Over-Marketing

**Warning: Rant Incoming**

I’m reading this book. It’s Nalini Singh, so it’s beyond excellent.  Her books are so utterly exquisite to me.  But I have a bone to pick.  Not with Ms. Singh, who is up to her usual insanely stellar standards.  No, I’m annoyed with the folks who packaged the book.  It’s the blurb.  It’s making me crazy.  Observe:

From "the alpha author of paranormal romance" comes the most highly anticipated novel of Nalini Singh's career--one that blurs the line between madness and genius, between subjugation and liberation, between the living and the dead. The one that finally reveals the answer to the most tantalizing Psy-Changeling myster of them all...

A dangerous, volatile rebel, hands stained bloodred. A woman whose very existence has been erased. A love story so dark, it may shatter the world itself. A deadly price that must be paid.

The day of reckoning is here. 

See that?  All style, no substance.  It's like those awful TV promos.  The last thirty seconds of this week's Scandal will be the most SHOCKING OMG MOMENT OF YOUR LIFE.  Awesome.  Thanks for letting me know in advance what my emotional reaction to your show is gonna be, doucheface.

Here's the thing.  This is an ongoing series and I devour each book as it comes, but what’s vexing about this blurb is that it tells us nothing about the story.  We don’t even get to know who the hero and heroine are!  In a series like this where non-hero & heroine characters also get POV sections, you can’t even rely on whoever the first POV on the page is to tell you.  It took me a solid fifteen pages before I was certain whose book I was reading.  And I felt like the back cover blurb was intentionally vague about who the hero is in order to try to con us into thinking we were getting a book about the Ghost.  Whether Kaleb Krychek is the Ghost or not, this is his book, so why not just freaking SAY SO.  To not give us his name, not give us Sahara’s… arg.  It just feels like I’m being jerked around.  I don’t want the blurb to give away crucial plot points, but I do at least want to know whose book I’m reading.  It’s so annoying to me when authors get so big and famous that we don’t even get blurbs anymore.  You get quotes about their awesomeness and giant pictures of them on the back and a title.  That’s it.  Me?  I still want a blurb.  I don’t care if you’re an autobuy author (which Nalini Singh absolutely is!), I still want to know what I’m buying. I shake my fist at you, marketing department. Stop trying to SELL me so dang hard and just let me see what I'm buying.

Rant complete.