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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cthulhu's Librarian" data-source="post: 1145529" data-attributes="member: 11064">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.  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.</blockquote>

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