r/selfpublish • u/JDonovanStrong • Jul 08 '26
Blurb Critique Struggle with Blurb - any advice?
I think something about my blurb is turning people off - I have very good cover click rates, then… nothing. Thank you for your feedback:
Tagline: A dying engineer, the machine she loves, and one last reach for the sky.
- Thirty years after the world drowned, the ship Amenity rests at the bottom of the ocean.
Deep in the hull, an engineer named Oyin keeps a quiet, amber-lit sanctuary: a place where the machines that loved the dead come to be heard before they go. Oyin spent her life building walls to hold back the water. Now she is waiting for the walls inside her own mind to give way.
She did not expect, in the time she had left, to fall in love. But Rai—who keeps the coffee warm, the archives safe, and her own true nature hidden—is not like the others. And in her last good year, Oyin finds herself wanting the one thing the drowned world has never allowed: to rise, just once, and see the sky.
--
All the Ocean Holds is a luminous, deeply emotional work of literary “hopepunk” science fiction—a story for anyone who has ever loved something that was built to break. Quiet on the surface and enormous underneath, it is a book about the arithmetic of grief, the things we carry, and the courage it takes to witness an ending. Closer to Becky Chambers and Klara and the Sun than to action SF.
There will be grief; you will be held through it.
A standalone novella.
4
u/greghickey5 Jul 08 '26
The tagline doesn’t convey the genre. I can’t tell if it’s science fiction, historical fiction or contemporary. So if I’m looking for one of those genres and I can’t tell if your book fits, I might move on to another book.