I think my previous post might have been unclear - my first paragraph was about taking the mysterious style that worked so well in the teasers, not reusing the content. A better way to put it would have been - pose more questions, give fewer answers.
Then halfway through writing the post, that train of thought collided with a Kate Russell-inspired transmedia/analytics/rapid feedback train of thought and the second paragraph was an attempt to recover a coherent argument from the wreckage. A better way to put that argument would have been - you have a lot of good work wrapped up in the trailers, finding some way to use that on the back cover (e.g. linking to them) could be good value for time. That doesn't have to be as part of the blurb
Having said all that, this paragraph:
... is great. The pacing shows you can really depict a fall from grace and rise back, and the mystery screams "human story in a sci-fi world". The teaser version of that paragraph gobbled up more of my mental energy than any other over the past year, so I for one will very much be reading the book to see if my theory was correct.
Reading the whole text again, some more points occur to me:
Then halfway through writing the post, that train of thought collided with a Kate Russell-inspired transmedia/analytics/rapid feedback train of thought and the second paragraph was an attempt to recover a coherent argument from the wreckage. A better way to put that argument would have been - you have a lot of good work wrapped up in the trailers, finding some way to use that on the back cover (e.g. linking to them) could be good value for time. That doesn't have to be as part of the blurb
Having said all that, this paragraph:
... is great. The pacing shows you can really depict a fall from grace and rise back, and the mystery screams "human story in a sci-fi world". The teaser version of that paragraph gobbled up more of my mental energy than any other over the past year, so I for one will very much be reading the book to see if my theory was correct.
Reading the whole text again, some more points occur to me:
- I'd recommend dropping the word "Tantalum". Anyone that gets the reference will be sold just by the ED logo on the spine, and three syllables with a comma disrupts the flow of a paragraph that already does easily enough to entice techy sci-fi fans
- the first paragraph is in the past tense, the rest in the present. That would be fine in normal text, but it reduces the impact of the blurb
- It took a few readings for "everyone thinks they're the reasonable one" to emerge from the text. That might just be because of the past/present thing, but actually I think there are too many actors (Lady Kahina Tijani, Chione, Empire, Federation and rebels). What if you changed the last bit of the second paragraph to something like "had acted legally in securing it from the Federation", and removed the next two paragraphs?
