Monday 18 April 2016

Blurb and Cover Help Please!


It's that time again, when I ask my blog readers for help with the cover and blurb for my next book. This one is a bit different because I'm submitting it to Kindle Scout, where it can be voted on by Amazon customers. The books with the highest votes are considered for publication by Amazon's imprint, with a $1500 advance and 50% royalties. To submit, I have to have a one-liner of 45 characters or less and a book description of 500 characters or less. Here goes!


The front line of the refugee crisis


He came to Tangier to die, but life wasn’t done with him yet.

Tom Miller has lost his job, his wife, and his dreams. Broke and alone, he ends up in a flophouse in Morocco, ready to end it all. But soon he finds himself tangled in a web of danger and duty as he’s pulled into scamming tourists for a crooked cop while trying to help a Syrian refugee boy survive life on the streets. Can a lifelong loser do something good for a change?

$500 of my advance will go to a charity for Syrian refugees.

So what do you think of the cover, one-liner, and blurb? This will be going into the Literature & Fiction section.

2 comments:

Alex J. Cavanaugh said...

I think the blurb is great as-is.
Cover is good, but the title's text is a little hard to read.

Sioux Roslawski said...

Sean--I love the cover. Your best yet, in my opinion. The large expanse of white, the bit of the doorway (?), the brass/gold window grate (or whatever it is) the font, and the color of the text on the cover... it all says screams "exotic tale from a foreign land."

The one-liner, if it is "The front line of the refugee crisis" does not grab me, but that might be just me. It bothers me that it's not a complete sentence but then, I'm a third grade teacher, so I might be overly-picky about that sort of thing. As far as the blurb, I like the ordinary sound of the final sentence, and the whole blurb makes me want to read it. You might consider another verb besides "pulled." Sucked? Lured? Conned? I don't know the plot, so I'm not sure what verb would work. Of course, it's just a suggestion...

Good luck. For you and for the Syrians, I hope you snag the most votes. Will you let us know when the voting opens up?

Looking for more from Sean McLachlan? He also hangs out on the Civil War Horror blog, where he focuses on Civil War and Wild West history.

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