ButtonYellow2With thanks to those kind enough to comment on my first take at a book blurb, here’s Take Two. As before, comments are very welcome.

First, a quick note on my thinking behind this draft.

Since I didn’t spend time trying to get my first book into brick and mortar bookstores, and don’t plan to with this one either, what clearly matters the most is what presents at Amazon, and, to a lesser extent, at Google, Barnes & Noble and iTunes. Using Amazon as an example, you get two bites at the apple: a short blurb that displays on the book landing page, and then additional text if the visitor wants to click on the “read more” button.

In looking at a lot of books on line, the tendency seems to be to include only a couple of sentences on the landing page. Some authors don’t even bother to go beyond this at all. Others do, with some giving plot synopses, and others expanding on other elements instead.

In this draft, I’ve gone with the latter approach, putting mostly a thematic hook on the landing page, and then trying to come up with additional tempting details to supplement it, with the entirety still being pretty short, and also (per multiple suggestions) dropping the language and the concepts of the original last paragraph entirely.

With that by way of explanation, here’s Take Two. Do you think it does the job?

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America is rushing headlong into another election year, but something is wrong – the polls don’t match reality. It’s up to cybersecurity super sleuth Frank Adversego to find out who is trying to hack the presidential election, and to stop them before they do.

The action begins when Adversego is enlisted by a government agency without a name to find out who is manipulating poll results. The mystery deepens when he discovers that multiple teams of hackers are scrambling for the ultimate prize, and will do anything to win. It’s a race against the clock as the presidential election – and Adversego’s life – hang in the balance.

In this latest Frank Adversego satirical thriller, you’ll meet a scheming Native American casino manager, a scrum of presidential candidates too incredible to be believed anywhere outside of a real American election, a former Secretary of Defense unwilling to leave anything to chance, and an attractive French hitchhiker that Adversego rescues in the middle of a desert, and soon wishes he hadn’t.

* * *

Andrew Updegrove, an attorney, has been representing technology companies for more than thirty years and works with many of the organizations seeking to thwart cyber-attacks before they occur. A graduate of Yale University and the Cornell University Law School, he lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

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