Workshopping blurb/Amazon description
Hi all! I shared my blurb a some time ago in order to get appropriate feedback on my cover design; but now I’m interested in tweaking the blurb itself a bit. I’ve posted it below, followed by specific questions.
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Some pray their whole lives to see the spirit realm.
They don’t know what they’re asking for.
Jubilee Li isn’t proud of her past. After an eye-opening miracle takes her to hell and back, she flees from her regrets—and the law—to start over on the other side of the world in modern-day Beijing. Under a concealed identity, she hopes to heal old wounds and live a normal life.
But that isn’t easy when she looks like she should belong, yet can barely read the language. It’s even harder now that she sees angels and demons everywhere she goes.
When Jubilee spies a girl talking with a demon, she impulsively follows—and captures the attention of Graeson Law, a private detective investigating a series of strange deaths. Determined to free the girl from the agony of hell she escaped, Jubilee agrees to work undercover for Law. But will their work together expose her secrets?
And is the girl tailed by a demon really a victim…or a murderer?
An edge-of-your-seat suspense story with a twist of romance and humor, This Strange Sight is where urban fantasy detective story meets C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters and Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness. This Strange Sight is the first book in The Year of Jubilee, a duology filled with suspense, faith, grit, and, ultimately, hope for what is lost.
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My question is about the phrasing of “urban fantasy detective story” in the final paragraph. Does it sound weird, and how do I make it not sound weird while still optimizing best keywords? My goal is to get “urban fantasy” in there somewhere. In previous versions, the wording here was “crime thriller” or “Dresden Files” (scrapped that one because it was a bad comp, haha), but I got a very insightful note from a beta reader that “urban fantasy” might be the best way to resonate with my target audience. That resonates with me too and feels right, seeing as how this is my debut novel and my future novel ideas are all fantasy. But I feel like I can’t just leave it on its own without adding a descriptor addressing the crime/detective aspect. What would work better? “Urban fantasy crime/crime story?” Or something else?
Open to hearing other general feedback as well.