Tonight We Fly was amazing too.
Sunday, 18 July 2010
Du, du, dugadugadugadah
There was a lovely moment in the Divine Comedy gig last night at Somerset House. Neil Hannon was playing At The Indie Disco at the piano and slowed it right down for the lyric 'She makes my heart beat the same way/as at the start of Blue Monday', and asked the crowd if he should give it a try. 'Yes!' we said, 'give it a try!'. So he started drumming the intro to Blue Monday on his mic. Du, du, dugadugadugadah and accompanied himself on sung bass part. And he nailed it! And then played an MGMT cover. Clever fellow.
Monday, 14 June 2010
The Power of Blurb
This is an adaptation of a talk I gave at the Bookseller Cover Conference 2010. Comments on the conference can be found using #coverconf on Twitter.
It's rather long (a twenty minute presentation).
I'll start with a disclaimer. I'm not an expert. I'm not a trained copywriter. At Hodder I comment on copy and I contribute to it, and I'm very interested in the way it works and the value it has, but I don't actually write it for a living, because it's just too bloody hard.
I'm going to try to show that:
Copy Sells Books
The words on the back of a book, or on the flaps, or in the online product description, affect how the book sells. The words are commercially valuable.
What's my evidence for that?
The fine people at BML do surveys of book buying habits, and one of those surveys asked 'what makes you buy a particular book?'
The results, incidentally, created some gloom among marketing departments because 'advertising' as an answer, was so infrequent as to be statistically irrelevant.
No one will be surprised to see 'Author I like' and 'Friends/family recommended' so high, but copy features very very strongly. It's a vital motivating factor in why people choose a particular book. And, unlike most of the other factors, it's totally within our control as publishers.
On a more anecdotal, qualitative level, the BML BookZone panel of readers were given a collection of blurbs to read and vote on, for the BMS Best Blurb Award. The responses don't exactly put a pound value on the copy, but they do show how real people react to copy.
Here's just a few, and there were dozens more where this last one came from; people saying 'I want to read this'. 'I'm going to go and buy this'.
From our own experience we know that browsers in a bookshop pick up books, and turn them over. I've tried really hard not to look like a freak standing in Waterstone's Kings Road with a notepad, but I probably did and my finding was that browsers turned over about two thirds of the paperbacks they picked up, and spent on average four seconds looking at the back. Which is a little frightening, but I suppose it's better than nothing.
The online equivalent of this is that we scroll down from the cover to the product description, before going on to the quotes.
So, to recap: browsers read the copy, and it influences what they buy.
Publishers Neglect Copy
So if we accept that copy is commercially valuable, do we as publishers give it the priority it deserves? I would contend that we don't. To demonstrate that, I'm going to contrast the priority given to copy in publishers with the priority given to cover design.
In every publishing company there are rows in the cover meeting.
This is a GOOD THING. Of course we row about covers. Because they're so important. It's axiomatic for publishers that covers sell books. In every company a given cover will be worked on, circulated, discussed, rowed about, revised, rowed about some more, sometimes researched, sometimes outsourced at the cost of thousands, scrapped, rowed about some more and finally signed off. Then the MD gets hold of it, rejects it, and the whole damn thing starts all over again.
Contrast that process with what I found out when I emailed a number of contacts in other publishers to ask about how copy was treated. These were editors, marketers, sales people.
I asked: 'how often is copy discussed in meetings at your firm?'
'In cover meetings, but only if it is too long or badly laid-out rather than because it is crap
'Rarely'
'Very rarely'
'Not that often exclusively, massive discussion about cover/package/overall tone though'
'Each piece of copy is discussed once at the copy meeting.'
'This is taking up much more of our thinking time on pbs these days. We meet weekly to discuss our plans for pbs and blurb is regularly on the agenda.'
'Only front cover stuff, not the actual blurb'
'I discussed blurbs a lot. This was not necessarily popular or viewed as 'normal'.'
No one I asked had ever done any market research on a blurb. Few could name their most effective blurb, or anyone else's
It's a pretty clear picture. Little time is spent discussing, debating, perfecting the copy. Senior people are spending their time on other priorities. A notable exception here is Penguin, who very sensibly have copywriters to work on their paperback editions. Elsewhere, copy is the ginger stepchild of the publishing family (I'm allowed to say that: I have some red in my hair).
At this point I should say that what I'm not doing is saying no one puts any effort in. The issue of who actually writes the copy is one we'll return to, but in most cases it is slaved over by someone and they give it their best shot. But then it's generally left as it is.
One significant exception to this is shoutlines, which rightly do get agonised over. But if you think that a shoutline is important and the back cover copy is not, then you're essentially denying the reality that readers routinely turn books over before they decide to buy.
One other small point about the contrast with cover processes before we move on: finishes. The time, effort and strife that goes into foil, matt lam and embossing in publishing meetings. Think about how many books get sold online nowadays, where all those finishes count for nothing. But the copy remains.
Publishers neglect copy, but it's obvious from other industries that we're missing a trick. It's almost too obvious to point out that the advertising industry has been selling products with words for decades and the balance between art and copy is built into the very structure of their creative operations..
In terms of packaging of other products, we've all seen what Innocent drinks have done with a fresh brand voice. Some people hate the words on their smoothies, but the sales speak for themselves.
Which means we can afford to be positive about all this. We have an opportunity to, dare I say it, add value. And not just in the sense of publishers competing with one another. If the industry as a whole communicates more engagingly about its books, we will compete better with all the other new forms of handheld entertainment busily scaring the crap out of us.
Publishers Neglect Copy ... Except When They Don't
So how much better could our copy be? I think we can say that there are some examples of copy which has significantly contributed to the success of books and they show the standard we ought to hit more often.
We're pretty sure that the copy sells The Other Hand to readers, as suggested both by the overwhelming success in the BookZone research into the most tempting copy and also anecdotal evidence. I've been to two book groups at which people have said 'I read the back and I just had to buy it'. And it was the first book mentioned when I asked staff at Waterstone's Kings' Road for an example of a selling blurb.
Why does it work? Two reasons: content and tone. In terms of content ... there ain't none. It plays the denial card: you're curious about what's in the book ... and you're going to stay curious, because we're not going to tell you. That's genuinely surprising, and because it's cleverly done it's actually intriguing, rather than just annoying. There are a few facts, but hardly any.
Tonally it's really shocking. It addresses you directly. The publisher, not the author or the character, the publisher, is addressing you, and it is asking you to BUY the book. What could be less appropriate? The cheek of it! Most puslishers wince when they read it. I did too. It breaks one of our biggest taboos. 400k sales on, I'm not wincing any more.
It represents a very bold new view of how much plot needs to go in, and actively seeks to unsettle the reader, who has, thanks to publishers, generally very conservative expectations of a blurb.
A footnote to that is that the Boy in the Striped Pyjamas did a very similar thing. I'm assured by colleagues at Hodder that they were unaware of this when doing The Other Hand, as was Damian I expect. But still, they've sold 1.3m books between them, I think the inference is fairly clear.
Next example is The Book Thief:
Less radical than The Other Hand, but very effective. It addresses you directly and it arouses your curiosity.
It has to be said it also contains one of my least favourite blurb devices: the time. The place. Nothing intrinsicly wrong with it but it's so overused as to be well worth avoiding now.
An interesting point here is how the copy is designed. This wouldn't work as a simple paragraph. Someone at Transworld has really thought through how this will work visually on a paperback. It's two voices, one from the book and one outside the book as it were. This has sold well over half a million. The crazy kids at www.fixabook.com don't agree. they think it's crap layout. I believe they are wrong.
Which brings us on to another example, from the first Twilight book
This was nominated by someone a contact at Little, Brown who says it's the best blurb they've done. And the bit he thinks is good is the first bit: simply an extract from the book. I agree it works brilliantly. The rest, as my contact says, is 'totally unnecessary'.
We quite often resort to using extracts from books when we're blurbing, and quite right too in my opinion. As I said, we will return to whose job it is to write the blurb, and I'll suggest that getting the author to do it is rarely a winning method, but using a carefully selected bit of their own prose to set the scene and arouse curiosity is a great option. You can't really force it, of course, the writing either lends itself to being extracted, or it doesn't.
I was very impressed with what Fourth Estate did with the paperback of Wolf Hall.
Minna Fry, never shy of a bit of market segmentation, had two copy approaches done for the two different covers. The white is for women unscared by literaryness the black is more male; for a more thriller-loving reader, possibly put off by prizes. I love the idea. I'm not sure the distinction is quite as clear as it might be in the copy, but you can see what they're trying to do: The Booker Prize reference is moved to the back on the black edition, for instance.
Both versions use copy and quotes to build on the overall proposition of the book: "Tudors". The copy's all about scale, drama, excitement, pace. It could have said 'at times laugh out loud funny' or 'exquisite prose which is a joy to read slowly and absorb' or 'manipulates second person narrative in an original and captivating way'. But they didn't. All of those things are true, but they are not the point Fourth Estate are trying to make.
I said I'd return to the issue of quote selection, and it's mainly to say that I'm not going to say that much about it - like shoutlines, quotes do get lots of attention, and have actually been the subject of a bit of market research; most big companies have probably replicated the research that tells them the same three things: readers are confused by quotes for the author's previous books, readers give credance to quotes from 'the right newspapers' and readers think all quotes from fellow authors are stitch-ups.
So I'm not going to dwell on quotes, beyond saying that they seem to work best when they, like the blurb, are pointed at a particular target. The quotes for Wolf Hall are buttressing the central message: 'don't be scared, it's a Tudor pageturner!'
I'm not suggesting, of course, that we should all start doing the same thing; addressing the reader directly, or just using extracts, or creating dual blurbs: that would be missing the point. The point is that we need to decide what effect we're trying to have on the reader, and go all out to create it. No one will arrest us if we don't represent the whole book accurately on the cover. And frankly no one will know if we do, because they'll have been too bored to have read the whole blurb.
Are we trying to arrouse curiosity?
Are we suggesting the conversations this book will inspire you to have?
Are we hinting that it's not a disimilar read to another, bestselling author?
Are we simply reassuring the reader that this is more of the same from their favourite author?
Every blurb performs a function. If you try to make it perform lots, then good luck. You're probably stuffed.
We Can Do Better
So if we accept that copy is valuable, and neglected, but possible to do brilliantly, how do we as publishers go about doing it brilliantly more often?
I would suggest that it's all about internal working methods. (Sorry if that sounds dull!)
Fact is, It's a right old can of worms. The status quo at most publishers seems to be:
The editor, or editorial assistant, writes copy for the AI sheet. They work hard at it, they're being bothered by the gits like me in Sales and marketing to get something on there, they get it done. It's fine. It goes online and already IS the copy to anyone browsing on Amazon. They adapt it for the catalogue, and before you know it they need to adapt it for the hardback too. In due course they're required to shorten it and bung on some quotes for the paperback.
All of this is well and skillfully done, again, I'm not having a pop at editors, god forbid. But it's typically done under a fair bit of time pressure, and tends to become self-repeating. You set the approach very early and it often stays set.
Why is it the editor? One reason: they've read the book. The gits in sales and marketing haven't. Usually.
Marketing sage Damian Horner believes that marketing people should do blurb. Not because marketing rule and everyone else sucks, but because their job is communicating persuasively about the books.
Practically, that's really hard to do. The poor folks in Marketing would have to read every book practically at the moment of acquisition, and there generally aren't enough of them. I think the only place this actually happens is at Penguin, where it's a copywriting team rather than Marketing, but along the same lines.
A senior colleague at Little, Brown has this to say on roles:
'There is no definite answer about who, in terms of role, should be writing blurbs for books – in my view sometimes the best person is the marketeer, sometimes the author, sometimes the publisher, depending on the skills of each.'
I agree with this. A flexible approach is needed. And it's not just about their skills. It also depends upon exactly what you're trying to achieve with each blurb.
Here's some specific new approaches that we might try. Some are really basic. Some a bit more radical.
#1 The Conversation
Lots of colleagues have a go at writing a blurb. We compare, we discuss, (we vote?) we adapt, we decide. The competing blurbs can be blown up and put around the office for others to comment on.
Sounds like copywriting by committee, and that is its main drawback; that it can become a collection of compromises. However, having tried it, it does introduce energy to the process, and it helps to distill choices. If one version is all about the atmosphere and location, but another is all based on characters, you have a really interesting and useful choice to make.
#2 Brief It Out
Why not? We spend a fortune on designers, so why not use a freelance copywriter?
It demonstrates commitment, it promotes variety (though some believe freelancers tend to 'give you what they think you want' rather than do anything unusual).
#3 Crowdsource
This might sound wanky if you haven’t tried it, but it’s simply a public competition to create blurb. We tried this with a book called And This Is True, sending out white-covered proofs to members of the public who'd taken up an invitation on our site, or Twitter, or Facebook. The winner was an actor, as it turned out, and I think his copy is genuinely fresh:
In addition to the potential for a surprising approach, this is also cheap and can yeild PR. Though it is immensely time consuming.
It's worth mentioning authors at this point. You'd have hoped they'd be a brilliant resource for blurb: they're the professional writers here. But it's not always the case; naturally they're not the most objective party, and probably more concerned than most with accurate representation, which is not commercially useful. In the above example, the author took the most convincing about the copy. And who can blame her? She does the words, right? Who has the right to put something gimmicky on the back of her book?
#4 Retained Writer
Find one brilliant copywriter to do your whole list. It would create a high overall standard, but it would cost a fortune and might introduce a homogenous tone. Penguin make it work, mind.
#5 Copy Leader
Should you appoint one copy leader per imprint? Could be an editor, could be a marketer, could be a sales person…?
They mind deadlines and own blurbs. Why not give someone the job and see what happens?
#6 Copy Teams
To raise the status and internal ambition for blurbs, should we simply appoint a copy team for each big book? And then brief them really thoroughly: Is there a problem to challenge or avoid? Is there a particular way we want readers to feel? Is there a 'magic moment' we need to highlight? What is the particular function of this blurb?
Evaluate!
We’ve seen from the BookZone work on the cover copy awards that it’s really easy to find out which blurbs readers respond to. There’s nothing to stop us testing two different blurbs and letting readers tell us which one makes them want to buy the book.
I'll finish with a quick note on authors and agents, suggested by Damian Horner:
Why not present blurb properly, in person, to author and agent along with cover? The package, all of it, is our communication vehicle, and we should present it to them with confidence. After all, if we rehabilitate copy, rescue it from being the ginger stepchild in the family, we're demonstrating to the world another vital element that the publisher adds. Another reason why we're the experts. Another reason why we're indispensible. And we need those.
It's rather long (a twenty minute presentation).
I'll start with a disclaimer. I'm not an expert. I'm not a trained copywriter. At Hodder I comment on copy and I contribute to it, and I'm very interested in the way it works and the value it has, but I don't actually write it for a living, because it's just too bloody hard.
I'm going to try to show that:
- Copy sells books
- Publishers neglect copy
- ...except when they don't
- We can do it better
Copy Sells Books
The words on the back of a book, or on the flaps, or in the online product description, affect how the book sells. The words are commercially valuable.
What's my evidence for that?
The fine people at BML do surveys of book buying habits, and one of those surveys asked 'what makes you buy a particular book?'
The results, incidentally, created some gloom among marketing departments because 'advertising' as an answer, was so infrequent as to be statistically irrelevant.
No one will be surprised to see 'Author I like' and 'Friends/family recommended' so high, but copy features very very strongly. It's a vital motivating factor in why people choose a particular book. And, unlike most of the other factors, it's totally within our control as publishers.
On a more anecdotal, qualitative level, the BML BookZone panel of readers were given a collection of blurbs to read and vote on, for the BMS Best Blurb Award. The responses don't exactly put a pound value on the copy, but they do show how real people react to copy.
Here's just a few, and there were dozens more where this last one came from; people saying 'I want to read this'. 'I'm going to go and buy this'.
From our own experience we know that browsers in a bookshop pick up books, and turn them over. I've tried really hard not to look like a freak standing in Waterstone's Kings Road with a notepad, but I probably did and my finding was that browsers turned over about two thirds of the paperbacks they picked up, and spent on average four seconds looking at the back. Which is a little frightening, but I suppose it's better than nothing.
The online equivalent of this is that we scroll down from the cover to the product description, before going on to the quotes.
So, to recap: browsers read the copy, and it influences what they buy.
Publishers Neglect Copy
So if we accept that copy is commercially valuable, do we as publishers give it the priority it deserves? I would contend that we don't. To demonstrate that, I'm going to contrast the priority given to copy in publishers with the priority given to cover design.
In every publishing company there are rows in the cover meeting.
This is a GOOD THING. Of course we row about covers. Because they're so important. It's axiomatic for publishers that covers sell books. In every company a given cover will be worked on, circulated, discussed, rowed about, revised, rowed about some more, sometimes researched, sometimes outsourced at the cost of thousands, scrapped, rowed about some more and finally signed off. Then the MD gets hold of it, rejects it, and the whole damn thing starts all over again.
Contrast that process with what I found out when I emailed a number of contacts in other publishers to ask about how copy was treated. These were editors, marketers, sales people.
I asked: 'how often is copy discussed in meetings at your firm?'
'In cover meetings, but only if it is too long or badly laid-out rather than because it is crap
'Rarely'
'Very rarely'
'Not that often exclusively, massive discussion about cover/package/overall tone though'
'Each piece of copy is discussed once at the copy meeting.'
'This is taking up much more of our thinking time on pbs these days. We meet weekly to discuss our plans for pbs and blurb is regularly on the agenda.'
'Only front cover stuff, not the actual blurb'
'I discussed blurbs a lot. This was not necessarily popular or viewed as 'normal'.'
No one I asked had ever done any market research on a blurb. Few could name their most effective blurb, or anyone else's
It's a pretty clear picture. Little time is spent discussing, debating, perfecting the copy. Senior people are spending their time on other priorities. A notable exception here is Penguin, who very sensibly have copywriters to work on their paperback editions. Elsewhere, copy is the ginger stepchild of the publishing family (I'm allowed to say that: I have some red in my hair).
At this point I should say that what I'm not doing is saying no one puts any effort in. The issue of who actually writes the copy is one we'll return to, but in most cases it is slaved over by someone and they give it their best shot. But then it's generally left as it is.
One significant exception to this is shoutlines, which rightly do get agonised over. But if you think that a shoutline is important and the back cover copy is not, then you're essentially denying the reality that readers routinely turn books over before they decide to buy.
One other small point about the contrast with cover processes before we move on: finishes. The time, effort and strife that goes into foil, matt lam and embossing in publishing meetings. Think about how many books get sold online nowadays, where all those finishes count for nothing. But the copy remains.
Publishers neglect copy, but it's obvious from other industries that we're missing a trick. It's almost too obvious to point out that the advertising industry has been selling products with words for decades and the balance between art and copy is built into the very structure of their creative operations..
In terms of packaging of other products, we've all seen what Innocent drinks have done with a fresh brand voice. Some people hate the words on their smoothies, but the sales speak for themselves.
Which means we can afford to be positive about all this. We have an opportunity to, dare I say it, add value. And not just in the sense of publishers competing with one another. If the industry as a whole communicates more engagingly about its books, we will compete better with all the other new forms of handheld entertainment busily scaring the crap out of us.
Publishers Neglect Copy ... Except When They Don't
So how much better could our copy be? I think we can say that there are some examples of copy which has significantly contributed to the success of books and they show the standard we ought to hit more often.
We're pretty sure that the copy sells The Other Hand to readers, as suggested both by the overwhelming success in the BookZone research into the most tempting copy and also anecdotal evidence. I've been to two book groups at which people have said 'I read the back and I just had to buy it'. And it was the first book mentioned when I asked staff at Waterstone's Kings' Road for an example of a selling blurb.
Why does it work? Two reasons: content and tone. In terms of content ... there ain't none. It plays the denial card: you're curious about what's in the book ... and you're going to stay curious, because we're not going to tell you. That's genuinely surprising, and because it's cleverly done it's actually intriguing, rather than just annoying. There are a few facts, but hardly any.
Tonally it's really shocking. It addresses you directly. The publisher, not the author or the character, the publisher, is addressing you, and it is asking you to BUY the book. What could be less appropriate? The cheek of it! Most puslishers wince when they read it. I did too. It breaks one of our biggest taboos. 400k sales on, I'm not wincing any more.
It represents a very bold new view of how much plot needs to go in, and actively seeks to unsettle the reader, who has, thanks to publishers, generally very conservative expectations of a blurb.
A footnote to that is that the Boy in the Striped Pyjamas did a very similar thing. I'm assured by colleagues at Hodder that they were unaware of this when doing The Other Hand, as was Damian I expect. But still, they've sold 1.3m books between them, I think the inference is fairly clear.
Next example is The Book Thief:
Less radical than The Other Hand, but very effective. It addresses you directly and it arouses your curiosity.
It has to be said it also contains one of my least favourite blurb devices: the time. The place. Nothing intrinsicly wrong with it but it's so overused as to be well worth avoiding now.
An interesting point here is how the copy is designed. This wouldn't work as a simple paragraph. Someone at Transworld has really thought through how this will work visually on a paperback. It's two voices, one from the book and one outside the book as it were. This has sold well over half a million. The crazy kids at www.fixabook.com don't agree. they think it's crap layout. I believe they are wrong.
Which brings us on to another example, from the first Twilight book
This was nominated by someone a contact at Little, Brown who says it's the best blurb they've done. And the bit he thinks is good is the first bit: simply an extract from the book. I agree it works brilliantly. The rest, as my contact says, is 'totally unnecessary'.
We quite often resort to using extracts from books when we're blurbing, and quite right too in my opinion. As I said, we will return to whose job it is to write the blurb, and I'll suggest that getting the author to do it is rarely a winning method, but using a carefully selected bit of their own prose to set the scene and arouse curiosity is a great option. You can't really force it, of course, the writing either lends itself to being extracted, or it doesn't.
I was very impressed with what Fourth Estate did with the paperback of Wolf Hall.
Minna Fry, never shy of a bit of market segmentation, had two copy approaches done for the two different covers. The white is for women unscared by literaryness the black is more male; for a more thriller-loving reader, possibly put off by prizes. I love the idea. I'm not sure the distinction is quite as clear as it might be in the copy, but you can see what they're trying to do: The Booker Prize reference is moved to the back on the black edition, for instance.
Both versions use copy and quotes to build on the overall proposition of the book: "Tudors". The copy's all about scale, drama, excitement, pace. It could have said 'at times laugh out loud funny' or 'exquisite prose which is a joy to read slowly and absorb' or 'manipulates second person narrative in an original and captivating way'. But they didn't. All of those things are true, but they are not the point Fourth Estate are trying to make.
I said I'd return to the issue of quote selection, and it's mainly to say that I'm not going to say that much about it - like shoutlines, quotes do get lots of attention, and have actually been the subject of a bit of market research; most big companies have probably replicated the research that tells them the same three things: readers are confused by quotes for the author's previous books, readers give credance to quotes from 'the right newspapers' and readers think all quotes from fellow authors are stitch-ups.
So I'm not going to dwell on quotes, beyond saying that they seem to work best when they, like the blurb, are pointed at a particular target. The quotes for Wolf Hall are buttressing the central message: 'don't be scared, it's a Tudor pageturner!'
I'm not suggesting, of course, that we should all start doing the same thing; addressing the reader directly, or just using extracts, or creating dual blurbs: that would be missing the point. The point is that we need to decide what effect we're trying to have on the reader, and go all out to create it. No one will arrest us if we don't represent the whole book accurately on the cover. And frankly no one will know if we do, because they'll have been too bored to have read the whole blurb.
Are we trying to arrouse curiosity?
Are we suggesting the conversations this book will inspire you to have?
Are we hinting that it's not a disimilar read to another, bestselling author?
Are we simply reassuring the reader that this is more of the same from their favourite author?
Every blurb performs a function. If you try to make it perform lots, then good luck. You're probably stuffed.
We Can Do Better
So if we accept that copy is valuable, and neglected, but possible to do brilliantly, how do we as publishers go about doing it brilliantly more often?
I would suggest that it's all about internal working methods. (Sorry if that sounds dull!)
Fact is, It's a right old can of worms. The status quo at most publishers seems to be:
The editor, or editorial assistant, writes copy for the AI sheet. They work hard at it, they're being bothered by the gits like me in Sales and marketing to get something on there, they get it done. It's fine. It goes online and already IS the copy to anyone browsing on Amazon. They adapt it for the catalogue, and before you know it they need to adapt it for the hardback too. In due course they're required to shorten it and bung on some quotes for the paperback.
All of this is well and skillfully done, again, I'm not having a pop at editors, god forbid. But it's typically done under a fair bit of time pressure, and tends to become self-repeating. You set the approach very early and it often stays set.
Why is it the editor? One reason: they've read the book. The gits in sales and marketing haven't. Usually.
Marketing sage Damian Horner believes that marketing people should do blurb. Not because marketing rule and everyone else sucks, but because their job is communicating persuasively about the books.
Practically, that's really hard to do. The poor folks in Marketing would have to read every book practically at the moment of acquisition, and there generally aren't enough of them. I think the only place this actually happens is at Penguin, where it's a copywriting team rather than Marketing, but along the same lines.
A senior colleague at Little, Brown has this to say on roles:
'There is no definite answer about who, in terms of role, should be writing blurbs for books – in my view sometimes the best person is the marketeer, sometimes the author, sometimes the publisher, depending on the skills of each.'
I agree with this. A flexible approach is needed. And it's not just about their skills. It also depends upon exactly what you're trying to achieve with each blurb.
Here's some specific new approaches that we might try. Some are really basic. Some a bit more radical.
#1 The Conversation
Lots of colleagues have a go at writing a blurb. We compare, we discuss, (we vote?) we adapt, we decide. The competing blurbs can be blown up and put around the office for others to comment on.
Sounds like copywriting by committee, and that is its main drawback; that it can become a collection of compromises. However, having tried it, it does introduce energy to the process, and it helps to distill choices. If one version is all about the atmosphere and location, but another is all based on characters, you have a really interesting and useful choice to make.
#2 Brief It Out
Why not? We spend a fortune on designers, so why not use a freelance copywriter?
It demonstrates commitment, it promotes variety (though some believe freelancers tend to 'give you what they think you want' rather than do anything unusual).
#3 Crowdsource
This might sound wanky if you haven’t tried it, but it’s simply a public competition to create blurb. We tried this with a book called And This Is True, sending out white-covered proofs to members of the public who'd taken up an invitation on our site, or Twitter, or Facebook. The winner was an actor, as it turned out, and I think his copy is genuinely fresh:
In addition to the potential for a surprising approach, this is also cheap and can yeild PR. Though it is immensely time consuming.
It's worth mentioning authors at this point. You'd have hoped they'd be a brilliant resource for blurb: they're the professional writers here. But it's not always the case; naturally they're not the most objective party, and probably more concerned than most with accurate representation, which is not commercially useful. In the above example, the author took the most convincing about the copy. And who can blame her? She does the words, right? Who has the right to put something gimmicky on the back of her book?
#4 Retained Writer
Find one brilliant copywriter to do your whole list. It would create a high overall standard, but it would cost a fortune and might introduce a homogenous tone. Penguin make it work, mind.
#5 Copy Leader
Should you appoint one copy leader per imprint? Could be an editor, could be a marketer, could be a sales person…?
They mind deadlines and own blurbs. Why not give someone the job and see what happens?
#6 Copy Teams
To raise the status and internal ambition for blurbs, should we simply appoint a copy team for each big book? And then brief them really thoroughly: Is there a problem to challenge or avoid? Is there a particular way we want readers to feel? Is there a 'magic moment' we need to highlight? What is the particular function of this blurb?
Evaluate!
We’ve seen from the BookZone work on the cover copy awards that it’s really easy to find out which blurbs readers respond to. There’s nothing to stop us testing two different blurbs and letting readers tell us which one makes them want to buy the book.
I'll finish with a quick note on authors and agents, suggested by Damian Horner:
Why not present blurb properly, in person, to author and agent along with cover? The package, all of it, is our communication vehicle, and we should present it to them with confidence. After all, if we rehabilitate copy, rescue it from being the ginger stepchild in the family, we're demonstrating to the world another vital element that the publisher adds. Another reason why we're the experts. Another reason why we're indispensible. And we need those.
Wednesday, 12 May 2010
Why Publishing Is Better Than Banking
(originally written for the Hodder blog)
When I was upgraded from Work Experience to Postroom Boy, my first paid job in publishing, my best friend delighted in teasing me about the career I had chosen: "tha' can't eat bukes, son" he would state, in unconvincing Yorkshire-ese. And he had a point. The pay was crap. Clearly there was something else that made me, and all of us, stick with bukes.
But what is it, since it's clearly not just that "we really like reading"? I think the answer is half laudable and half ... slightly tacky.
Laudable first: If you love books, and have even the tiniest impulse to share your love of books with the world, what could be more inviting than the opportunity to engage with a book – a text as they'd have said at college – and attempt to add whatever publishing Right Stuff you may have to the thing, in an attempt to get it widely read?
From editor to rep, and beyond, to bookseller, everyone gets a shot at (if you'll forgive the horrid phrase) adding value. It could be creative, it could be nakedly commercial, but it all contributes to the enterprise of making the book popular.
And now the tacky bit; our less classy reason to stay in books: we get to show off. When we go for drinks with old school friends who have been cutting a swathe through the City, say, or billing fortunes at the Bar, we know we can't compete on the financial front. But just try asking them what excited them at work last week. Specifically what bit was best. Chances are your week sounds more fun. Discovering a stunning new author, maybe meeting them and persuading them that your publishing house is their creative home. Puzzling out how to get the public to respond to their book. Even the bad bits are pretty great. Consider the "nightmare" of a steaming row in a cover meeting or a "real struggle" selling a brilliant book to a book loving bookseller. Many people would give their right arm to get paid to do either.
To address, at last, the book in hand: David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet sums up exactly what makes me love the business. I started reading it on a family holiday, alongside four people all reading The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Nothing against Stieg, but by God I felt smug. When you're reading a story no one has ever told before, or even come close, when you're absorbing page after page of prose which makes you grin with its wit, with the delightful surprise of the character's actions, with the sparkle of the ideas being playfully chipped your way by the author ... you're feeling happy. When you pause to reflect that you get to join in, be it with the cover art, the blurb, the text design, or the way it's conveyed to the booksellers and the public, well, then you feel privileged.
And that sums it up. It's a privilege to work on a book like this.
But what is it, since it's clearly not just that "we really like reading"? I think the answer is half laudable and half ... slightly tacky.
Laudable first: If you love books, and have even the tiniest impulse to share your love of books with the world, what could be more inviting than the opportunity to engage with a book – a text as they'd have said at college – and attempt to add whatever publishing Right Stuff you may have to the thing, in an attempt to get it widely read?
From editor to rep, and beyond, to bookseller, everyone gets a shot at (if you'll forgive the horrid phrase) adding value. It could be creative, it could be nakedly commercial, but it all contributes to the enterprise of making the book popular.
And now the tacky bit; our less classy reason to stay in books: we get to show off. When we go for drinks with old school friends who have been cutting a swathe through the City, say, or billing fortunes at the Bar, we know we can't compete on the financial front. But just try asking them what excited them at work last week. Specifically what bit was best. Chances are your week sounds more fun. Discovering a stunning new author, maybe meeting them and persuading them that your publishing house is their creative home. Puzzling out how to get the public to respond to their book. Even the bad bits are pretty great. Consider the "nightmare" of a steaming row in a cover meeting or a "real struggle" selling a brilliant book to a book loving bookseller. Many people would give their right arm to get paid to do either.
To address, at last, the book in hand: David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet sums up exactly what makes me love the business. I started reading it on a family holiday, alongside four people all reading The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Nothing against Stieg, but by God I felt smug. When you're reading a story no one has ever told before, or even come close, when you're absorbing page after page of prose which makes you grin with its wit, with the delightful surprise of the character's actions, with the sparkle of the ideas being playfully chipped your way by the author ... you're feeling happy. When you pause to reflect that you get to join in, be it with the cover art, the blurb, the text design, or the way it's conveyed to the booksellers and the public, well, then you feel privileged.
And that sums it up. It's a privilege to work on a book like this.
Saturday, 20 March 2010
The One About The Man With The Banjo
Cut & pasted from the Hodder blog...
Listening to Frances Spalding on Start the Week last month reminded me of a small obsession: the value of memorable words in a book title. She thinks a good title ‘acts as a capstone’ to a work, and must be ‘wholly at one with the book’. That may well be true, but for shameless unit-shifting reasons, I say a good title is also a memorable one. And a memorable one almost always includes at least one decent noun.
Animals, objects and famous places are easy to remember. And if you can remember the title of a book, or at least a bit of it, then you can ask for it in a shop, or find it online and recommend it to a friend – that critical word-of-mouth factor that creates so many bestsellers.
This was wittily exploited by Penguin in their adverts for Two Caravans by Marina Lewycka:
This is clever for a number of reasons: most importantly it reflects perfectly the way readers actually talk about books. It doesn’t plunge immediately into detail about the plot, because readers don’t. It’s not over-reverential about the author, because readers aren’t. Instead it invites us to recall that we liked the last one so we’ll probably like this one. We can’t remember the last one’s title, or the author’s unpronounceable name, but it’s the new one from that tractors woman and we’ll probably give it a go.
A straw poll of booksellers reinforces the impression that book buyers need all the help they can get remembering book titles.
Dillons alumnus Mike Atherton (not that one, another one) remembers being asked for ‘that motorbike thing by Shaggy Vera’ (The Motorcycle Diaries, Che Guevara). Marie recalls the classic ‘it has some sushi on the front.’ Stephanie tells me that in her days at WH Smith ‘A Cross on the Nightingale's Door’ was nearly as popular an enquiry as the correct title (Across The Nightingale Floor). Wendy reports the priceless ‘set in Greece, about a man with a banjo’ from the Captain Corelli era.
And at the risk of turning this into a post mocking book buyers, I can't resist including this lovely scene in a shop witnessed by Shona Cook, a Canadian publishing friend (the ‘me’ is Shona):
Customer: I need to get that book about cookies. It's something about cookies.
Clerk: Cookies. Okay. (types into the computer) umm... there are quite a few books about cookies here.
Customer: Well it was on TV the other day. My wife saw it on TV.
Clerk: Um. Okay. There are really a lot of books about cookies. Can you tell me anything else about it?
Customer: It's something about making money and cookies. I don't know. She was going on about it at dinner but I wasn't really listening to her.
At this point, I realize which book they are looking for and turn to the clerk.
Me: I think the book you want is called The Smart Cookie’s Guide to Investing
Him: YEAH. THAT'S IT.
Clerk: Thank you.
Me: Your wife is a lucky woman.
And, rather than get properly back to the point, here's a story from Lucy Mangan, one of our own authors, ex of Waterstone's in Bromley, demonstrating that even a great title won’t be enough for some customers: ‘There's the one who came in saying he didn't know the title (‘Fine,’ I said, moving to the database screen) – or the author (‘Less fine’) but he knew it was ‘this shape’. He drew a rectangle in the air.’
And that brings us nicely on to what happens if you don’t have a memorable title.
Despite the outstanding efforts of India Knight and The Lutyens & Rubinstein Bookshop among others, I reckon the (absolutely brilliant) Important Artefacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris: Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewellery by Leanne Shapman will always be hampered by its impossible to remember title, despite the fact that the title is an ingenious and integral part of the novel itself. I have had about thirty conversations about it and no one (including me) has yet managed anything closer than ‘you know, the novel written like it’s an auction catalogue’. Test for yourself how hard this makes things: try and find it on Amazon twenty minutes after you’ve finished reading this.
In fact Amazon, and the importance of online search, makes a distinctive, memorable title more vital than ever. You'll need to get at least one word right to find the damn thing online.
A great title, as Frances Spalding puts it, will ‘catch passers-by’, but a bestselling title will stay in the mind of the passer-on.
Tuesday, 22 December 2009
Christmas card 2009
A very satisfying process, printing this year's card:
Firstly, it's a team effort. S's idea, B found the pinecone on hols in France and did the writing, which I traced onto the lino. H did nothing, the slacker.
Secondly, I learned something really important about lino printing: the reason I have been getting, literally, patchy results to date, with more mottled ink application than I'd have liked, is not because of this:
or this:
it's because I don't got one of these:
and instead rely on rather cruder means, such as:
and, this time, one of these ugly brutes:
But all done now, and happy with it. Happy Christmas!
Firstly, it's a team effort. S's idea, B found the pinecone on hols in France and did the writing, which I traced onto the lino. H did nothing, the slacker.
Secondly, I learned something really important about lino printing: the reason I have been getting, literally, patchy results to date, with more mottled ink application than I'd have liked, is not because of this:
or this:
it's because I don't got one of these:
and instead rely on rather cruder means, such as:
and, this time, one of these ugly brutes:
But all done now, and happy with it. Happy Christmas!
Sunday, 29 November 2009
Arf
Two stories which have amused me in the last few days:
My sister was picking up her six year old at school and happened to notice the new Ben 10 'Omnitrix' watch her classmate Max was wearing. "Nice Omnitrix, Max!" said V, all friendly and mum-like. "Thanks!" said Max, and, realising it was polite to reciprocate the complament, briefly looked her up and down, scanning for an appropriate subject. "Nice ... boobies." he settled on, and turned back to his game.
Our friend M was off work looking after his daughter when his phone accidentally called work from his pocket. His PA did the decent thing and put the call on speaker when she realised that this was the boss reading his daughter, of all things, That's Not My Fairy.
My sister was picking up her six year old at school and happened to notice the new Ben 10 'Omnitrix' watch her classmate Max was wearing. "Nice Omnitrix, Max!" said V, all friendly and mum-like. "Thanks!" said Max, and, realising it was polite to reciprocate the complament, briefly looked her up and down, scanning for an appropriate subject. "Nice ... boobies." he settled on, and turned back to his game.
Our friend M was off work looking after his daughter when his phone accidentally called work from his pocket. His PA did the decent thing and put the call on speaker when she realised that this was the boss reading his daughter, of all things, That's Not My Fairy.
Thursday, 12 November 2009
The Back of the Book
Here's a blog post about blurb I done did on the Hodder site:
What happens the instant after you flip a book over might make the difference between bestseller and remainder.
Why?
When you turn over a book, it's like clicking on a link, or raising your eyebrows and tilting your head in a conversation. It says "tell me more".
Quite often we, as publishers, bugger up this priceless invitation with a blurb that tells you all the wrong stuff, or simply tells you too much.
Research, consultants, and common sense tell us two things about blurbs:
#1: The punters neither want nor need a full synopsis.
#2: They think we sorted out all those lovey "A Masterpiece" quotes from other famous authors over drinks at The Groucho.
So what should we put on the back of a book? Here's a blurb I think works really well:
and it was a monster bestseller, sans prizes or Richard & Judy.
I think it works because:
It addresses you directly, and in an arrestingly unusual way: "HERE IS A SMALL FACT: YOU ARE GOING TO DIE".
It doesn't tell you more of the story than you need (though it does fall back on that overused 'The year. The place' thing).
It's suggestive rather than explanatory. How could your curiosity not be piqued by "and quite a lot of thievery"?
So why aren't more blurbs like that and less like dull synopses and tiresome hype?
A chap called Damian Horner (more on him later) has some good opinions on this, but my list would go:
1) Low status of blurb. There are some notable exceptions, but in most publishers it’s written by quite junior staff, like Editorial Assistants. Nothing wrong with that in itself – they're smart and they know the books – but it's an indication that the enterprise as a whole doesn't value it as highly as, say, the front cover. We can tell that the cover art is important because it is afforded the ultimate accolade of a Punch’n'Judy set-to (aka The Cover Meeting) between the most senior members of staff every week, in every publisher.
2) Publishing processes. You write the Advance Information sheet, you adapt it for the catalogue, which becomes the hardback copy, which becomes the paperback copy. Surprise, surprise, it ain't reading very fresh any more. Hard to manage freshness when you're only ever 10 minutes from the next deadline.
3) Lack of evidence. We don't, as an industry, spend that much on research, and what we do spend probably isn't too closely focussed on the role of copy. It happens, but it's not exactly common. So we don't know enough about what works.
But back to the good examples. My colleagues at Sceptre scored a big hit with this one:
When I first saw it my immediate reaction was "Arg! Can't do that!" I had a right old cringe at the notion of "we", The Publisher, addressing the reader. 300,000 sales later ... I might have revised my stance a tad.
So why does it work? It goes further than The Book Thief by making a virtue of denying you information (though the information you do get is very well judged). It, too, is arrestingly direct: "We don't want to tell you what happens in this book". It makes an unusual request of you: "please don't tell".
It was written before my time here in a very intense and thoughtful process led by Damian Horner, our marketing consultant. Now if you read 'marketing consultant' and think bad thoughts (I've been told that some people don't think us Marketing Professionals are the salt of the earth) please consider that his job here is nothing more sinister than helping us persuade people to buy books we love.
What's next? How to repeat the trick? Probably not by repeating it, for a kickoff ("We don't want to tell you what happens in ... THIS book either!!"). We have been working on an interesting new wheeze, though. It’s about getting fresh ideas from writers outside the industry. Watch this space
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