Bad Press Release Friends

resist deadened copy!

I used to hate, hate, hate writing the sorts of paragraphs required by publicity: the back cover copy, the email press release, the “sell sheet” that we fold in half and wrap around the front cover of a galley, per the convention of book review editors and booksellers. I hated writing them the same way I hated writing abstracts for papers and panels back in my academic days: it always seemed insurmountably difficult to sum things up and make them interesting.

This fall, I’ve been doing a lot of publicity—writing those dreaded paragraphs—and I I now better understand why I’ve always dreaded this genre: the conventions of this prose are deadening.

Here’s an example of how I used to think about these tasks:

Me, talking to a friend: “I love this book! It’s so well-written and talks about a specific concrete thing so many people don’t, and the author is the nicest person, and I think this book really fills a gap, and has a wide if niche readership. All we have to do is find its readers! I …