Covered with mosquito bites

[pegkerr]

but I've pulled out five huge Hefty bags of weeds from two of the gardens. Go me.

Thinking about the blurb I've promised to write. Thinking about blurbs in general. What about a blurb makes a book attractive to the targeted market? The identity of the author who is saying "it's good"? The only truism I can think of is that I've noticed that a real turn off for me when I read is a blurb is when the author says, "The best thing since Tolkien." (Somebody did this on the Pullman trilogy, btw.) First of all, just accept it: nobody's as good as Tolkien. And if they are good in their own way, they're going to be good in an entirely different way, and the comparison just seems nonsensical. When I read that on a book, it strikes me that the blurber is just lazy.

I remember reading in a review of the LOTR:FOTR movie and being very struck by a critic remarking that Tolkien to the field of fantasy is like Mount Fuji is to the craft of Japanese landscape painting: it's always there. You're either seeing something on the mountain slopes, or the mountain is there in the distance, or you don't see it at all because you're standing on it.

I think it's a combination of the identity of the person writing the blurb and what they say about it. I know that some writers "dilute" their value as a blurber by blurbing so many books, saying on all them "it's great!" until you just can't believe them any more. (I think that kind of happened with Steven King, although I'm not sure--I don't read any horror and so am not familiar with marketing in that field).

For those so inclined, send in the blurb on a wonderful book you found, where the blurb made you pick it up. What was it about the blurb that snagged your attention?

Cheers,
Peg

Comments

[darius.livejournal.com]

I think the most recent novel I got blurbed into was Karl Schroeder's Ventus, with Vernor Vinge saying it was ``a milestone in science fiction about nanotech and fine-grained distributed systems.'' That worked because I respect Vinge a great deal, distributed systems are something I know he knows about, and his earlier blurbs were mostly for good stuff. Of course, none of that's enough if the story inside doesn't look interesting -- it just got me to take a peek, which I'm glad it did.

(Hi, by the way... I enjoyed Emerald House Rising.)