What's in a blurb?

July, 2025

In our family, July is as frantic as Christmas because three birthdays occur – Meg, Leah and Jaimee. My running joke was that I worked to pay for two months every year – December and July. Kim, Henri and I have birthdays scattered over March, September and October, easing the burden.
 
Readers found a couple of careless errors in the latest novel, All We Have, but the beauty of self-publishing on Amazon is that I have corrected the errors. The downside is that I have ten copies that I will now trash because of the errors. Ah the perils of publication.

I’m finalising a new novel project, current working title Mika, another speculative and relatively short novel, which I may self-publish next month or possibly in October. As part of the preparation, I’ve created a blurb which I include below. Take a read and see if it provides enough of a ‘pull’ to engage readers.
 
Blurb writing is an interesting skill in that a good blurb should:

• Be concise
• Have a hook – something that grabs the reader’s attention
• Introduce the central character or characters
• Indicate the tension, the conflict without giving away spoilers
• Suggest the story’s tone and genre

 
So here is the draft blurb for Mika:
 
Mika Katic, Eternal Beauty’s sensational model and marketing commodity, has style and looks imitated worldwide by everyone who wants to be fashionable, but Mika leads a double life as ‘Whisper’, an assassin commissioned to bring down leaders and purveyors of corporate greed. As a global model and efficient killer, Mika’s careers and life are destined to be wild and brief, especially when she is pitted against a determined and ruthless enemy. But she sees her work as essential for saving humanity.
 
An operative for Corporate Security Services, Harry Best is assigned to protect a secret multi-corporation project in cybernetics that will transform sport, but he faces one major obstacle: Whisper, the assassin employed by International Freedom, a terrorist organisation determined to disrupt corporate advances. If the project is to succeed, Harry must find Whisper and eliminate her.
 
Jamal Bol wants to be the best basketballer he can be, only he plays for a mediocre team destined for relegation into obscurity – until a recruit, a powerful, aloof and skilled individual, joins the club. But with the recruit comes an enigmatic puzzle and a sinister threat that Jamal struggles to reconcile when corporate ambition and greed collide with corporation resistance.
 
Yes, it is longer than I’d like. I will work on shortening it. The challenge is having three key characters whose stories unfold throughout the novel. This will appear on the rear of the book and in online promotions, so I will continue to refine it.
 
That's it for this entry.