Pred Description
Here’s the description I sent in to the publisher at their request. It’s devilishly hard to describe your own book, so I think they generally ask for this so they have something they can kind of knead and finesse and react to. So it’s rough and kinda lame, but it does describe the novel. Really, somehow, the final description’s gonna need to convey that I was trying to summon the essence of Sam Peckinpah and Joss Whedon while writing this. I’m sure Dark Horse will come up with something cool.
Jeff
On a remote South China Sea island, a hunt is underway…but not the hunt the participants expected. Ex-Khmer Rouge Colonel and lodge owner Rath Preap knows something odd is going on–security fences have been cut and big game animals run amok, surveillance cameras reduced to white snow, members of his small private army disappearing…Is it a demon or one of his own men?
The hunters…
John Gustat, billionaire entrepreneur, haunted by a secret and the owner of a mysterious black box. Nikolai and Marikova, supposedly part of the new class of wealthy Russian oil aristocracy, but a little too proficient with a knife and a sniper’s rifle. A Romanian ex-professional wrestler turned mobster who knows Gustat is hiding something. A South African arm’s dealer. A disgraced rock star who really doesn’t want to be there. A Washington D.C. liquor baron. And a Thai pirate captain out to avenge the murder of her sister…
Full-on battles in old temple ruins. Deadly African crocodiles. A secret Thai military base. A strange alien virus. Double crosses and last stands. Love and death in the tropics.
Something is beginning to hunt the hunters. Something that has endured a thousand battles on a hundred worlds. Something entirely too familiar to the mysterious John Gustat…
This time, it’s personal. [Like, all the other times, it was "just business" - Jeff]










January 26, 2008 at 11:10 am
Predator in love? Who’s the lucky guy?
January 26, 2008 at 1:05 pm
LOL!
January 26, 2008 at 6:18 pm
I think you had me at the “Romanian ex-professional wrestler turned mobster” part. Dude has to be a badass then, right?
January 26, 2008 at 6:23 pm
“A disgraced rock star who really doesn’t want to be there.”
Gary Glitter?
January 26, 2008 at 11:47 pm
Ha! I really wish I could come up with something better, but they will take care of it. It’s so much more effortless than my description!
JV
January 27, 2008 at 2:11 am
But in the meantime, it’s okay to imagine the Iron Sheik and Gary Glitter as being action heroes, right?
January 27, 2008 at 8:35 am
oh sure.
January 28, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Jeff. how different is this description from the kind one would use to query an agent? In essence it seems like the kind of copy you’d see on the flaps of a book, right?
January 28, 2008 at 3:19 pm
Very different, I’d think. You’re not trying to hard-sell the agent so much. There you’re just trying to let them know where it might fit on the spectrum of genres/sub-genres/themes/whatever and give a basic summary.
JV
January 29, 2008 at 11:20 am
That’s why you get paid the big bucks — you know the difference between the two! LOL. I do see what you mean, now that I read through your description again. I guess the query would definitely be more like a hard pitch.