Decoding publishers' blurbs

A friend forwarded this to me from her copy of Slightly Foxed Quarterly:

The novelist Sarah Harrison ... feels all those reviews and publishers' blurbs [in the now-imminent run-up-to-Christmas launches] need some decoding. Her brief guide tickled us, so we thought we'd pass it on:

Enchanting: there's a dog in it
Heart-warming: a dog and a child
Heart-rending: they die
Thoughtful: tedious
Thought-provoking: tedious and hectoring
Haunting: set in the past
Exotic: set abroad
Prize-winning: set in India
Perceptive: set in NW3
Epic: editor cowed by writer's reputation
From the pen of a master: same old same old
In the tradition of: shamelessly derivative
Provocative: irritating
Spare and taut: under-researched
Richly detailed: over-researched

Most of those could apply to films as well! 

I LOVE this! Gonna forward this to all the book worms I know! Thanks for sharing!

Very cute.

I quit reading publishers' blurbs a while ago though, 'cause seriously in the case of sci-fi and fantasy I'd never believe that the blurb was written by someone who read the book.

Very cute.

I quit reading publishers' blurbs a while ago though, 'cause seriously in the case of sci-fi and fantasy I'd never believe that the blurb was written by someone who read the book.

The people who write the blurbs don't fully read the books. They don't have enough time. 

Same deal with the people who design covers.  Jennifer Crusie was recently complaining about the shaggy terrier the put on the cover of a reissue of a book that fortunately _did_ have a dog in it... but it's a daschund!

Same deal with the people who design covers.  Jennifer Crusie was recently complaining about the shaggy terrier the put on the cover of a reissue of a book that fortunately _did_ have a dog in it... but it's a daschund!

I just wrote a long, rambling explanation but then decided it was a bit much, lol. Basically, there could have been due to legal issues, it could have been a marketing preference or it could have been due to not wanting to pay extra fees to have the cover re-designed.

But no, the cover designers don't read the books. The editor provides a detailed brief to the designer for the jacket, and the editor has to approve the final design, so you at least have that person who (supposedly) has read the book acting as some sort of filter. It doesn't always work, though.

All that said, I did a Google search to find the cover in question, and I really can't imagine what a daschund would look like trying to carry a shoe in its mouth!

I really can't imagine what a daschund would look like trying to carry a shoe in its mouth!

The reasons were that A) books with dogs on the cover are selling well right now and B) the daschund looked bad so they used a terrier.

Sort of similar, I used to work for a publisher and my job was to do pull-quotes, those one line sparkling reviews of the book that go on the very back of hardbacks.  They really are basically stringing together every shining word that a review has of the book, and, while I never really put a lot of stock or notice into them, I now read them and imagine what what the review probably actually said.  Especially when the pull-quotes are lukewarm sounding.  You know the book was bad and the marketing assistant spend 20 minutes trying to use ellipses to glue "it started ok" to "I was glad when I finished".