Dwayne’s Comments (group member since Apr 01, 2017)

Dwayne’s comments from the Support for Indie Authors group.

Deleted for the link. Please read the rules. Thanks.

I wrote this to give authors some insight into the intimate details of horses and life on a farm so that they can write better for me.

I can't speak for other authors, but I will not buy a book just so I can learn to write "better" for the author of said book.

I've tried to be completely honest.

Personally I don't understand that statement. Being honest shouldn't take any effort. As M.L. said, you're coming across as defensive. We haven't even read the first page and you're already defending the book.

If I were you, I'd make a fresh start at it.

It's not so much a blurb as a rant and a turn off.

You need a strong hook at the start of the blurb. I get that the first paragraph is important in the book itself, but it isn't an interesting way to start a blurb. The rewording of that first paragraph is better. It's less confusing and flows better. It's still not really an attention grabber, though. I would suggest jumping right to her finding the dragon.

"Countess Tessa of Newshire stumbles across a dragon..." Let the reader find out about her marriage and reading habits when they pick up the book.

Aside from that, the rest is pretty strong. I only have two small objections. How old are Tessa and Zariah? Are the girls or women? I would also drop the adverb before "content". It's not necessary. If you insist on keeping that first paragraph, definitely cut one of the "quite content"s out.

It's pretty long, but there are plenty of things you can cut.

The whole first paragraph is clumsy and it took a couple of reads for me to understand part of it. In the end, the count and his mistress don't seem that important to the rest of the story, so you could chop all that out, along with the line about the countess reading about elves and dragons.

The second paragraph is okay, though I don't like the "Her somewhat ordinary life takes a turn for the strange..." as it's a bit cliche and I don't really consider being a countess who is content letting another woman service her husband to be "ordinary". Not even "somewhat".

The paragraph that starts "Tessa's not-quite-ordinary..." is redundant. We've already gotten it that her life is changing. It could be dropped.

I think if you fine tune the rest of it, the blurb could be excellent.

For me, it works up until I get to "Series Description". The stuff above does a good job at getting me interested in this book, making me curious enough to want to read a couple of pages and that's the goal of a blurb.

The series description would work better inside the book somewhere. Get them to read one book first, then try to get them interested in the series.

And personally, I'm not super crazy about warnings in books. I feel they're too apologetic and it makes me feel like the writer is timidly asking me not to read the book as it might offend me somehow.

At this point, I think you're getting really close. Maybe a touch of rewording to fix the cadence of it. It reads a little choppy, still. But, you're getting there.

In addition to burying the vampire, couldn't the earth force a root through its chest? Keep forcing the vampire deeper and deeper into the planet, maybe to the core?

As for the last question, I'm not sure what you mean. I don't know how to change your name to DC Alexander.

Abandoned houses accommodate vampires and that is the worse, but I do not want to telegraph that. You are right.

Understandable. It's best, then, to leave the "possibly worse" off.

The planet is somewhat at her beck and call, it is an earth elemental, but she did not get a mentor or a magic book that taught her. She doesn't know what it is. I tried 'The very earth beneath her feet helps her when she is in need.

Sorry for my apparent ignorance, but I'm not getting this. If she has so much power over the planet, or if the planet helps her when she's in need, it seems vampires aren't going to be much of a problem. It seems the earth could just swallow up any enemies she has. Or am I missing something?

'Her world is changing rapidly' doesn't seem to add anything. I took it out.

I agree with that. I know phrases like that show up a lot in blurbs, but honestly, it's so overused. And really, if things didn't change for our characters, there wouldn't be any reason to write their stories.

Don't I need some sort of question, tension, etc to end? That was the purpose of the bit after that. It feels like I should end with something.....your opinion?

My opinion is, I'm not a fan of rhetorical questions in blurbs. I think I've used them before, but they don't seem to add anything to the blurbs I read. If you feel you need a question at the end, by all means add it. Some people might respond well to it.

I might end it with, "Rose knows if she cannot find whoever is bewitching the young girls, all will be lost" or something to that effect.

We're getting there, DC. This one is a great improvement.

The first half is pretty good, but a little vague here and there, still. "...And possibly worse", for instance. Tell us what is worse. It will likely have a bigger impact.

I'd chuck the semicolon in the third paragraph. Use a period, instead.

I don't know what the sentence "The earth responds when she is in need" means. That puts me in the mind that the entire planet is at her beck and call.

The sentence starting with "When called on to save..." is impacted with a lot of information. I'd break it up into a few sentences and slow it down some. "Rose is called on to save a neighbor's daughter and discovers the girl is bewitched. While healing the girl, Rose also learns someone is selling young girls. The seller is said to be an evil magician." Something like that.

Beyond that point, I'd lose pretty much the rest of it as you're again belting us with a lot of story in a small space. The idea of a blurb is to get us to turn to the first page and begin to read, not to give a shopping list of what we'll several pages in. By the end of that sentence above, we know that Rose is deal with a vampire and a magician, as well as her newfound powers. That should be enough to get the right reader to open the book.

If they're coming to you and not the other way around, they're likely not going to be much help, especially if they start their emails with a phrase like, "We have read your latest book and we think you have a lot of potential..." without telling you any details about the book (such as the title).

DC, your new blurb is certainly better, but I have to agree with everything Lydia says. I'm still not getting a strong sense of who Rose is or what the situation is. I am not sure, but I'm guessing you're peppering this with a lot of inside jokes that only you, the author, can appreciate. A creature uses a child for a snack toy. You know what this means. I don't. What sort of creature? Is the child dead or chewed up? The Wizard of Oz references are lost on me. Are they that important to the blurb or can they be scrapped? You say this isn't Oz and Rose is no wizard, so it feels unnecessary to make references to The Wizard of Oz.

It still feels like you're piling a lot of story into the blurb. What is the main thing Rose has to deal with? The creature? The gangs? Vampires? It's fine to have a lot of various "bad guys" in the book, but in the blurb it would be better to focus on the main dilemma, rather than sprinkle the blurb with lots of little side problems.

Comments on the blurb:

Rosalee, a young mixed race girl, survives one day at a time in the hood as it goes from bad to worse. Is it important to know that she's mixed, but not important enough to know what races? It's not necessarily problematic, I'm just curious on that.

Hookers, drugs, and gangs are not her problem if they leave her alone. If not? They get smacked down HARD. This Rose has thorns. Sounds like they're not a problem either way. Why does she smack down hookers? How does she smack down drugs? I'm not following that.

But when the young and defenseless are eaten, zombied, sold and abused by the unnatural, Rose is the only hope they have. I'm guessing you mean zombified. Zombied is something else.

To be clear here... they're eaten. Then, turned into zombies. Then sold and then abused? This is raising a lot of weird questions. They're eaten. Does this mean they're digested and turned into waste matter, then turned into zombies, and then sold and abused? As if being eaten and turned into zombies isn't abuse enough. I think this could be a huge problem in your blurb. Either it's poorly worded or you're writing about abused zombie fecal matter.

Vampires and ghouls and magic, oh my. Can she save them? Can she save herself? Can she save... what? The vampires? The ghouls? You're kind of all over the place by this point. I'm losing focus of the story.

It aint Oz in the hood and Rose aint a wizard, but her back is against the wall and maybe a Druid will do. If that’s what she is. She has no idea; her abilities didn’t come with any more explanations or labels than the bad guys. Ain't has an apostrophe in it. Spelling and punctuation count, even in blurbs. And by now I ain't following a thing you're saying. So, Rosie is not a wizard, but she finds a druid who won't tell her what she is? I don't get it. I've also lost all sense of this character. She started off seeming tough and you went with the cliche of her being the only hope of someone, and now she's coming across as weak and confused and seems to either have no abilities or she has no idea how to use them (which is the same as having no abilities, I guess).

Foul mouthed at times, destroyed and reborn, if she can figure enough of it out she might live another day.

Huh? So, she's foul mouthed. So what? Why is that important at this point? I have no idea what this book is actually about and have lost all sense of who Rose is by now.

It needs tightening. Lots of it. It started off fairly interesting, then I think you got too excited about everything that's going to happen in the book and started piling far, far too much on.

DC wrote: "My blurb is just not cutting it. I will totally appreciate any advice I get here. Painful though it might be.

Rosalee, a young mixed race girl, survives one day at a time in the hood as it goes from bad to worse. Hookers, drugs, and gangs are not her problem if they leave her alone. If not? They get smacked down HARD. This Rose has thorns.
But when the young and defenseless are eaten, zombied, sold and abused by the unnatural, Rose is the only hope they have.

Vampires and ghouls and magic, oh my. Can she save them? Can she save herself?
It aint Oz in the hood and Rose aint a wizard, but her back is against the wall and maybe a Druid will do. If that’s what she is. She has no idea; her abilities didn’t come with any more explanations or labels than the bad guys.
Foul mouthed at times, destroyed and reborn, if she can figure enough of it out she might live another day. "

DC, I am deleting your full comment as you're asking people to go read part of your book and I removed the link.

I'm keeping your blurb so people can help you with that.

Melodie wrote: "I don't follow rules!"

No self promotion. No links. Etc. Please read the code of conduct. Thanks.

Thomas wrote: "Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer.

I understand what everyone is saying here, but quoting a single line from a song is *likely* not going to land you in copyright hot water. If that were the case, there would be an insane amount of copyright lawsuits over even the most frivolous usage of copyrighted works.

For the USA, the Fair Use Act protects you on a limited basis for things like that. However the Fair Use Act is also very open to interpretation based on the court it's brought to, how much of a copyrighted work was used, and if your book has any effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

With all of that being said, I believe it's a good idea to reach out to the copyright holder and ask for permission. Explain what you want to use, maybe show them the context of it, and tell them that it wouldn't affect their profits (Because really, is the title of a chapter of your book going to affect the sales of their song? Not likely). "

Thank you for your comment, Thomas. I have to delete it due to the link, but since the rest is very useful and helpful to the topic, I'm quoting the entire thing. I believe you're right. I don't think using one short line from a song will get you sued.

Charles wrote: "It's about quality, not quantity."

That's how I see it, too. Most anyone could type a bunch of pages and call it a book. The real work comes in making that pile of pages something worth buying and reading. (And that's the fun part, too).

Marc wrote: "how many pages do you consider a novel. i like to keep my books at 250 pages max ."

The size of a novel is not determined so much by pages, but by word count. Various sources list different word counts, but generally a novel is at least 50,000 words. That said, my first novel published was about 180,000 words, the second was 330,000 or so. I have no idea how long the third one will want to be. I'm guessing somewhere between those two numbers.

Leah wrote: "In the end, I guess it’s a matter of preference. "

It is. It's one of those things where there's no right way or wrong way and I'm guessing is largely determined by the genre you write and the kinds of books you prefer.

How many books I can get out depends on the length and the style and how much work needs to be done to get it right. Short stories generally take three weeks to two months. Novellas are more like four to six months. A novel is around a year or two. The one I'm working on now I started in the late eighties. This is probably my sixth attempt to get it right.

On a good day I can get ten or twelve pages done. On a better day, I can get two. On the best days I get one really good paragraph. As we all know, it's not about how many words you can write in an hour or how many pages you can do in a day. That's the rough draft and most of it will be changed, deleted, replaced, rewritten, and edited a thousand times until your final draft has almost nothing in common with the rough draft, just as an acorn looks nothing like an oak tree.

I have a full time (plus) job and take care of my house pretty much by myself as there's not much my wife can do. No kids, but we do have three dogs. I do the bulk of my writing on days off. I can usually manage some writing in the morning or afternoon on work days, depending on what times I work and how many hours. Sometimes I'm able to write while I'm at work.

I'm gonna go through this and give you my gut reaction paragraph by paragraph. It's what I usually do on longer blurbs.

Welcome to the town of Hollow Hill, a peaceful port town with a tragic past. But Hollow Hill isn't like other towns. It's built over a gateway between our world and the next. And things exist here that shouldn't be in our world. Dangerous things. Hungry things. And the dead don't stay dead here long.

So far, it's somewhat intriguing. A little vague, though. I don't know what the "next" world is, or what the dangerous, hungry "things" are. I'm a little confused how anyone would call this place peaceful with dangerous, hungry, undead things running around.

*** <-- Serves no purpose.

Would you give up everything to save someone you loved?

Since I don't have a clue, yet, what your story is about, I can only put this in the context of my own life. If the someone I love is everything to me, this is a baffling question.

That's a question I never thought I'd need to answer again. After the horrors of my past, I've returned to my peaceful hometown of Hollow Hill in order to build a quiet and safe life. And I've succeeded. Or so I thought. But when I discover that witches – real witches – exist, all of that is shattered in an instant.

Three paragraphs in, we get some inkling of what the story is about. That's a long wait in a blurb. I'd suggest getting us right to the meat of the story much faster. We've already been told Hollow Hill is peaceful. There's no need to hear it again. Anyway. Witches. Something solid. Everything up to this point is vague and not terribly interesting. As we don't know what the horrors of this character's past are, there's no need to bring it up. You know, as the author. We're still clueless. We don't know anything about the character, yet. Also, if this character has not succeeded in whatever he or she is trying to accomplish, I'm not sure why he or she would tell us they succeeded, then say, "Nah. Never mind. I didn't."

What's more, my twin brother Gwydion is in danger. In order to save the man he loves, he triggered The Claiming, an ancient ritual that can turn an ordinary person into a witch. But now he's trapped in the underworld and he'll be dead before sunrise unless someone does something to stop it.

Now we finally get an idea of what the plot is. I would skip all that stuff earlier about a peaceful life and horrors of the past and get right into this. In a blurb you want to hook a reader right away. The only nitpicky complaint I have here is, this feels more like the brother's story. I'm getting a sense of the brother and what he's up against, but still don't know who the narrator is.

I'm the only one who has any chance at all of being able to help him. But in order to save him, I'll need to descend into the underworld myself.

Oh, the old "only one person can save him" cliche. I'm not saying it won't work in a novel. Many have made it work. It's kind of a turn off for me in a blurb, though.

But if I do that, I'm risking my life. Because if I fail, I'll be trapped there forever.

Yep. Pretty much expected this to follow the previous paragraph. I'm sure your novel is great, but in the blurb it would be good to find something unique about your story and give some focus to that. You will hook some people with the "so-and-so is in danger in some magical realm and I am the only one who can save them, even if I am risking my own life" story line. You'll hook more if you can give us a taste of what sets your book apart from similar stories.

And if I succeed, nothing will ever be the same ever again.

I would lose this. It doesn't add anything to the above.

Overall, the paragraph about the brother is good and seems to be the focal point of the story. The rest is fluff. I would suggest centering your blurb around the paragraph that begins "What's more..." And give us a clue as to who this narrator is and what is unique about your story.