Author Stephen Graham Jones Captures Our Love-Hate of the “Back Cover Copy”

I know I don’t need to tell any of you this, but the "back cover copy” or publisher’s descriptions of books can both help and hurt a book. Yes it’s a great way for us to preview a book and even book talk it to our patrons. But, on the other hand, these descriptions can give away major twists or even inaccurately portray the book that follows inside the covers.

When I had my book club vote on possible titles, I only provided them with publisher copy to make their choices. Of course they could go seek more info on their own, but the “back cover copy” was at least a standard that I wasn’t influencing. Some of these blurbs were so bad and inaccurate that we would discuss them during the book discussion.

The point is, we all have a love-hate relationship with the “back cover copy” as library workers and as readers, but authors have just as complicated a relationship with it too.  Recently, one of my favorite authors, Stephen Graham Jones, took on this issue on his blog here.

As a reader, writer, and professor Jones looks at this issue from a variety of angles. I highly urge all of you to read it because you will learn much about how both authors and readers approach a book based on that description. This post is an excellent way to give yourself some outside the box CE, a new way to look at something we encounter every day and make it work better in our service.

Click here for the full post, but the opening bit is appended below to pique your curiosity:

Strikes me that the reason a lot of novels start out so slowly is that they don’t take into account the version of the catalog copy on their back cover. That copy nearly always gives away the central conceit or trick or surprise of the novel, but the novel, pretending to itself that it exists as pages only, no marketing involved, plays its central whatever close to the vest for eighty or a hundred pages, taking the reader up an agonizingly slow incline to the first of its twists or reveals or big developments. Except the reader, because of that back cover copy that got them to buy the novel in the first place, they’re not reading in a “wait, what’s going to happen here?”-mode but a “when’s what I read about on the back cover going to happen”-mode.

At least I know I do.

Click here to read more. And also do yourself a favor and go read something by Jones himself. His works is both brilliant and fun to read, a mix that is quite unique.