Month: June 2017

thebibliosphere:

fidoruh:

hopefulkillianheart:

rhube:

lediableaquatre:

fearnotthepen:

I don’t understand why books have shifted from having summaries on the back of the covers to having one-line reviews.

Seriously though. I want to know what the book is about. Not that someone from the Evening Standard thinks it’s a masterpiece. 

I have been waiting for this post my whole life.

Editors I have talked to seem *genuinely* surprised when I bring this up, but, honestly, I don’t care if Stephen King, Robin Hobb, and GRRM ALL liked it, I WANT TO KNOW WHAT IT’S ABOUT.

I never buy a book with a blurb on the back like how the fuck do I know if I am even remotely interested in the story

@thebibliosphere

The blurb got moved–on hardbacks–to the inner sleeve cause marketing showed (a phrase that makes my soul shrivel) that if a book had positive reviews on it, people would trust those reviews and be more likely to buy it.

Most paperbacks will still have a blurb on the back, but it’ll be vague and buzzwordy because it was written by someone in aforementioned marketing team, sort of like how they will tag certain words to make it jump out in a Google search for ebooks. It doesn’t necessarily have to be accurate–just so long as you get the general overall feel for it in order to make a reader think “hey I might like this.”

In reality, authors have very little to do with the cover of their own books, from the composition to the words that appear on the front and back. Some publishing houses will even change the title, and once you’ve sold that book, they are perfectly within their rights to do so and better pick something which marketing will think their target audience will engage with. Hell, I’ve seen authors names changes cause marketing suggests readers won’t read XYZ genre written by Author Name who is known for writing ZYX, so it will be suggested to the author that another name be used, and most authors will go along with it because the implied threat of “we won’t publish you otherwise” hangs in the air over their contract like an axe.

This is not so much true of big name authors in big publishing houses, but for small time fish, it’s fairly common to have nothing to do with the cover design of your book. Indie small houses tend to be a little better about it, but that’s usually because their marketing team is smaller and it’s more cost effective to throw the blurb at the authorxs head and say “here, you do it”.