Cover quotes
Apr. 11th, 2014 06:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceWe used to call them puffs, when I was English. My first American publisher and I confused each other utterly, when she asked me about blurbs and I sent her cover copy, which was what that word meant to me and not what she meant at all.
But anyway: call them what you like, little sentences of advance excitement about a new book are a powerful marketing tool, and a splendid boost to the writer's poor suffering ego also. (It is in the typing of this that I realise that calling them "cover quotes", which has become my default, is not really useful either, in these days when so many releases do not have that kind of cover, and most of these quotes are never actually physically attached to a book any more. I have no solution to offer, except that we need another word.)
As I may have mentioned once or twice, I have two new books coming out later this year. The first is Being Small, a short mainstream novel with a genre sensibility (is how I have taken to describing it): it is, inter alia, about coming-of-age with a dead twin and a mad mother among Aids carers in Oxford. A ghost story without a ghost is my other favourite way of saying what it is. And the second is Bitter Waters, it of the recently-gorgeous cover: and that is a collection of spec-fic short stories with some degree of gay content to them. It includes a number of the Quin stories, and all of the Sailor Martin tales (thus far), plus some of my other favourites.
So: whom should I invite to read either one of these and supply blurb, puff, quotes? Who's influential, willing, friendly? Who do I know? Help me out here, people. My mind's a mess, if a total blank can be messy. I was brought up too long ago and far away to be comfy with any of this. These are not the customs of my people.
But anyway: call them what you like, little sentences of advance excitement about a new book are a powerful marketing tool, and a splendid boost to the writer's poor suffering ego also. (It is in the typing of this that I realise that calling them "cover quotes", which has become my default, is not really useful either, in these days when so many releases do not have that kind of cover, and most of these quotes are never actually physically attached to a book any more. I have no solution to offer, except that we need another word.)
As I may have mentioned once or twice, I have two new books coming out later this year. The first is Being Small, a short mainstream novel with a genre sensibility (is how I have taken to describing it): it is, inter alia, about coming-of-age with a dead twin and a mad mother among Aids carers in Oxford. A ghost story without a ghost is my other favourite way of saying what it is. And the second is Bitter Waters, it of the recently-gorgeous cover: and that is a collection of spec-fic short stories with some degree of gay content to them. It includes a number of the Quin stories, and all of the Sailor Martin tales (thus far), plus some of my other favourites.
So: whom should I invite to read either one of these and supply blurb, puff, quotes? Who's influential, willing, friendly? Who do I know? Help me out here, people. My mind's a mess, if a total blank can be messy. I was brought up too long ago and far away to be comfy with any of this. These are not the customs of my people.