Playing telephone.
Remember that game where you have a line of people and you say something into the first person’s ear and they whisper it to the next person, on down the line, and then the last person says it out loud and usually the sentence has been completely changed? I was reminded of that when I picked up the newest RT magazine, and at the back saw that Demon Moon was mentioned as an upcoming June release, and it said something like (the magazine is down in my car, so I’m just doing this from memory):
Under a Demon Moon, a vampire and his lover battle a horde of nosferatu.
I should probably say that’s not exactly right, even though I can see how the copy for the book was condensed down into that little blurb. And it’s not exactly right because if Colin and Savi did battle a horde of nosferatu, even as smart as she is and as beautiful as Colin is … they’d be totally dead. So I’m just sayin’, I hope you don’t expect a great big Colin/Savi/nosferatu fight.
On the copy: I think this might be one of the most difficult parts of the process, trying to give a good sense of what the book is about without a) giving away any massive spoilers, b) catching the reader with a hook that sounds interesting enough to read, and c) fitting it all on the back of the book. And then you have a book like Demon Moon, in which the plot is organic and really isn’t about one thing (there’s a lot going on, it’s not just the creatures from Chaos coming to Earth … that’s more of a catalyst than a primary plot thread, because the romance is the main plot thread). But, anyway, this was how it worked:
The copy writing people took my proposal synopsis and wrote something up (they follow it pretty closely, even using some of the hook-y language I used in the proposal when I was trying to get my editor to think, Woot!) and then send it to my editor. My editor shoots it off to me to edit and tweak, because a) no one knows the book better than the author, and b) I’ve been working on it since I wrote the synopsis.
So I added in a few more details (the focus was on the nosferatu horde, because of something I’d mentioned in the synopsis, but in the writing of it I’d changed the importance of it) and shot it back to my editor. And (surprise surprise) it was a bit too long, so she tweaked it a bit more, the copy people tweaked it a bit more, and finally she shot it back to me for approval and I was like, “cool”.
Demon Moon’s copy goes like this:
Return to the sensual netherworld of Demon Angel for a startling romance of eternal love threatened by the consuming darkness of a Demon Moon…
No one would call vampire Colin Ames-Beaumont kind, but they would call him unnaturally beautiful. For two centuries his tainted blood has kept him isolated from other vampires, sustained only by his beauty and vanity—bitter comforts, since a curse has erased his mirror reflection, replacing it with a terrifying glimpse of Chaos.
Savi Murray’s insatiable curiosity had gotten her into trouble before, but she’d always escaped unscathed. Then came Colin. In the midst of Heaven, he gave her a taste of ecstasy—and of Chaos. Deadly creatures from that realm herald the return of an imprisoned nosferatu horde, and Colin and Savi’s bond is their only protection—and their only passion…
I think this works, because it lets the reader know that it’s part of a series and gives a good sense of the start of the novel — no one picking it up is going to say, “This isn’t what the book is about!” … but since there is also a demon in there, a vampire community under its influence, and Colin’s absurdly beautiful knees, they might say it’s not all it’s about.
But they still don’t battle a nosferatu horde. Because ripped-apart Colin-and-Savi do not a romantic HEA make.
Oh, and Mrs Giggles totally gave Demon Angel an 84. Woot! I’m so going to be a cantankerous old lady like her when I grow up.
