Up in Ontario

Book Information

It's a strange thing to try and write copy for your own book. You spend n years working on something (in my case, roughly six) and then you're asked to summarize it into a cute 'hanger' for sales reps. "Just give us one sentence that sums it all up. Something that people will remember."

Now, I have nothing against sales reps, since they do a difficult job I don't do and they do it well if they're still employed in the current industry. More than one inkslave has been seduced by the easy target of bashing the publishing industry, and each one who has fallen has been subsequently reduced in public esteem. But it seems to me that the whole process of publishing and selling a book can't help but be reductive, and can't help itself because this is the way it's done, and this is the way it's always been done. But for a sensitive writerly type, that can be a little (how shall we say this), well, offensive. The word vulgar also comes to mind, but it's connotation is too prissy. Luckily, I'm not one of those types. You know, the ones Russell Smith writes about.

To whit, here is my stab at copywriting for my own book for my own website for my own book. Please, read along and help.

Set at Lake of the Woods, in Kenora, Ontario, and in the parklands of Manitoba, Up in Ontario is the story of the Dubois family coming of age.

For most people, the Lake of the Woods is a summer-time paradise -- a weekend retreat to cottages. For Wade Dubois, Lake of the Woods exists as an alternate part of himself, a place where he visits his dad once or twice a year. As Wade gets older, he learns to live life in two worlds, his mother's in upscale Winnipeg, and his father's, out of a boat or a tent on Lake of the Woods.

As Wade grows up, he must decide for himself what Lake of the Woods means to him. It is a place that has kept his mother and father apart, a place that has kept him and his father together, and a place caught between Canada's earliest days and the progress of development; it is Up in Ontario.

Through nostalgia, sadness and joy, Up in Ontario covers thirty years in the history of the Dubois family as they carve their lives out of the Canadian shield.

ISBN: 0-88801-286-1
$18.95 Canadian / $16.95 US, quality
paperback 5-1/2 x 8-1/2, 236 pages