Blurb Hype and the Good-Enough Novel

This is the final cover copy for my next book, Women’s Hotel. I’m really pleased with how it turned out, especially because we were able to restrict the blurbs to a sane amount in a single location: there are just three of them on the bottom half of the back cover.

The only thing on the front cover is the title, my name, and an illustration of a women’s hotel. That’s what I like to see most on the cover of a book! The author photo is confined to the back flap, where it ought to be, and also has a dog in it, which gave me something to do with my hands.

Best of all, the back cover for Women’s Hotel includes a brief description of what happens in the book. This is something every book should have! When I’m browsing and trying to get a sense of whether I’m interested in a book, I feel irritable and overly-marketed-to when the cover is awash in blurbs — especially when the back cover only has blurbs on it. A good blurb or two can be helpful, especially if I already know and like whoever wrote it, but I get irritable when the back cover reveals nothing about a book but “Sensational! Says Patrick Direction” and “I couldn’t put this down — Sep Corsico of the Saturday Philharmonic Standard.”

It’s nice that so many people like this book, I think to myself, but I don’t know what the book they like is about. At most, I might learn that it’s slim, terse, searing, urgent, or necessary. I want to know what the book is about so I can get a better sense if I’m going to like it.

For whatever it’s worth, I don’t think this is an especially new problem. Back in 1997 (and it wasn’t new then, either) Doreen Carvajal claimed that: “Breathless blurbs in praise of books are as mechanical as a response to ‘How are you?’ Fine. Also delighted, haunted, satisfied, engaged, moved, thrilled and gripped. So common is the industry practice of issuing cloying endorsements to grace dust jackets and advertisements that the compliments of luminaries seem rather meaningless.”

Nor is this a problem that’s exclusive to book publicity! Some readers may remember the 1993 debut of “OK Soda,” an attempt to capture more of the soft-drink market by “underclaiming” — a low-affect Wario to Fruitopia’s more punchy and kaleidoscopic campaign. The fonts were blocky and restrained, the faces blank, and the overall design looked thrown-together, noncommittal, and washed-out. (They discontinued OK Soda in 1995.)

While I haven’t wanted to stray into OK Soda territory when it comes to promoting Women’s Hotel¹, I have wanted to keep blurbs and overblown promises of greatness to a minimum. I do think Women’s Hotel is a very good book, and I’m proud of it — but part of what I’m proud of is that it’s just good, and no more than that.

For a number of years now, I’ve had a casual rule about submitting the briefest possible bio whenever I give a reading or appear on a panel, because otherwise it’s too easy to want to list everything I’ve ever done, and some poor sap has to read my entire CV while I stand behind them getting embarrassed. It’s a casual rule because I don’t want to take this too seriously either – it’s also a mistake to go too far in the opposite direction, and look contemptuous or self-important with something pointedly short. Somewhere in between “Daniel Lavery is the author of [everything I’ve published since college] who also does [every hobby I’ve ever dabbled in]” and “Daniel is a writer” is the sweet spot.

I also make it a rule, whenever I’m giving a reading, to come in under whatever time limit I’ve been given. If they say I have ten minutes, I try to find a reading that’s over in seven; if they say I have five minutes, I shoot for three, because I would always rather leave an audience wanting more rather than wishing I had stopped earlier.

Some of this is protective and, of course slightly delusional. I want people to talk about Women’s Hotel like Poochie: “Where’s Women’s Hotel?” “When is Women’s Hotel coming out?” “Isn’t it incredibly modest to only call it a ‘very good book’ instead of the best book about hotels since Grand Hotel — isn’t he incredibly modest and brave for saying his book is good? Let’s all hoist him our shoulders and carry him down 5th Avenue for his courageous restraint, et cetera.”

The key for me, as I see it, is neither to pretend a lackadaisical attitude (“Here’s a book! You might like it, whatever!”), nor to give in to strained overstatement (“Look at everyone who says this book changed their lives forever”). I want someone picking up Women’s Hotel at random during a pleasantly aimless trip to the bookstore to get a reasonable sense of what the book is like at a glance, so they can decide whether it’s for them.

Then, of course, I want it to become a blazing word-of-mouth success, such that everyone in the world buys a copy, and there are newspaper articles about how surprising and remarkable the success of Women’s Hotel has been, despite a famously restrained and modest ad campaign.

I aim to live with my delusions in a peaceable and friendly fashion, not evict them.

1. Although part of me has been tempted to use a tagline like: “It’s a novel. Try it. You’ll like it.” But the phrase sounded suspiciously familiar as I typed it out, and a quick Google search has confirmed this was a 1972 tagline for Alka-Seltzer.