LogFAQs > #919623096

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Entity13 posted...

On the other hand I'd say that the blurbs are the fault of someone else working for the publisher. The author has only so much say in what goes into a book before the sales team tries to, you know, sell it with the cover.

Oh no, that's 100% the case. Cover blurbs are like film trailers, in that they're almost never created by the person who created the actual work in question, and the auteur often hates them for being inaccurate or downright deceptive. And that's been the case longer than any of us here have been alive.

But my perception is more along the lines of, if your story focuses on those details excessively, it makes it harder for the blurb writer to summarize in any useful way, which is why they tend to default to overuse of setting details. When you're two paragraphs in and the blurb-writer is talking about how a thousand years ago the empire of Proper Noun fought a war with the kingdom of Proper Noun, and the Knights of Proper Noun discovered the Proper Noun, and used it to end the war and usher in the era of Proper Noun, and now Main Character is growing up in Proper Noun and he has to find the Proper Noun to Proper Noun Proper Noun, it tends to imply there isn't a lot of worthwhile story in there to sum up in any other way.

Whereas telling me that Main Character finds a magic ring that turns out to be evil and he has to travel across the land with his friends and chuck it in a volcano, it feels like there's more meat to that story even as simplified as it is.

It also helps if you work your way up to the Proper Nouns - if your blurb tells me that the main character grows up on a farm and his parents are murdered by evil soldiers before you start dropping in the setting-specific stuff, you've got a better chance of being worthwhile than if you feel the need to drop a dozen setting references before you mention a single character name.

And this is why I look at the first chapter or two of my story and ask myself what's necessary, and what can be told without losing my audience to unfamiliar words. I want to at least cut down the odds of a bad blurb, and also increase my odds of readers coming along who read any part of the intro first. The middle or ending might not work as well, since names and terms are in effect.

At the same time, though, I do try to limit how much of those things appear in ANY paragraph, and how many paragraphs per page. As much as I liked LotR, that was one gripe I had about it where so many lore building paragraphs existed, and so many such words existed in and out of the lore building. I thought many of Sanderson's books to be better about that, but caught in its own traps (such as the blurbs).

With apostrophe names I at least have an in-world reason for it as it has to do with combining noun and adjective, as is the cultural norm for the obligatory space elves I made (so obligatory that the main character, who is from Earth, references Vulcans to everyone's confusion). The other races that appear don't have this as their norm, but may have other cultural quirks that don't require punctuation like that.
---

http://i207.photobucket.com/albums/bb179/EntityXIII/entityfn7.jpg