Sales pitches and blurbs

I'm nearly done transcribing my last set of revisions, still need one more fight scene toward end and have to cut about 25000 words, but its still close enough to start thinking about how to get it published so I've been thinking about sales pitches. Some sites have suggested that the query letter should have something of the flavor of a jacket blurb.

How about:

“She is strong like some pottery,” her interogator noted, “able to bear great weights, yet fragile if struck in the wrong direction. Her spirit, too, is strong, but thin, a veneer over the cracked surface beneath.”

Candice McGregor had spent more time off planet than any other Earther, over two years of it as the subject of alien experiments and torture by Cereli scientists until some of their own broke her free. Now her second trip, to teach alien languages and cultures at the Commonwealth university on REagell seems likely to take a similar course. Her Cerel captors seem interested in resuming where Nish left off, but this time Candice is not alone. A bunch of Commonwealth military and govies are taken with her, including her most recent alien lover, the future of govenor of REagell. With Commoner Spacers, Marines, and the govenor’s staffers at each others throat, and the Cerel fighting for control of her time, her mind, and her body, Candice is expecting to be tortured to death in a world of unfriendly aliens. Still, on Nish, Candice learned that the Cerel game of bikjni allows goals to be achieved even when the game is lost, and that it is sometimes possible to hold onto life one day, or one hour at a time, even in the midst of hell. It soon becomes a race between exhaustion, madness, and a spirit barely holding on as Candice tries to use what she has learned of her tormentors to find peace and hope, if only for one more day, for all of them.

Probably too much, though its shorter than my first draft and its not the length but the content that is the real issue, here. In the unsuccessful letters I've tried for other books, I've given the basics but I think probably more than is needed in the intial query. For final decision, yeah, they need to know more, but do they really need to know current length (it'll get edited and change anyway), how much of genre? This one is adult science fiction, space fiction (is it important to differentiate? i would have said light science fiction, as it is light on the science, but my comment on a book review I did made me wonder. is my idea of light science fiction really "hard core"? That's what someone said when I so much as suggested that, if telepathy is what makes a story science fiction, then telepathy should play a role in the story line. Hard core? The terms have new definitions and I fear using the wrong one is potentially worse than specigying at all. Do the publishers need to know up front (since it is an editable feature) that the current version has sexual content but nothing explicit, including references and ... vague descriptions of past sexual violence, adult themes but not graphic, some poor values (my main character will at least try to get in bed with several men and others encourage it). How much does the agent or publisher want to know the first time they consider whether even to read more than a couple sample pages?

One pub company said to write the letter in the style of the book, but i doubt they really mean that. The pace wouldn't work, for one thing. A decent scene is more than a page, and a scene conveys one idea, not all the ideas needed for a query letter.