Cthulhu's Librarian
First Post
I can tell you exactly why the cover copy and blubs on SF & Fantasy books are so awful. At the major publishers, cover copy is usually written by people who either don't know or don't care about the books. Simple as that.nikolai said:
While working at HarperPrism, I saw this practice over and over and over again. The copy-writer would come by and ask for a quick summary of the book so she could write the flap or jacket copy. By quick summary, she usually was asking "what are the main charaters names, who are the villans, and what is the major conflict?" Thats it. She would write the copy, send it to the editors who whould re-write it to actually resemble to book in some way and send it back. She would re-write it again, usually to make it short enough to fit the cover of the book, and then send it to the marketing department who would re-write it yet again in order to have it appeal to the widest market possible, and in the process dilute it once more. Finally, when the cover proofs would go around for final approval, those of us in editorial who had actually read the book would make changes once more to try to make it resemble the novel.
Yes, its a dreadful system, but thats what happens when you have to sell a novel in less than 200 words, and you are dealing with a copy-writer who is not only writing copy for SF novels that she hasn't read, but most likely also writing copy for mystery novels, exercise books, sports books, and self-help books. Seriously. Our copy department was working on books of all types, and there is no possible way for them to read them all. One person may be responsible for writing copy for more than 15 books each day.
I wrote copy for several of the novels I editied, in order to make the copy actually sound good, and to stand out and actually work for the novel. Each and every time, I was told "Thats too specific, you are writing it for too small a market. Make it more general." Over and over again. Marketing and Sales departments want to have something to work with that they can throw down on the table and say "You want to stock this book in your store because it is just like X but has the characteristics of Y and all the action of Z" and go on to the next title in the catalog. Simplest way to do that is to make the cover copy sound just like all the other cover copy thats out there.
Not to get too off topic, I've got one that may be my favorite, due to lack of communication between editors, art directors, and artists. The book was Guy Gavriel Kay's Sailing to Sarantium (the name is an allusion to W.B.Yeats Sailing to Byzantium, which heavily influenced the book). The artist requested to read the book, or at least several chapters, so he would have something to work from. I gave the art director a copy of the manuscript to send to the artist, and he said he would send the artist some relevent chapters with some ideas that were discussed in our weekly "cover meetings." A few weeks later, we got the artwork back just before deadline, only to find that it pictured the main character on the deck of a ship in the middle of the ocean, wind blowing through his hair. That was interesting, to say the least, since he never sets foot on a boat in the book (the title refers to a journey, not actually sailing on a ship). Some quick work was needed to remedy this, so the art was sent back to the artist with a revised deadline and instructions to redo the painting, only to be told that he didn't have the time as he was working on several other commissions. It was worked out between the art director and the artist to make some revisions to the existing work and to use some carefully considered editing and cropping of the painting, and we would make do. What we ended up with is what made the cover of the American edition of the novel (
