ON THE OUTSIDE

"You can't judge a book by its cover." Willie Dixon (and Thomas the Tank Engine)



*****

RO: This week I was asked to write jacket copy for my first book. No probs, I shot back in an email. I even made a joke – “How about if I say it’s the most significant book since the Bible?” Piece of cake, right? After all, I’d written the book – how hard could it be to bang out a few paragraphs? Well,…not that easy.
The art department has designed a gorgeous cover. In the bookstore your masterpiece is in someone’s hot, little hands, they flip open the cover, and in 5 seconds will decide if they are going to spend a weekend with your baby or not.
I rewrote the copy ten times. I tortured my husband and forced him to read it every time I changed two words. The irony is that the publisher probably won’t even use it, but I felt like I had to give it my best shot. Jacket copy isn’t a book report, or a synopsis. It’s a last little sales pitch. Or not? What do you think?

HANK: Well, you just won me over. Now I can’t wait to read what you finally wrote. Which, of course, is exactly what you’re going for in the jacket copy. And you only have one chance.
But, say, you’ve got an indecisive hero, surrounded by people he can’t decide whether to trust, feeling alone, missing his father, struggling to understand his role in a world he can’t escape. You got Hamlet. You also got Gilligan’s Island. The jacket copy has to be the true essence—it’s what gets people in the front door of your world.
I love that introductory moment, that audition moment at my local bookstore. The cover creaks a little, that nice ‘new book’ feel. The cover’s what attracts me first, of course. (And we’ll certainly have to talk about that later since, BSP, the cover for Prime Time (June 2007,Harlequin Books) is supposed to be ready in a few weeks. I love to see a picture of the author. You guys? Picture yes? Or no?
But Ro, you will not have worked in vain. It’s the inside jacket copy that gets me. Are there key words that mean probably yes? Literate. Clever. Innovative. It’s easier to think of the ‘no’ words: Cowboy. Bodice. Titillating. But hey, not always.
It would be fascinating to watch on surveillance camera, don’t you think? Watch what people pick up, what they read, what they discard and what they take home?

RO: What's wrong with cowboys??

JAN: I think there’s only one thing worse than having to write a synopsis of your own novel, and that’s having to write your own jacket copy. I had to write it for Final Copy (2001, Larcom Press) and it was stilted. Too bogged down by the author’s own reserve. I know I should want to have input, but frankly, I was relieved to have found the jacket copy for Yesterday’s Fatal( May 2007, St. Martins Press) on Amazon one day. St. Martin’s obviously employs skilled copy writers, why wreck their work with my clouded thinking? And not to denigrate the importance of jacket copy, which I know everyone else reads. But personally, I buy most of my books on a friend’s recommendation. Sometimes I don’t even look at the jacket copy until I’m a hundred pages into the book, when I flip back to figure out what the book was supposed to be about again.

HALLIE: Ah, jacket copy – as crime fiction book reviewer for the “Boston Globe,” I can only say, it matters! And sadly the words and phrases that either pump or torpedo your novel are going to be different for each reviewer. Jacket copy gets me started reading. Wondrous prose and plotting and characterization are what get reviewers to the finish line.

A novel’s opening paragraphs are as important as the jacket copy. I’m not at all interested in Westerns but this opening from Steve Hockensmith’s “Holmes on the Range,” nominated for an Edgar for best first novel of 2006, hooked me good: ”There are two things you can’t escape out here in the West: dust and death. They sort of swirl together in the wind and a fellow never knows when a fresh gust is going to blow one or the other right in his face.” Voice! That’s what it’s all about. (See more on this topic in my article in the March, 2007, issue of Writer Magazine.)

And in the “A little learning is a dangerous thing” Department: I’m working on a psychological suspense novel and if I think too much about the opening paragraphs or jacket copy, I get completely paralyzed.

Ro: After all this, I have to admit, that I have never bought a book solely because of jacket copy. I’m a first page kind of woman. If the first page gets me, I’m in. That said, like Hank, I have snooped on a lot of people in bookstores and the first thing everyone seems to do is read the inside front cover. Hopefully, what I’ve written will get them to turn the page….