Wednesday, September 28, 2011

A Tale of Two Blurbs

Well, the cover art for Lyon's Legacy is nearly done, and the manuscript will be back from the line/copy editor within a week. It looks like I'll be able to publish it sometime in October. There are still several things I need to work on before the story goes live, including the blurb. I have two different versions and would love some thoughts on which one to use, along with any suggestions for improvement.

Blurb #1:

Sometimes being a geneticist isn’t enough to understand your family....

As a child, Joanna Lyon was pressured by her family to play and write music like her famous rock-n-roll ancestor, Sean Lyon, but her passion was in science instead. When grad school became too expensive, her Uncle Jack offered to make her rich if she did him a tiny favor: travel to an alternate Twentieth Century universe where Sean still lived and sample his DNA. Jo disapproved of Jack’s plan to create his own performing clone of Sean, but she agreed to accept the mission with her secret goal of sabotaging it.

Facing obstructive historians and her own hatred of Sean, can she obtain Sean’s DNA without being stranded in his universe? How much will she have to sacrifice to protect Sean’s clone?

Blurb #2:

When Joanna Lyon, a scientist in training, learns her rich uncle plans to have their rock legend ancestor, Sean Lyon, cloned, she’s disgusted. Uncle Jack pushed her into music when she was younger, and she hated it. So it’s particularly galling that he wants her to travel through a wormhole to an alternate universe and sample Sean’s DNA. She only agrees to go so she can secretly sabotage the project. But meeting Sean forces her to re-examine her feelings about her family, including her estranged father. Can she still protect the unborn clone from her uncle, and will she have to sacrifice her career and new-found love to do so?

Please let me know which one you prefer. If you have some constructive suggestions for a new approach, I'd love to hear them too. Thanks!

4 comments:

David P. King said...

Hi, Sandra!

There's things I like about both blurbs. There's really no right way to go about the blurb, but some things did jump at me that I've heard will make for a great one.

Write the blurb in present tense (which you do in the second blurb) and avoid ending with a question(s). Give us the stakes. Tell us the possible consequences.

I like what you have here. Keep it up. You can do it! :)

Briane said...

Both are okay. I like the introductory sentence idea, except that in that example, the introductory sentence doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the blurb: Is the general thesis you're exploring her attempting to understand her family? That doesn't come across in the rest of the paragraph.

I'm going to mess you up and contradict DPK above there: I don't mind the blurb ending with a question at all.

I'd definitely go with number 1, though.

Michael Offutt, Phantom Reader said...

I think that I like number 2 better.

Sandra Ulbrich Almazan said...

Thanks for your input, everyone! I may wind up combining the two somehow.

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