blurb comments, please?

[BeccaPrice]

Ask ApK - he's read them. <g>

[BeccaPrice]

I've found a wonderful cover artist that I can afford - still not sure about the title yet, but I'm so excited I can hardly stand it - it looks like this first of my fairy stories will actually be published.

Potential blurb, comments please?

I’m not a baby anymore!” the little girl stammered.
“Prove it!” said the Tooth Troll.
A child leaves the Garden of the Morning, and passes on to every more interesting and challenging Gardens.

The Tooth Troll is a story about losing teeth, and growing up. It recognises the losses of familiar ways and things, and shows how each new stage leads to new and wonderful things. About 10 pages, 3000 words.


should I include the word count? there's a brief afterword - should the word count and page count include that?

[frahse]

Originally Posted by BeccaPrice

I’m not a baby anymore!” the little girl stammered.
“Prove it!” said the Tooth Troll.
A child leaves the Garden of the Morning, and passes on to every more interesting and challenging Gardens.

--- just something to think about ---

"I'm not baby!"
"Prove it!"
A child leaves the safety of the Garden of the Morning and begins exploring the Gardens of Growing Up.

[Turtle91]

I like Frahse's... much more succinct. Although I think they wouldn't use contractions just to give that extra emphasis - that they really aren't!

"I am not a baby!"
"Prove it."

[BeccaPrice]

done. It seems awfully short, but it fits the story just fine.

Now to try to write a blurb for Dragons and Dreams, the compilation of 5 stories.

so here's the total for it:

"I'm not baby!"
"Prove it!"
A child leaves the safety of the Garden of the Morning and begins exploring the Gardens of Growing Up.

The Tooth Troll is a story about losing teeth, and growing up. It recognises the losses of familiar ways and things, and shows how each new stage leads to new and wonderful discoveries. About 10 pages.

[Turtle91]

"I'm not A baby"

[BeccaPrice]

since you all are so good at helping me refine blurbs, here's another conundrum.

I've got about 11,500 words in 5 fairy tales. Two are humourous, two are more serious, and the last one is more poetic (there's some thought that the last one doesn't belong in the collection, but I'm leaving it in anyway.)

Do I write a sentence about each individual story? or do I highlight one or two, and say that these are some of the stories in the collection? Maybe one of the silly ones and one of the serious ones? (I hate writing blubs!)

[frahse]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

"I'm not A baby"

I don't like to get into giving style advice. Others do that.

I will answer that particular: "A" though, for I thought of it.
That was hard decision. My thinking is that "most" young children aren't too particular about articles, and would leave it out, especially if in a huff, though some might emphasize the whole phrase "A CHILD!".

My youngest daughter, standing and talking at 7 months much like her mom" would be more "erudite" and would speaking like an early teen put that troll in his/her place.
My older daughter would have grabbed something hard and knocked that troll back under the bridge.

"A" or not, is more subjective for a young child.

Really, either way.

[BeccaPrice]

no, I cut out a word, and accidentally cut out the A. I've checked my blurb file, and made sure it's in there.

[BeccaPrice]

A brave princess sets out to save her kingdom from a dragon. Three princes set out to find the most precious thing. Two children set out to find out what is the dark that hides between the trees in the forest.

These and other bedtime stories, some modern, some with the flavor of an old-fashioned fairy tale, will delight your family. Each is timed to be "just right" for bed time reading.

[BeccaPrice]

In A Princess for Tea, a brave princess sets out to save her kingdom from a dragon -- but who will save the dragon from the princess?

In The Grumpy Dragon, the oldest, grumpiest dragon decides that he doesn't want to sleep on treasure anymore, and wants a real bed.

Three Precious Things tells the story of three princes who need to discover the most precious thing, in order to become king. The first looks for wisdom, the second for justice, and the third for bravery, but each discovers something very different.

In The Dark, two children set off through mythical lands to discover what is The Dark, that lurks between the trees in the forest near their home. If King Sun and Lady Moon cannot help, maybe Grandmother Night can.

When bad times come to a small village, Agnes sets out to find the solution in Child of Promise.

These five modern fairy tales, timed just right for bedtime reading, are gems that will delight the entire family.

[James_Wilde]

If I might make the suggestion, Becca, put your titles in quotation marks and/or italicise them. In some cases I'm not sure what the exact title is.

You start every story description with the title of the story except the last one. For consistency, why not put "Child of Promise" somewhere near the beginning of its paragraph?

And finally, your last line is a value judgement which belongs to your readers. Of course you think they are gems, but perhaps tone it down a bit. How about:

These five modern fairy tale gems, timed just right for bedtime reading, will delight the entire family.

And btw, what do you mean by timed just right for bedtime reading? I'm reading the blurb at ten minutes to two in the afternoon.

Another point: I've been so involved in the production of these stories, from criticising the story line through decisions on cover photos and a review of the blurb that I think I'll have to buy a copy when it comes out!

[BeccaPrice]

I had intended to italicize the story titles, but cut and pasted the text from my Notepad++ file, and then forgot to do so here.

The thing is, none of these blurbs capture the *feel* of the stories, and I don't know how to do that.

What I meant by "timed just right" is that they're a good length for a bedtime story, so that they take about 1/2 hour each to read aloud. That was from one of my beta testers (hi, ApK!) who said that the timing on them was good. but I will take it out.

Since I don't have a writer's group (I'm intending to Join SCBWI shortly, when I get some money), I'm depending on people here - maybe depending too much - and over at Kboards for input.

[gmw]

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.

[BeccaPrice]

One question:

I hadn't wanted to start each story description with "in <story title><this happens>" and tried to mix things up a bit in the phrasings. Should I work on that, or maintain the parallelism?