Quest Reviews (CLOSED FOR CATCH UP)

Nazeefa's review

Book Title: The Prognostication

Author:  ShubhamKumar917

Genre: Fantasy/Mystery

Chapters Reviewed: 3

Reviewer: @MidnightKoala

Note: I will try and be as constructive and as polite as possible regarding areas that I think can be improved but still remain honest. It is not my intention to be harsh or rude but if any of my comments come across that way, I do apologise sincerely. I am not always right and sometimes my opinions may be different to yours so please do tell me if you don’t agree with something I’ve said or want to discuss further - I am more than happy to. I hope the review is helpful! ❤️

TITLE/COVER:

Your title is really good! It’s unique sounding and has a mysterious hint to it. It’s definitely interesting enough to pull me in. I am not an expert in graphics but I’ll give you my personal perspective of your cover as a reader. I love the choice of image - it really goes well with your title and the themes/vibe I’m getting from the title. It’s an eye catching sight as well. However, I do think your title is too small and doesn’t stand out enough. The author’s name is also obscured due to the choice of colour and so it clashes with the background. The writing under the author’s name is also too small to read so I don’t know what it says. I’d suggest playing around with the image (which is really good!) and trying to find a way to make the title bigger and fit in a good position. The author’s name could easily be fixed by changing the font colour to white. Overall, your cover is nice but definitely could be better to attract more readers. Consider going to a graphics shop if you want or you can experiment with this yourself! Let me know if you want some good graphic shop recommendations. 😉

BLURB:

Note: whenever I mention a quote from your work, I will highlight it between these symbols <> like so: <quote> to make it clearer where the quotes are.

Moving onto the blurb, your first line is pretty good. It’s snappy and intriguing. It is slightly grammatically incorrect though. You wrote: <Life is never an easy going, but for Max, things are even worse.> It should say: Life is never easy going, but for Max, things are even worse. You don’t require the word ‘an’.

When you say <for he is the chosen one!> it feels quite cliché to me so perhaps try and use more extensive vocabulary and intrigue the reader better. Let us know what is unique about your book and why we should read it. What stands out about the plot and storyline and makes it interesting. A lot of books have a ‘chosen one’. Why is your ‘chosen one’ different? 

When you say: <Join Max on this journey as he....> this isn’t the most professional line for a blurb. I believe this line could be taken out and it would sound much more elegant. 

A technical point about your blurb. Ellipses should always only be three dots, not four/five/six. And where you’ve written: <to prepare him for what’s coming….for he is the> here you have four dots for ellipses which should be changed to three, but also, you need a space after the ellipses before the next word ‘for’. So it should be like this:

to prepare him for what’s coming... for he is the

Your last line of your blurb has a rule of five which I believe is a little clumsy. A rule of three would work much better. Instead of saying <...the labyrinth of mystery, fear, pain, loss and agony…...> try choosing three of the five words and it’ll have a much more powerful impact. Again, a reminder to use three ellipses here.