The first public info about No Going Back

The path to a novel's publication is long and complex. Even as I am still several months from finishing No Going Back, Publisher Toni and the fine folks at Baen are busy doing all the behind-the-scenes work necessary to bring the book to market.

One of the items they create is what's known as the promo copy. This is a short bit of text that they use to tell both the sales force and ultimately readers about the book. As you might expect, the copy is supposed to interest and intrigue buyers, but it also has to help the understand within seconds what kind of book it is.

This copy goes on to form the basis for the material on the book that goes into a sales catalog. It appears in the online database of Simon & Schuster, the distributor. From there, it goes to booksellers such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble. It gets around.

With Publisher Toni's kind permission, I'm going to show it to you here. I am going with my latest version, which differs in a key way from the last one I saw. If the online one differs from this one, trust me, mine is right. (Publisher Toni's version, though, will appear in far more places.) This text tells more about the novel than I've ever told anyone publicly.

Enjoy.

Promo copy for
No Going Back

Jon and Lobo are back–
and enemies on all sides are out to get them.
Haunted by memories of children he could not save, Jon Moore becomes so increasingly self-destructive that even his best friend, the hyper-intelligent Predator-Class Assault Vehicle, Lobo, is worried. So when Jon receives both a job offer and a message from a woman from his distant past, he and Lobo leap at the welcome diversions.

That the job is illegal is the least of their problems. They’re happy to retrieve stolen artifacts from Jon’s quarantined home world, and their fee is high even for a job so highly illegal.

The forces protecting their targets are formidable, and the assault team that’s chasing them is even more dangerous–but Jon and Lobo are used to that.

The scientist Jon and Lobo need for the mission has an agenda of her own, but they’ve faced that problem before.

This time, though, the knowledge that they and the others seek spells doom for Jon.

Racing from planet to planet, Jon and Lobo come at last to a world so inhospitable that its statues and monuments outnumber its living inhabitants. Desperate and out of options, they encounter their deadliest challenges yet and must make life-changing decisions from which there truly is

No Going Back