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One technique I've seen for capturing the feel is to include an excerpt of the text, some piece of dialogue or action that captures the essence. This can either be all of the blurb, or a lead in to a simple paragraph of elaboration.
WARNING: One problem I've had is getting the blurb formatted correctly with resellers. Amazon seems to get it right (but I've never tried to send italics, just paragraphs). Most of the other resellers continue to have merged my three paragraphs into one, and some are obviously getting the encoding wrong. Had there been dialogue or special characters beyond hyphens it would look truly awful.
I distribute through BookBaby which limits how much control I have - perhaps if I could post directly to each reseller I would have better luck. I tried getting BookBaby to ask the resellers to correct it, but no one appears to have paid any attention - whether BookBaby are at fault or the resellers is difficult to guess. Note however that it's not just BookBaby, I had similar trouble with Lightning Source (for my paper editions). They said I could use limited html in the blurb - but some resellers are showing the html codes.
As if blurbs weren't hard enough! All this has made me quiet leery of getting to adventurous with what goes in my blurbs.
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