What Should You Say On The Cover Of Your Novel?

You have the title and, if you’re lucky, a few lines of advance praise from readers. But what else should go on the cover of your book (or the flaps or dust jacket if it’s a hardcover)?

The longtime Penguin Books copywriter Louise Willder scatters tips for writing fiction and nonfiction book-cover copy throughout her new Blurb Your Enthusiasm!: An A–Z of Literary Persuasion (Oneworld Publications, 2022).

Good cover copy, she says, has a tight narrative structure with a clear beginning, middle, and end. It tells a mini-story that makes an emotional impact.

That storytelling begins with an opening hook that makes people want to read more. You’ll find an example of a strong first line for the cover copy of a novel on the Virago edition of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: “The Republic of Gilead allows Offred only one function: to breed.”

Want more tips on what to say on the cover of your book? And a few about the things you should never say? You’ll find them in my article:

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https://medium.com/lit-life/shes-written-cover-copy-for-5-000-books-what-did-she-learn-1f00015f0bb5

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How Social Media Can — And Can’t — Help You Sell Your Book

“You have to be on social media.”

If you’ve written a book — or plan to do one — you’ve probably heard this more than once.

Editors, agents, and publicists hail social media as the potential savior of authors ignored by mainstream reviewers and news outlets. As evidence, they point to pop-fiction superstars like Colleen Hoover, whose Himalayan number of TikTok followers recently helped her land an astonishing 15 books on the USA Today bestseller lists at once.

The standard publishing advice boils down to: Books by big names like James Patterson may sell themselves, but if you’re a small-name or no-name author, you must promote yourself relentlessly on social media in order to succeed.

There’s a problem with this advice, as commonsensical as it sounds: No solid research supports it.

As a journalist who writes about books and publishing, I’ve looked for years for hard data that proves that plugging your work on social media sells books. All the evidence I’ve seen is so anecdotal and sketchy, I’ve wondered: Are authors being gaslit by all the “promote, promote, promote” messages they hear?

Two recent, gold-plated articles suggest that social media is, to put it mildly, oversold to writers as a tool for selling books. Here’s more on the best research on the issue and, if you’re an author or would like to be, how it can help you:

https://medium.com/illumination/how-social-media-can-and-cant-help-you-sell-books-d660317438c5

Shocking Abuses at Irish ‘Mother-and-Baby’ Homes Underlie the Best Novel I Read in 2022, Claire Keegan’s ‘Small Things Like These’

In 2014, a historian made public her horrific discovery that 796 infants had died and were buried in secret graves near an Irish home for unwed mothers and their babies between 1925 and 1961.

Her finding sparked worldwide outrage and led Ireland to set up a national commission to investigate the deaths at the Tuam Home and others like it, known as “mother-and-baby homes.” In announcing the move, the Irish prime minister said that for decades Ireland had treated babies born to unmarried parents as “an inferior sub-species.”

An official investigation found that Tuam women who became pregnant again after their stay were sometimes sent to the now notorious Irish institutions known as Magdalene Laundries.

“Orders of Roman Catholic nuns ran the laundries for profit, and women and girls were put to work there, supposedly as a form of penance. The laundries were filled not only with ‘fallen women’ — prostitutes, women who became pregnant out of marriage or as a result of sexual abuse and those who simply failed to conform — but also orphans and deserted or abused children.”

More than 10,000 women passed through the laundries, where they suffered further abuse or neglect before the last of the institutions closed in 1996. Some of the victims reported being beaten, locked in, fed bread and water, made to work from morning until evening, and forced to stay out in the cold if they broke rules. Here’s more: https://medium.com/p/dcb6dc922488

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How the ‘Southernization’ of the U.S. Hurts Politics

Media analysts often spoke of Donald Trump, during his first presidential campaign, as a rogue candidate, a one-off the country hadn’t seen before. On one level, it was true: No major party had ever nominated a reality-show host for president.

But the U.S. had seen something like Trump before, the authors Frye Gaillard and Cynthia Tucker note in their insightful book The Southernization of America: A Story of Democracy in the Balance (New South,  2022). The country had seen it in the presidential campaigns of four-time Alabama governor George Wallace, who proclaimed in his 1963 inaugural address: “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

Many of Trump’s tactics, intentionally or not, were a page out of Wallace’s playbook. By failing to understand the depth of the racist fears and hatreds that Wallace had stirred up — and the degree to which they persist — the analysts underestimated not just Trump’s appeal but its potential effects.

I write about some of the ways U.S. politics has become “Southernized” over at Medium:

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Salman Rushdie: Books ‘Make Us Who We Are’

Salman Rushdie may be better known as a novelist, but he’s a wonderful literary critic, and I’m grateful for his many admirable reviews of other authors. Over at Medium, I’ve posted one of my favorite quotes from him on why books matter:

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https://medium.com/everything-shortform/why-salman-rushdie-believes-the-books-we-love-make-us-who-we-are-c09ebc0bcac3

One of America’s Most Honored Journalists Reread the Hardy Boys Novels He Once Loved–And What He Found Startled Him

Gene Weingarten, America’s only two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, calls the Hardy Boys mysteries the novels that “most influenced” his love of his craft

When he reread the books as an adult, he made a couple of startling discoveries: Contrary to his rosy memories, the writing was so bad, it was “some of the worst bilge ever published.” But there was much to admire in the often heartbreaking, Depression-era life of their author, Leslie McFarlane, who was required by the publishers of the Hardy Boys to write under the pen name of Franklin W. Dixon. Weingarten described what he learned about McFarlane and the Hardy Boys in an article I wrote about on Medium.

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https://medium.com/crows-feet/what-happened-when-a-pulitzer-winner-reread-the-hardy-boys-books-66107b46c6

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7 Deadly Sins of Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’

Stephen King’s On Writing is America’s second bestselling guide to the craft, according to Amazon rankings, and it draws rapturous praise from aspiring writers. But in my experience, more experienced writers take a dimmer of its advice.

Over at Medium, I challenge seven pieces of advice King gives in On Writing. Some of his precepts are outdated or inconsistent. Others oversimplify an issue that’s vastly more complex than King makes it. Here’s a brief excerpt from my post (dealing, in this case, with King’s views on adverbs) and a link to my responses to six others at the end of it:

1 ‘The adverb is not your friend’

No, it’s not your friend — unless you’re Jane Austen and writing one of the most famous first lines in English: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Or you’re F. Scott Fitzgerald and writing one of the most famous last lines: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Or you’re Herman Melville ending Moby-Dick by quoting the Book of Job: “And I only am alone escaped to tell thee.” Take that, writers of the King James Version.

Yes, writers tend to overuse adverbs, especially in speech tags. But adverbs have a purpose, and the best writers don’t libel them but use them — as Austen and Fitzgerald and Melville did — to serve their purposes.

https://janiceharayda.medium.com/7-ways-stephen-kings-on-writing-loses-the-plot-2494b09dc64f

My Summer Reading List — 30 Beach-Ready Books From 30 Countries

Has your reading become GU, or geographically undesirable? Do you read way too many Mom Coms about mothers in deep suburbia or first novels by young Brooklynites living on Ramen noodles?

Jump start your summer reading with my list of 30 beach- and hammock-ready books from 30 countries, from Australia to Zimbabwe, all alphabetically arranged by country name. My list includes new and classic books of fiction and nonfiction with a one- or two-line review of each and a link to more information, chosen with an eye toward providing something for every taste and travel destination.

If you’ve found a great book about a place you love, please feel free to add it in the comments here or on Medium, where I’ve posted the full list:

https://medium.com/lit-life/intriguing-books-from-30-countries-151377fe8cac

Thanks for reading, and if you’ll be taking a trip this summer, happy travels.

How a Drug Startup Scammed Patients, Doctors, and Insurers Until Its Founder Got Caught

If you love to read good books about crooks, the American drug companies are the gift that keeps on giving. Last year’s hit was Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, a story of the misdeeds by the OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma, which became finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction and winner of other honors.

Now comes Evan Hughes’ The Hard Sell, a story of crime and punishment at Insys Therapeutics, the once high-flying drug startup that in some ways makes Purdue Pharma look a choir of angels. Founder John Kapoor is doing five-and-a-half years in a federal prison, and more than two dozen of his executives, sales reps, and doctors were convicted of crimes related to illegal promotions of the company’s signature drug, Subsys, a fast-acting opioid linked to more than 100 deaths, according to an investigation by Frontline for PBS.

Interesting in reading more? Here’s my take on the scandals on Medium:

https://janiceharayda.medium.com/how-a-drug-startup-screwed-patients-doctors-and-insurers-33d33aabda2b

How Much Trouble Can You Get Into by Stealing Another Writer’s Idea? An Author Finds Out the Hard Way in Jean Hanff Korelitz’s ‘The Plot’

I liked the satire of creative writing programs in The Plot but had mixed views of other aspects of the story in a book likely to turn up on a lot of holiday wish lists: https://medium.com/p/e183cd41ac25

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