking my head in sorrow for lost opportunities.) Okay, maybe your loyal readers will snap this up. Anyone seeing a mention of your series for the first time at around book #three to book #ad infinitum most likely won’t. I don’t know about you but I always want new-to-me readers so I try to give an enticing blurb, and maybe (but not always) add a general paragraph about the series itself – here’s what I say about my Badari Warriors, for example: Genetically engineered soldiers of the far future, the Badari were created by alien enemies to fight humans. But then the scientists kidnapped an entire human colony from the Sectors to use as subjects in twisted experiments…the Badari and the humans made common cause, rebelled and escaped the labs. Now they live side by side in a sanctuary valley protected by a powerful Artificial Intelligence, and wage unceasing war on the aliens.
Sometimes, if I’m feeling extra helpful or I loved the cover or I really want a book in that genre to include, I’ll go searching for book 1 in the series and pull part of that blurb, where hopefully the author did explain the overarching concept of the series, and I’ll include that information properly labelled in my Wednesday listing along with the cryptic blurb for the latest book. But not always…it’s not really my job to sell your book.
I may also do this if the blurb really doesn’t explain the scifi or paranormal element of the plot but there’s more information in the blurb for an earlier book. (And no, this post wasn’t inspired by the last authors I did this for – it’s been on my mind for a while!)
But what a missed opportunity to have the hundreds of people who kindly come and view my new releases report every week at least consider your series, all for the want of a little more information to intrigue them.
OK and if you’re on book #37 of a really well selling series, maybe you don’t need to bother with a blurb in any detail but how many of us enjoy that lovely state of being?
I’m not generally in favor of the excerpt approach either. For one thing, that’s what the ‘look inside’ features does to some extent, as far as allowing the reader to sample your style and the flavor of the story. For another thing, it’s often hard to know what to make of a random excerpt from a novel out of context. Personally I have a hard time relating to characters who just start ‘talking to me’ when I’m not invested even a little bit in the story yet.
And I certainly don’t think an excerpt should be your only blurb! If your characters have to carry the load of explaining who they are and the plot and everything else in an excerpt, maybe you have too much backstory and/or ‘telling’ in your novel?
Another thing to watch out for is having typos, misspellings or editing issues in your blurb. Sure we’re all human and mistakes do happen but wow, what a turnoff to a reader (speaking for myself) to see a blurb that commits multiple slips. I’m likely to pass on that one.
I do applaud authors who include a little extra information at the end, whether it’s a serious trigger warning (I’m not getting into the whole trigger warning debate here) or a clarification that the book is reverse harem, or a bully academy, or contains material suitable only for mature readers or has a cliffhanger ending…and some people have funny taglines about general information in the series (mermaids solving cozy murder mysteries and baking cupcakes in a town where it’s always summer solstice [which I just totally made up]).
After the cover, your blurb is your most important tool to get your book into the hands of the readers (or onto their ebook readers) so even if you loathe writing blurbs (and there are still people who write them for a fee out there by the way), be sure you have a nicely polished not-too-long, not-too-short piece of prose to make us highly intrigued and need to know more!
Readers – what do you think? What kind of blurbs work or don’t work for you? Any tips for authors, including me?
And here’s my latest, by the way:
REEDE: A BADARI WARRIORS SCIFI ROMANCE NOVEL (SECTORS NEW ALLIES SERIES BOOK 9
Lt. Fallyn Damara was sent by the Sectors to investigate a strange transmission from an isolated planet and determine whether the residents of a vanished colony had been transported there by alien enemies. Fallyn’s ship crashes and she’s taken prisoner by the Khagrish scientists, to await her fate in the slate of horrifying experiments being conducted.
Reede, the second ranking enforcer in the Badari Warrior pack, volunteers to be recaptured by the Khagrish in an effort to locate and rescue Fallyn inside the deadly lab complex.
While a prisoner Reede discovers Fallyn is the woman destined to become his fated mate but the moment is bittersweet because Fallyn will be leaving their world at the first opportunity, to report back to the Sectors. He refuses to complete the mate bond, believing to do so will lead to nothing but lifelong misery for them both, separated by lightyears and interstellar politics.
For her part, Fallyn wants to shake up the rule-bound enforcer and persuade him to take a chance on love.
But first they have to escape the Khagrish.
