• Welcome to the Fantasy Writing Forums. Register Now to join us!

Gender in Summary

Russ

Istar
That depends on how you trying to market your book. IF you believe that the gender balance is a strong selling point for your book by all means include it subtly. If not, it is not required. The blurb is short and precious, pack it with what you believe will help sell your book and nothing more.
 

Svrtnsse

Staff
Article Team
It's a bit of a marketing thing, like Russ says. The summary/blurb helps set your reader's expectations of the story, as does a great many other things that tell about the story.

An example is when skip.knox posted here on the forums about his Goblins at the Gates being available. The post made it seem like the story would be told from multiple different characters. To a certain extent this is true, in that it's not always told from the PoV of the main character. However, the passages that aren't from the MC are relatively short, and all of them from different characters.
The post here on the forums (more of a sales pitch than a summary) served to give me a slightly incorrect idea of what to expect from the story.

As a rule you'll want your summaries and blurbs and sales pitches to set up the expectations of the reader correctly.

You don't have to spell it out that the story is told from two different PoVs, or that they're male and female respectively, but you can take the opportunity to hint at it, or make it obvious through other means.

Let's say the story is about Bob and Jean and how their relationship struggles while they're trying to save their village from a terrible dragon.

A)
Bob's village is threatened by an angry dragon. Bob and his girlfriend Jean are the only ones who can save it, but can he patch up their misunderstandings before it's too late?

B)
Jean's village is threatened by an angry dragon. Jean and her boyfriend Bob are the only ones who can save it, but can she patch up their misunderstandings before it's too late?

C)
Bob and Jean's is threatened by an angry dragon. Bob and Jean are the only ones who can save it, but can they patch up their misunderstandings and save their relationship too?

Right, three different (and pretty bad) blurbs. The first one hints the story is from Bob's PoV, the second one from Jean's, and the third from both.
This may be a bit more than you asked for but it seemed a fun little exercise to write the blurb examples to see how they turned out.
 
Top