Blurbs
For all the two hundred and eighty thousand words plus that make up The Powers that be trilogy, the hardest words of all, I have found, are those of the blurb.
Writing a good blurb for your own book really is a far harder task than it would seem.
Some four or five drafts on, I’ve finally managed to get it down to something close to finished. My first mistake I found, was to rely too much on my new prologue material, just re-hashing it in a shortened form. I do, after all, need to sell books, and not just present the content of the prologue on the back cover. Thankfully, my ever-discerning friend Sean was on hand to put my straight on this one.
The second main difficulty I found in approaching the task of blurb-writing, was that of condensing down the essence of the story, and the nature of the tale, into a short summary, no longer than two small paragraphs. After much fretting, and many, many re-writes, I came to the conclusion that the best approach to take on this task was to focus primarily on the first book, and the opening of the trilogy, setting the story up for the other two books. Hopefully what I’ve come up with now after some careful consideration, is a blurb that not only reads well, and is fast-paced enough to give a good reflection of the books’ content, but it should hopefully, leave enough to the imagination to make people want to read on. Though the second paragraph is still possibly open to a bit of alteration, my blurb reads as follows. Thoughts and opinions, are of course, welcome:
When a daring raid on a returning war hero’s fortune ends with his foster-father dead at the hands of an assassin, Callum must race for his life to escape the fell clutches of his pursuers. Armed only with a note telling him to seek out a man named Kulgrim in a nearby merchant town, Callum’s road takes him to the Magical Isle of Asturia, where he finds safety under the watchful eyes of the wizards.
Years pass, and as Callum grows to adulthood, so the dark powers of the old world continue to plot. Just as he is beginning to settle to the idea of life on the ‘Isle, the mysterious disappearance of his tutor, and the enigmatic ransom note left in his tutor’s place leads Callum on a perilous journey to the uncharted forbidden lands of the south. What starts out as a mission to save a friend in need soon turns into the quest of a lifetime as Callum and his friends discover that all is not as it seems, and even they are not safe from being caught up in the great prophecy of the age. Only through the strength of their friendship can Callum and his three young friends hope to defeat the dark forces that beset them on all sides, and so save the realm of men from falling to total darkness.