Bad blurb?

I’ve just received a list of the nominees for an award. The blurb below is for one of these, and it’s written by an established author, and published by an established firm. On Amazon, it has over 4,000 ratings, averaging four stars. This is clearly a book that people enjoy, but with this blurb, I don’t really understand why people are interested in it (names redacted).


A****, F****, E*****, and S**** are still young — but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?

OK, so young people are aware of time passing. And they have sex and worry about it. And yes, young people are not perfect, and their relationships (sexual and other) ebb and flow. And they worry about all these things.

Why should I wish to read about these people? What makes them interesting or different? Is this the aim of this pedestrian blurb? To make me want to see why 4,000 Amazon readers think this is such a good book? I’m sure that a better blurb would sell more copies.

“Standing in the last lighted room before the darkness” – it’s a beautiful phrase, and one that many people will relate to. I think many generations feel that they’re the last hope of humanity, whether it be battling the evil Hun in the Great War, or the Nazis in the continuation of that conflict, or marching and protesting with CND about nuclear weapons, or even superglueing themselves to the M25 to raise awareness of climate change. So why are these four young people different? I’m not interested.

A book’s blurb blurb needs to show us why this book is so different from so many other books on the market (Amazon carries over 10,000,000 titles). This prose above just makes my heart sink, and excites me as much as a half-finished bowl of cornflakes.

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Time to start again with a blank sheet

Oops! False start…

Apologies.

I uploaded the EPUB version of On the Other Side of the Sky to the Amazon Kindle convertor and all seemed to be OK. No error message, EPUB looked great on my Kobo. I don’t own a Kindle and none of the pieces of emulation software seem to do their job on my computer.

However, when I could finally see the preview on screen following the release of the book (KDP offers an on-screen preview, but never seems to allow you to see the results of your latest upload, taking you straight to the pricing page once you’ve uploaded the new version) – all my fancy fonts had been stripped out (with no warning – thank you, Amazon) and so the nice little squiggly doodles that I’d carefully inserted came out as M and u.

In addition, it seemed that the InDesign TOC creation process had fouled up, putting Part headers at the end of the preceding chapter. Even going into the source code with Calibre, and cutting and pasting (and editing TOC files and the CSS files) didn’t seem to fix it.

So… start again with Vellum. A pain, but it works. Export from InDesign to RTF, open in Word, save as DOCX and import into Vellum, tidying up all the chapter and section divisions as I go. So as of today (December 1) the new edition is with Amazon having passed the initial checks. With luck you’ll be able to get it tomorrow. Same with Smashwords (Kobo, Apple, B&N, etc.).

On the Other Side of the Sky

A novel combining history, adventure, and more than a little touch of the arcane