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Colin the Copywriter @colinthecopywriter.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

(1/2) What is the purpose of stories? Recent 2026 @clarkeaward.bsky.social winner @catamaroon.bsky.social & Arcadia Books When There Are Wolves Again pitches story as hope. Everything about this quiet but insistent blurb dares us to imagine a better future . . .

When There Are Wolves Again by EJ Swift and wolf image

Blurb: Decades from now, two women sit beside a campfire and reflect on their life stories. For fifty years, they have fought to restore Britain's depleted natural landscape, and to give voice to those who cannot speak for themselves. Both dream of a time when there are wolves again. A novel of hope, tragedy, despair and triumph, When There Are Wolves Again offers a vision of the future that is only just out of reach.

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Colin the Copywriter @colinthecopywriter.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

Blurbs in the wild (1/2): How do we pitch horror stories to a literary crowd? One way is to hold back the horror until they're hooked in. The blurb for @lucyrosecreates.bsky.social The Lamb begins by keeping the reader's options open – folk tale, horror story, love story, enchantment. Take your pick

Blurb: A FOLK TALE. A HORROR STORY. A LOVE STORY. AN ENCHANTMENT. Margot and Mama have lived by the forest since Margot can remember. When Margot isn't at school, they spend quiet days together in their cottage, waiting for strangers to knock on their door. Strays, Mama calls them. Mama loves the strays. She feeds them wine, keeps them warm. Then she satisfies her burning appetite by picking apart their bodies. But Mama's want is stronger than her hunger sometimes, and when a white-toothed stray named Eden turns up in the heart of a snowstorm, little Margot must confront the shifting dynamics of her family, untangle her own desires and make a bid for freedom. With this tender coming-of-age tale, debut novelist Lucy Rose explores how women swallow their anger, desire and animal instincts - and wrings the relationship between mother and daughter until blood drips from it.

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Colin the Copywriter @colinthecopywriter.bsky.social · 02/03/2026

A 'cremulator' is involved, apparently. The Terminator film series is not a patch on The Cremulator film series in my head: 'You'll be dust.' www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

bbc.co.uk

Scotland becomes first UK country to allow water cremations

The process - called alkaline hydrolysis - will offer families a third option instead of burial or traditional cremation.

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Colin the Copywriter @colinthecopywriter.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

Blurbs in the wild (1/2): @panmacmillan.bsky.social know how to have fun with a funny book. First, we have two increasingly ridiculous lists – the first asking a question and the second list (deliberately over-deploying the word mysterious) answering in an unilluminating but also intriguing way.

Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Blurb and quotes: What do a dead cat, a computer whiz-kid, an Electric Monk who believes the world is pink, quantum mechanics, a Chronologist over two hundred years old, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (poet), and pizza have in common? Apparently not much; until Dirk Gently, self-styled private investigator, sets out to prove the fundamental interconnectedness of all things by solving a mysterious murder, assisting a mysterious professor, unravelling a mysterious mystery, and eating a lot of pizza – not to mention saving the entire human race from extinction along the way (at no extra charge). To find out more, read this book (better still, buy it then read it) – or contact Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. 'A thumping good detective-ghost-horror-who dunnit-time travel-romantic-musical-comedy-epic' - Douglas Adams

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Colin the Copywriter @colinthecopywriter.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

Blurbs in the wild: (1/2) @faberbooks.bsky.social reissue of Kay Dick's unsettling THEY has a blurb that is having great fun with its title. Making the perfectly ordinary word THEY sound increasingly sinister & ominous, the blurb, through a series of lists describes how THEY change the world ...

Blurb: This is Britain: but not as we know it. THEY begin with a dead dog, shadowy footsteps, confiscated books. Soon the National Gallery is purged; eerie towers survey the coast; mobs stalk the countryside destroying artworks - and those who resist. THEY capture dissidents - writers, painters, musicians, even the unmarried and childless - in military sweeps, 'curing' these subversives of individual identity. Survivors gather together as cultural refugees, preserving their crafts, creating, loving and remembering. But THEY make it easier to forget ...

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Colin the Copywriter @colinthecopywriter.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

(1/4) @theodoragoss.bsky.social and @tachyonpub.bsky.social brilliant Letters from an Imaginary Country does what is says on the tin. These remarkable short stories take you places you didn’t know existed. The book’s blurb is a three parter:

Theodora Goss's Letters from an Imaginary Country plus magnetic alphabet letters

Blurb: Roam through the captivating stories of World Fantasy and Mythopoeic Award winner Theodora Goss (the Athena Club trilogy). This themed collection of imaginary places, with three new stories, recalls Susanna Clarke’s alternate Europe and the surreal metafictions of Jorge Luis Borges. The infamous girl monsters of nineteenth-century fiction gather in London and form their own club. In the imaginary country of Thüle, characters from folklore band together to fight a dictator. An intrepid girl reporter finds the hidden land of Oz―and joins its invasion of our world. The author writes the autobiography of her alternative life and a science fiction love letter to Budapest. The White Witch conquers England with snow and silence. Deeply influenced by the author’s Hungarian childhood during the regime of the Soviet Union, each of these intricate stories engages with storytelling and identity, including Goss's own.

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Colin the Copywriter @colinthecopywriter.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

(1/2) Plotless, dreamlike, meandering, Joanne McNeil’s and @fsgbooks.bsky.social Wrong Way is the mid-21st-century work novel par excellence. The blurb on the back, like the book it describes, is a long no-nonsense straightforward explanation of what you’re going to get. No hard sell. No hooks...

Joanne McNeil's Wrong Way and Princess Peach toy car

Blurb: For years, Teresa has passed from one job to the next, settling into long stretches of time, struggling to build her career in any field or unstick herself from an endless cycle of labor. The dreaded move from one gig to another is starting to feel unbearable. When a recruiter connects her with a contract position at AllOver, it appears to check all her prerequisites for a “good” job. It’s a fintech corporation with progressive hiring policies and a social justice-minded mission statement. Their new service for premium members: a functional fleet of driverless cars. The future of transportation. As her new-hire orientation reveals, the distance between AllOver’s claims and its actions is wide, but the lure of financial stability and a flexible schedule is enough to keep Teresa driving forward. Joanne McNeil, who often reports on how the human experience intersects with labor and technology brings blazing compassion and criticism to Wrong Way, examining the treacherous gaps between the working and middle classes wrought by the age of AI. Within these divides, McNeil turns the unsaid into the unignorable, and captures the existential perils imposed by a nonstop, full-service gig economy.

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Zeno Agency @zenoagency.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

UK paperback edition of EXO by @colinthecopywriter.bsky.social is out today! zenoagency.com/news/exo-uk-... Published by @diversionbooks.bsky.social.

Cover for Colin Brush's EXO - a figure runs towards what looks like a thick fog/smoke cloud. The title, in large text, runs down the centre of the image, author's name along the bottom.

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Colin the Copywriter @colinthecopywriter.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

Blurbs in the wild (1/3): A war story is a love story. And the quietly subversive blurb sneaks up on you. In @amalelmohtar.com and @maxgladstone.bsky.social Quercus-published This is How You Lose the Time War, the blurb ought to be bleak, filled with the language of anger and violence: . . .

Amal-el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone's This is How You Lose the Time War

Blurb: Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading. Red and Blue, two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions, strike up an unlikely correspondence. But what started as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more: something epic and romantic. Something that could change the past and the future. The discovery of their bond will mean their deaths. There's still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win that war. That's how war works. Right?

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Colin the Copywriter @colinthecopywriter.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

Blurbs in the wild: (1/2) @rfkuang.bsky.social Katabasis' blurb is all problems & stakes. The first paragraph gives the set up: to be a best magician. All else is obstacles in our hero's way: a dead facilitator, a visit to Hell, the rival whose help you need but . . .

Blurb: Grad student Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become the brightest mind in the field of analytic magick. But the only person who can make her dream come true is dead and – inconveniently – in Hell. And Alice, along with her biggest rival Peter Murdoch, is going after him. But Hell is not as the philosophers claim, its rules are upside-down, and if she’s going to get out of there alive, she and Peter will have to work together. That’s if they can agree on anything. Will they triumph, or kill each other trying?

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Colin the Copywriter @colinthecopywriter.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

Lovely early Christmas present for Exo, being part of @libraryjournal.bsky.social selection of the Best SF Books of 2025. @zenoagency.bsky.social @awfulagent.bsky.social

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Colin the Copywriter @colinthecopywriter.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

Thanks to The Indie View for the interview about Exo . . . www.theindieview.com/2025/11/18/i...

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Deborah Kalb @deborahkalb.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

Q&A with Colin Brush about his new novel, EXO. tinyurl.com/5n8784hr

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Colin the Copywriter @colinthecopywriter.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

Thanks to @athenascalzi.com & @scalzi.com for the chance to talk about a Big Idea involving my novel Exo over at Whatever. It's all about writing adaptability and exploring different paths through the story woods. Because there's more than one way to tell a story. whatever.scalzi.com/2025/11/20/t...

whatever.scalzi.com

The Big Idea: Colin Brush

When writing a novel, a lot of people think of the process as sort of rigid. You have a specific story to tell and it needs to be an unchanging vision all the way through. Author Colin Brush, howev…

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Colin the Copywriter @colinthecopywriter.bsky.social · 20/11/2025

Thanks to @andrewliptak.com for putting my novel Exo on his list of new titles to consider checking out this month. Lots of great titles on that list that you should definitely *LOOK INTO MY EYES* FORGET THEY EVER EXISTED, BUY ONLY EXO . . . transfer-orbit.ghost.io/sci-fi-fanta...

transfer-orbit.ghost.io

11 new SF/F books to check out this November

Hidden secrets, uninhabitable planets, secret worlds, and quite a bit more to check out

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Colin the Copywriter @colinthecopywriter.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

But if you're in the UK/Europe and want a physical copy, you'll need to wait until January . . .

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JABberwocky Literary Agency @awfulagent.bsky.social · 17/11/2025

"Colin Brush is a name to watch in the realm of speculative fiction" 💥 EXO by @colinthecopywriter.bsky.social publishes tomorrow!

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Colin the Copywriter @colinthecopywriter.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

It's been a long journey, but thanks to @jberlyne.bsky.social @awfulagent.bsky.social @tonimargarita.bsky.social & Shannon Donnelly and all at @diversionbooks.bsky.social (not to mention @bookforward.bsky.social & @michelvrana.com ) for bringing Exo out into the world in style.

Happy Publication day, Exo. May you find the readers you deserve. Plus packshots of the novel Exo and as it appears on an e-reader and a phone.

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Colin the Copywriter @colinthecopywriter.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

Thanks to @booktrib.bsky.social for the chance to talk about five books dealing with change in the world & how we live with that change, each of which changed how I wrote my own novel, Exo. booktrib.com/2025/11/12/f... @tadethompson.bsky.social @sannewman.bsky.social @catamaroon.bsky.social

A hand holding the Earth with the title 'Books to Hold Close As the World Turns', featuring 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson, The Country of Ice Cream Star by Sandra Newman, Skyward Inn by Aliya Whiteley, Rosewater by Tade Thompson and The Coral Bones by EJ Swift

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Colin the Copywriter @colinthecopywriter.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

Blurbs in the wild (1/2): Follow where the title leads. For @cornerstone_press & Ernest Cline's Ready Player One the super-short blurb is all tell and no show, leaning heavily on gaming tropes. WORLD AT STAKE. GOOD AND EVIL. QUEST. FATE OF HUMANITY. And, lastly . . .

Blurb: Imagine the WORLD AT STAKE. An EPIC STRUGGLE between good and evil. The GREATEST QUEST in history. The FATE OF HUMANITY resting in your hands. ARE YOU READY?

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Colin the Copywriter @colinthecopywriter.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

I've read it from top to bottom twice and, while I accept I've got a vested interest, I do think you might have missed one . . . reactormag.com/new-science-... @reactorsff.bsky.social @diversionbooks.bsky.social @awfulagent.bsky.social @zenoagency.bsky.social #ColinBrush #Exo #sciencefiction

Reactor's November 2025 science fiction publications with my novel Exo making an oversized and uninvited-to-the-party entrance.

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Colin the Copywriter @colinthecopywriter.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

Blurbs in the wild (1/3): Classic book, classic copy shape. @gollancz.bsky.social edition of Frank Herbert's Dune features copy with an inverted triangle shape. We start big and wide with awards & movie affirmation, followed by landmark works of SF that followed Dune. Says: this book matters . . .

Blurb: WINNER OF THE HUGO AWARD.  WINNER OF THE NEBULA AWARD. NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE. Before The Matrix, before Star Wars, before Ender's Game and Neuromancer, there was Dune, one of the greatest science fiction novels ever written. Melange, or 'spice', is the most valuable - and rarest - element in the universe. And it can only be found on a single planet: the inhospitable desert world Arrakis. Whoever controls Arrakis controls the spice. And whoever controls the spice controls the universe. When stewardship of Arrakis is transferred to his house, Paul Atreides must travel to the planet's dangerous surface to ensure the future of his family and his people. But as malevolent forces explode into conflict around him, Paul is thrust into a great destiny beyond his understanding. And in this game of power, only those who can conquer their fear will survive.

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Colin the Copywriter @colinthecopywriter.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

Perspective is everything. Plus, this reminds me strongly of the ladders I am wobblingly and swayingly at the top of in my dreams/nightmares. The base of the ladder is usually in a moving vehicle to add to the fun . . . www.thisiscolossal.com/2021/11/stri...

thisiscolossal.com

A 'Staircase to Heaven' Installation Ascends into the Sky as a Trippy Optical Illusion

South African artist Strijdom van der Merwe’s deceptive “Staircase to Heaven” sculpture is designed to make you wonder. When viewed straight on, the towering optical illusion appears to ascend into th...

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Colin the Copywriter @colinthecopywriter.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

Lovers of Dungeness: click below to discover how this curious corner of Kent coastline was the seed for Exo, my SF murder mystery set at the end of the world. Thanks to Michael Golding for asking me to write about his home & not minding my hubris at playing nemesis. dungeness.org.uk/info/exo-a-n...

Homepage for Dungeness.org with view of the beach and ruined shacks.

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Colin the Copywriter @colinthecopywriter.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

Blurbs in the wild (1/2): This old warhorse! After all these years @gollancz.bsky.social & @lordgrimdark.bsky.social The Blade Itself is still sporting its original cover and blurb. But this blurb knows something legions of Grim Dark fantasy imitators often forget: it's all about the characters ...

Blurb: Logen Ninefingers, infamous barbarian, has finally run out of luck. Caught up in one feud too many he's about to become a dead barbarian, leaving nothing behind but bad songs and dead friends. Jezal dan Luthar, paragon of selfishness, has nothing more dangerous in mind than winning glory in the fencing circle. But war is brewing, and on the battlefields of the frozen North they fight by altogether bloodier rules. Inquisitor Glokta, cripple turned torturer. would like little more than seeing Jezal come home in a box. But then he hates everyone. Cutting treason out of the heart of the Union one confession at a time leaves little room for friendships - and his latest trail of corpses could lead straight to the rotten heart of government if he can just stay alive long enough to follow it.

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Zeno Agency @zenoagency.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

EXO by Colin Brush is out in two weeks! zenoagency.com/news/exo-by-... Due to be published by @diversionbooks.bsky.social (print and eBook) and @dreamscape-media.bsky.social (audio) on November 18th.

Cover for Colin Brush's EXO - a man runs away along a road, thick clouds roil before hum. Big title, running down the middle of the image, author's name along the bottom of the cover.

Audiobook cover for Colin Brush's EXO - a man runs away along a road, thick clouds roil before hum. Big title, running down the middle of the image, author's name along the bottom of the cover.

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Colin the Copywriter @colinthecopywriter.bsky.social · 05/11/2025

Blurbs in the wild (1/2): The secret here is in the middle. Most blurb writers (myself included?) would pitch @harpercollins.bsky.social and @robinhobb.bsky.social Assassin's Apprentice with just paragraphs 1 and 3 of this blurb. Pitch the set up, the character's situation and the story direction...

Blurb: The kingdom of the Six Duchies is on the brink of civil war when news breaks that the crown prince has fathered a bastard son and is shamed into abdication. The child’s name is Fitz, and he is despised.
Raised in the castle stables, only the company of the king’s fool, the ragged children of the lower city, and his unusual affinity with animals provide Fitz with any comfort.
To be useful to the crown, Fitz is trained as an assassin; and to use the traditional magic of the Farseer family. But his tutor, allied to another political faction, is determined to discredit, even kill him. Fitz must survive: for he may be destined to save the kingdom.

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Colin the Copywriter @colinthecopywriter.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

Blurbs in the wild (1/2): Avoiding spoilers. Sometimes pitching the book’s plot would spoil the read. But how do you find an intriguing way of pitching the little you can say? In Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary, we’re given a problem – the coming death of humankind – and . . .

Blurb: A LONE ASTRONAUT.
AN IMPOSSIBLE MISSION.
AN ALLY HE NEVER IMAGINED.
Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission - and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.
But right now, he doesn't know that. All he knows is that he's been asleep for a very, very long time, and he's just woken to find himself hurtling through space, millions of miles from home.
It's up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery, and he's got to do it all alone... Or does he?

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