Why you should ignore the superlatives on book jackets

Recently I was at a literature festival, being interviewed by a man who hadn't had the chance to read my novel. It was fine. These things happen and we muddle through.

Unable to draw upon the themes of the work my kindly interviewer took to reading from the cover, attempting to bolster audience appreciation of me by quoting what someone else thought of my writing. He landed on a quote by the author Joe Dunthorne: "Terrific," Joe had said. "Engaging, funny and inventive." My interviewer grinned and asked how such a comment made me feel?

It may have been the heat. It may have been my irritation at the mother letting her child run around in front of the stage. It may have simply been ungraciousness on my part. At any rate, I felt the imp of the perverse take hold: "I should confess," I offered. "I've known Joe Dunthorne for many years. I think he owed me a favour."
Some tittering in the audience; my host barked a laugh.
"To be honest," I continued. "When he sent it, I considered pressing for more. Why not intensely engaging, riotously funny and, um-"
"Indefatigably inventive?" my host offered helpfully.
"Precisely! Where were the superlatives?"

I was joking, of course. Or was I? I thought about it again today when the post arrived. Post in our household has become considerably more exciting since my novel, The Shock of the Fall, won the Costa book award; in the last six months I have received 42 (I just counted) unsolicited novels.

Better yet, these are advance copies of works, yet to be published. In the book trade they're called "uncorrected proofs" and are used to start generating support for a work prior to its publication. I remember first seeing the uncorrected proof of my own novel. I had gone to my publishers for some meeting or other, and caught sight of one on a table in the foyer. Nobody had come to join me yet, so I got to spend a bit of time with it, all by myself. It was my favourite moment in the whole publishing journey; when my story ceased to be the stack of dog-eared pages I'd spent so long living with, and became a proper book. But a book with no gushing praise adorning it. And apparently that won't do.

This isn't a conclusion I would have reached myself. Before being published, I don't recall paying much attention to cover quotes. I would mostly buy books on the recommendation of friends or if I already knew I liked the author. Yet somewhere along the path from that joyous wonder of discovering the proof of my novel to it appearing in hardback, I became all but obsessed with it garnering adoration. I shan't seek to abdicate too much responsibility for this; but the publishing industry doesn't help – and I think it might just be going a bit crazy.

With each book I receive in the post comes a letter from its publisher. They all follow the same basic template: a few pleasantries followed by three or four paragraphs explaining how the book you are holding is the most incredible, astounding, breathtaking work of literature to ever exist, that it will break hearts, move mountains, define the age, live with you long after the final page, and it is with trembling excitement we now share it, and hope you might etc. And how else could it be? If the publisher isn't an advocate for their own books then something has gone wrong.

The hope is that two or three recognisable names will agree with the hyperbole and quote it back to the publisher. I've known this happen verbatim. I shan't say which book, but it's doing rather well right now, and the author quote on the cover is plucked straight from the letter that accompanied the proofs. Dunthorne received no such letter with my book, though doubtless many authors will have done. Instead my publisher suggested that, as we were friends, it might be best for me to contact him myself. I could have declined on the grounds of embarrassment and they'd have been fine with that, but by now I had caught the strange fever that infects the industry: if I was to shift a single book then I needed other authors to say very nice things. We got our quotes. We moved on.

Now the books come to me. It's my turn to give something back. I've offered endorsements for about 10 novels, and thought long and hard over each of them. It's no easy thing, to distil a whole reading experience into a couple of lines. My first attempt – for a book I enjoyed immensely, but was slightly disappointed with the ending – left the editor somewhat cold. But that's just it. Cover blurbs aren't reviews. They're advertisements. No space for balanced, nuanced positivity. Nothing can be interesting; it must be fascinating. Good isn't good enough; it must be great. With today's post came "an epically brilliant work", according to the blurb already in place. A slight volume, it consists of a hundred or so different tweets, harvested by the author from Twitter, and each containing the phrase "working on my novel". It's quirky, sure. And nicely presented. But is that really "epically brilliant"?

Where do we go from there? What's left for War and Peace? Though perhaps this doesn't matter, now that books are "classics" before they reach the shelves. It's all too easy to get swept away. Increasingly I've found myself reaching for superlatives because increasingly, anything short of this reads as damning with faint praise. I wonder if this trend can really be helping anyone?

So I've taken a step back. As grateful as I am for my free novels, I've started going back to bookshops, to reading books that don't come with letters attached. I've just finished To Kill a Mockingbird. I'm not sure what made me pick it. Perhaps it felt safe – to read a book that I already knew was great. But there are lots of great books, so why this one? An unconscious response to the quote on the back cover (pictured above)? On this edition there's only one. It's from Truman Capote. I read somewhere once that he and Harper Lee were good friends. Perhaps he owed her a favour.