New Year 1st Task Updating Old Project with a logline

A few years ago I pulled my first self-published book, THE GARGOYLE IN THE SEINE, off Amazon, knowing it needed to be updated. I’ve been alternately too busy or too uninspired to work on it until now. I really hate going back and reading my published work because I know I will always find things to be changed, but I finally forced myself to start the read-through. The book, a historical mystery set in 1878 Paris, has held up better than I thought, though of course I’ve found things to change. I have a long list of tasks before I’m going to republish it, including a new title and a new cover.

The first step though is a logline. A logline, if you don’t know, is a one or two sentence description of the story written to hook a potential reader. I didn’t have one the first time around. I’ve done a few of them for my other projects but I had to refresh my memory on how to write them. I found this site which has an article about screenplay loglines. https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/write-compelling-logline-examples/#

Screenplay loglines are essentially the same thing as book loglines as far as I can tell. The basic structure of them is: When [INCITING INCIDENT] happens, [OUR PROTAGONIST] decides [TO DO ACTION] against [ANTAGONIST].

Sounds simple to write but adding in a few descriptions are necessary to make the story more interesting. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

I may continue to refine it, but it’s a start and something I can check off my list. On to the next task!