Writing jacket copy

Re-wrote the jacket copy for 300 Miles to Galveston. This is much better:

In 2037, a man and his daughter flee the ruins of suburban Dallas, driven by a radio broadcast from the Gulf Coast offering rescue for dozens of survivors. With no gasoline or ammunition, they rely on bicycles, simple weapons, and their wits as they race to the signal’s source. Every few hours, the number of survivors to be rescued shrinks in an updated broadcast. When they arrive in Galveston, the cause of the global apocalypse is revealed in a bloody and surprising conclusion.

You’d think I’d be good at this (I was an editor for Simon & Schuster, and wrote catalog copy in another life), but it’s hard to step back from your own stuff and write as a publisher, instead of a writer. What I had before was a summary with a little titillation, not promotional copy that makes you want to buy the book:

Volume 1 of the Displacement series. A Top 10 Amazon Best Seller in Kindle Science Fiction Adventure, now available in paperback. It started on November 17, 2034, during the peak of the Leonids meteor shower. After that night, no one was born, and no one stayed dead. Three years later, with society collapsing, Kurt Fullmer and his daughter Sophie heard a message on their shortwave radio: “This is the USS Fort Worth, at Coast Guard Station Galveston. We have room for 41 survivors. We will update the count as we accept new passengers. Message repeats.” Can they survive the trek across post-apocalyptic Texas? Will they find rescue, or just a new place to die?

Oh, by the way, you can buy it here (CreateSpace paperback), here (Amazon paperback, if you get free shipping), or here (Kindle). It’ll be on Nook and iBookstore next month.