Skip to main content

Blurbs or Blank Back Covers?

Levi Asher feels that a book must have some copy on the back cover, like blurbs or review excerpts:
I still feel strongly that back cover blurbs and review excerpts are essential to the "selection process" every reader goes through when looking at a new book. A publisher who presents a blank back cover on a novel by an unknown author, in my opinion, must not be thinking about how potential readers are going to look at this novel. The purist approach Chapman describes sounds admirable, but I don't think it translates into reality. I am simply not going to devote my time to reading a book without some idea why I should read it. A novel needs a road map, and to fail to provide some explanatory text when publishing a new author is, in my opinion, a fatal mistake.
But Daniel Green from The Reading Experience disagrees:
Frankly, I almost always ignore not only this back-cover material, but everything that's printed on a book jacket, including the flap copy. My curiosity about what I will find in a given book is going to be satisfied only by reading a few paragraphs, a few pages, enough to inform me about the book's thematic focus and aesthetic assumptions. Sometimes it won't be safisfied until I've read the whole thing. (Sometimes it will be satisfied quite quickly and I'll decide it's not a book for me. But the blurbs and the review excerpts will have had nothing to do with it.)
I'll have to agree with Levi Asher if the book's shrink-wrapped (like in Kinokuniya or MPH), and with Daniel Green if the book is not (Borders or Payless). But I would prefer thumbing through a book to see for myself if the writing was good enough for me to get it or not.
Labels:

Comments

  1. bibliobibuli25/7/06 2:49 pm

    i never read the blurb for fiction ... or any of the comments from reviewers. i want to decide what i think for myself.

    if the book is shrink wrapped always ask for it to be opnened so you can dip into it. i always read the first page or so to assess the writing.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ted Mahsun25/7/06 3:05 pm

    I rarely ask for a book to opened... i feel guilty if I don't end up buying it! I can't help it!

    But nowadays I do most of my book browsing in Borders so it's not really that much of a problem for me anymore.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Lydia Teh25/7/06 3:07 pm

    I always read blurbs, if they are enticing enough, then I leaf through the books, especially the first few pages and check out the table of contents.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ted Mahsun25/7/06 3:13 pm

    That's what I do, Lydia. But no blurbs is fine with me, as long as I get to the read the inside.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Ted Mahsun26/7/06 11:10 am

    I go for instinct to sometimes... so far okaaay la... no really bad choices so far. Yeah, blank covers are a bit disappointing... it's worse when it's seal wrapped.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I'm going to Clarion West!

So yeah! I'm going to Clarion West this year! If you didn't know, Clarion West is a really awesome science fiction and fantasy writing workshop that runs for six weeks in summer every year at Seattle and is usually taught by a faculty of award-winning authors and editors. Many students who attend this workshop also go on to have illustrious writing careers of their own too. I've been meaning to attend this workshop (or its sister workshop, Clarion UCSD, which is the original Clarion workshop but runs in San Diego around the same time) for years now but never had the courage to apply. Many reasons as to why: didn't think I'd have money for the most part, didn't think I was good enough, didn't think I could leave work long enough, didn't think I could leave family behind, etc. But something sparked inside of me late last year. I felt I should at least give it a go this time round. So I did. They requested a sample of my best work and an applicatio...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dedicated by Burgess.

I've been wanting to blog this for ages, but I've never managed to make the scanner work properly... that is till now. Some years back, my dad was browsing the shelves of NovelHut, Ipoh's best second-hand bookstore, and found a copy of Anthony Burgess's Time for a Tiger . Price? RM2. (That would be approximately USD$0.60 or GBP£0.30). Did I mention it was a hardcover first edition? Here's the dedication page, with the famous dedication written in Jawi. Jawi is the Malay language written in Arab script, a norm early last century. Nowadays, Malay is written in Romanised form. The dedication says: " Kepada sahabat-sahabat saya di Tanah Melayu " which translates into "To my friends in Malaya." On the opposite page, proof this is the first edition. A first edition is probably valuable by itself. But this copy has something extra that makes it even more special--a personal dedication by Burgess himself to a friend: If you can't make the writing out...
15 comments
Read more

REVIEW: Pinball, 1973 by Haruki Murakami.

UPDATE: My Wind/Pinball review can be found here . ISBN: n/a Publisher: n/a Paperback: 160 pages In Murakami fan circles, simply owning a copy of Pinball, 1973 is a mark of hardcore-ness. Like Hear the Wind Sing before it, Haruki Murakami does not allow English translations of Pinball, 1973 to be published outside of Japan. Back in the 80s, Alfred Birnbaum translated it into English and Kodansha published it as a novel for Japanese students who wanted to improve their English. While the English edition of Hear the Wind Sing continues to be reprinted and sold in Japan (and available for a moderate sum via eBay, see my review ), Kodansha stopped its reprint runs of the English edition of Pinball, 1973 and has now become a collector's item, fetching vast amounts of money on auction sites and reseller stores. Last time I checked, the cheapest copy went for USD$2500. Of course, Murakami addicts or the curious can always download a less than legal PDF of the book, painst...
18 comments
Read more