I assume the "testimonials-with-no-blurb" sells books because there is a large-ish segment of readers that buys based on recommendations from critics or "because everyone else is reading it".
The "don't spell out the subgenre" is to make the blurb as interesting and distinctive as possible: "this is why you want to buy THIS PARTICULAR BOOK and not any other random book in the same subgenre". Putting the subgenre on the back cover is a bit like saying "my product is basically interchangeable with other books in this subgenre and there's no special reason you'd want this over them." Yes, the whole rest of the blurb is still there, but it has a psychological effect.
I've seen self-pub books that put the the subgenre at the bottom of the blurb, and paperbacks that put it at the bottom of the back cover ("An Action-Packed Science Fiction Mystery!"), yeah. I could stick it into the cover text, for instance, in place of the tagline. The other problem is "what word to use"; the standard for books about a threesome is "ménage" or "ménage à trois" rather than "polyamorous", but I don't really like "ménage" because it's more closely associated with "three people having sex" than with "three people in a romantic relationship". :/
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2018-07-01 08:13 pm (UTC)The "don't spell out the subgenre" is to make the blurb as interesting and distinctive as possible: "this is why you want to buy THIS PARTICULAR BOOK and not any other random book in the same subgenre". Putting the subgenre on the back cover is a bit like saying "my product is basically interchangeable with other books in this subgenre and there's no special reason you'd want this over them." Yes, the whole rest of the blurb is still there, but it has a psychological effect.
I've seen self-pub books that put the the subgenre at the bottom of the blurb, and paperbacks that put it at the bottom of the back cover ("An Action-Packed Science Fiction Mystery!"), yeah. I could stick it into the cover text, for instance, in place of the tagline. The other problem is "what word to use"; the standard for books about a threesome is "ménage" or "ménage à trois" rather than "polyamorous", but I don't really like "ménage" because it's more closely associated with "three people having sex" than with "three people in a romantic relationship". :/