Publishing
A book description has a strange job. It needs to explain enough that a reader knows what they’re buying, but not so much that the whole thing feels flattened into a tidy little summary.
Overexplaining can make a novel sound smaller than it is, which is a pity. Some stories need room to breathe on the page, even if the blurb has to be practical about it.
The best descriptions usually seem to understand that tension. Clear, but not over-neat. Enough shape to be useful, enough mystery to keep the book alive.
Overexplaining can make a novel sound smaller than it is, which is a pity. Some stories need room to breathe on the page, even if the blurb has to be practical about it.
The best descriptions usually seem to understand that tension. Clear, but not over-neat. Enough shape to be useful, enough mystery to keep the book alive.
The blurb also has a dirty job. It’s often where a book gets reduced to its most marketable bits, whether that suits the novel or not.
For crime, especially, I’d rather have one sharp problem and a sense of tone than a list of plot turns. If the description reads like a police file, I’m already half gone.
For crime, especially, I’d rather have one sharp problem and a sense of tone than a list of plot turns. If the description reads like a police file, I’m already half gone.
A blurb also has to sell tone, which is where a lot of them go wrong. Some descriptions are so busy proving the premise that they forget to sound like the book. If a novel is sharp, funny, bleak, formal, messy, the copy should give that away. Otherwise you end up with a perfectly accurate summary of the wrong experience.