Judging a book by its back cover

This is the 268th edition of SHuSH, the newsletter of The Sutherland House Inc.

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There hasn’t been a bookselling season pass at Sutherland House that we haven’t discussed our approach to back covers.

There are five things you can do with the back of a book.

• You can print several blurbs, those short recommendations of the book from other authors or subject-matter experts

• You can run “praise” for the author, quotes from previous reviews or blurbs attesting to his or her merits

• You can display an author photograph

• You can sell or tease the content of the book with a short excerpt or a description of the contents

• You can go with some combination of the above.

That’s not an exhaustive list. You can also extend the cover art from the front to the back cover, or use other visual elements, or advertise the publisher, or talk more about the author. But those are the major approaches in use by publishers at the moment. It should be mentioned that most hardcover books have dust jackets that feature a description of the book on the inside front flap and the author bio and photo on the inside back flap, which argues against descriptive or author material on the back.

Blurbs are by far the most popular way to fill a back cover. I walked into a Barnes & Noble this week. This was the first table I met. Twenty books, all but three had blurbs on the back. The rest had praise for the author (quotes from reviews of previous books).

I looked at the nearest fiction table. Of the forty-six books there, thirty-seven had blurbs on the back. The exceptions were the authors who no longer need to impress anyone: Louise Penny, Nora Roberts, Lee Child, Nicholas Sparks, Clive Cussler. Their publishers opted for author photos:

I don’t have a problem with author photos (although the Childs are trying too hard). They used to be common in the fiction world, before it was swamped by blurbs. I can remember trolling through bookstores in an era when you saw photos on most back covers. The point of the exercise seemed to be to make the author look cool, rather like an album cover (ever see a blurb on an album cover?). Especially when the author was young and attractive, it could leave an indelible image and help sell the book:

A difficulty with back-cover photos is that some authors can pull them off better than others, and you never want to have that conversation with a writer.

The other exceptions to the blurb rule on the fiction table at Barnes & Noble were as follows:

• Liane Moriarity, who went with a praise/photo combo, and a single blurb on the front cover

• Stephen King, who went with a simple tease (great cover, though)

• Zora Neale Hurston’s posthumously published The Life of Herod the Great, which went with a short excerpt from the preface

• Lucy Foley’s publisher went with a descriptive teaser and a quote from a review of her previous book (without telling prospective buyers that she is the author of that previous book, The Paris Apartment, which seems an oversight).

  

  Just to make sure this wasn’t an odd sampling of books, I went over to this wall of new releases and checked them out. I didn’t count, but they, too, overwhelmingly featured blurbs:

  

  I’m surprised at the reliance on blurbs, for a couple of reasons. First, every book has them. Especially within genres, they all tend to sound the same and use the same language—captivating, spellbinding, eye-opening, inspirational, timely, haunting, unputdownable, etc. Readers have to know they can’t all be that.

  Second, blurbs are a lot of work. From a Sophie Vershbow piece in Esquire:

  An editorial director within the Big Five (the five largest publishing houses: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Hachette) who asked to remain anonymous told me that he spends about a third of his week dealing with blurbs, which includes tasks like making wish lists with the author and their agent, sending queries, and chasing down ‘drop dead’ due dates. He completes these tasks, he joked, ‘all while coaching my author to stay calm or gently explaining to them why Donna Tartt isn't really an option.’

  I don’t know about a third of a week, but blurbs aren’t easy. You have to do all the chores listed above, hope they get delivered, and hope again that they don’t sound just like the other blurbs you’ve requested. They’re not much fun for the blurber, either. They involve a lot of work (another book to read) and they don’t pay. They are mostly written as favours to the author, agent, or publisher (a number of writers I know ask the requesting author to draft something for them).

  That last point is the third reason I find the reliance on blurbs surprising. Everyone in the industry knows they’re a massive circle jerk. And a lot of readers must know this, too. Roughly once a year, someone writes an expose of the blurb economy. One of my all-time favourites:

The fourth and most important reason blurb dependency is surprising is that the limited data available indicate they’re ineffective. The audience-research firm Codex Group tested variations of book covers, some with blurbs, some without, in surveys of several thousand readers. A very small number of participants found blurbs meaningful, and only when the person doing the blurbing mattered to them, and the blurb itself contributed to their understanding of the book. When it came to purchasing decisions, 2.5 percent of participants admitted to discovering a book through the recommendation of a favourite author, and 1 percent bought the book as a result.

All this begs the question, why do publishers rely so heavily on blurbs?

I don’t have a good answer. Maybe they’re not convinced by the research or have seen other research. Maybe they believe buying decisions at bookstores can be influenced by blurbs. Vershbow managed to find one bookseller who admitted to using them to sort through a mountain of proffered books.

At least once a season at Sutherland House, we ask ourselves why we’re scrambling to get blurbs for our books. If it’s because the author wants them and will help us chase them down, we’ll cheerfully do them. Sometimes, as publishers of a lot of topical nonfiction, we feel that the right blurbs will either drive home why people need to read this book at this moment, or underscore the authority of the author on the subject (although the front flap description and the author bio also contribute here).

Increasingly, we’re avoiding blurbs and running something rooted in the book’s content, an excerpt or a tease, compatible rather than redundant with the description on the front flap. These items help bring the book to life and make for a better cover package.

Do they have any more influence than blurbs on the purchasing decisions of readers?

No idea.

If anyone has seen any other research or persuasive arguments on the best use of back covers, drop a comment below.

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Start the year informed

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Banuta Rubess’s Funny, You Don’t Look Bookish, reviews five books a week.

The Bibliophile from Biblioasis, an independent publisher based in Windsor.

The Literary Review of Canada’s Bookworm, “your weekly dose of exclusive reviews, book excerpts, and more.”

Art Kavanagh’s Talk about books: Book discussion and criticism.

Gayla Gray’s SoNovelicious: Books, reading, writing, and bookstores.

Esoterica Magazine: Literature and popular culture.

Benjamin Errett’s Get Wit Quick, literature and other fun stuff

Lydia Perovic’s Long Play: literature and music.

Tim Carmody’s Amazon Chronicles: an eye on the monster.

Jason Logan’s Urban Color Report: adventures in ink (sign-up at bottom of page)

Anne Trubek’s Notes from a Small Press: like SHuSH, but different

Art Canada Institute: a reliable source of Canadian arts info/opinion

Kate McKean’s Agents & Books: an interesting angle on the literary world

Rebecca Eckler’s Re:Book: unpretentious recommendations

Anna Sproul Latimer’s How to Glow in the Dark: interesting advice

John Biggs Great Reads: strong recommendations

Steven Beattie’s That Shakespearean Rag, a newsy blog about books and reading

Mark Dykeman’s How About This: Atlantic Canadian interviews and thoughts on writing and creativity.

J. W. Ellenhall’s 3-Page Book Battles: Readers help her choose which of three random books to review each month.

Donald Brackett’s Embodied Meanings: “Arts music films literature and popular culture.”

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