But usually, if I don’t know the author’s work, I just go straight for the jacket copy to get a feel for the story line and judge from that whether or not I’m going to read it. I rarely if ever even glance at the review excerpts or blurbs, because I know that no one is going to be putting “Edelman’s writing could suck the wind out of a Cat 5 hurricane” in their book. The blurbs are always the best, most enthusiastic yes-fests the publisher has available, and as such they all more or less read the same and tell me nothing except that the book is not so universally repellent that not even the publisher’s janitor wants their name associated with it.

Given the pure and irredeemable dreck that I’ve seen published (larded with enough hypetastic blurbs to represent an entire forest’s worth of non-content-bearing wood pulp), except in the few instances mentioned above I pretty much see them as so much wasted cellulose.

But that’s just me. I’ve spent enough time writing marketing copy and whatnot (and filling web pages to the breaking point with universally chipper testimonials from my clients’ clients) that I may be just a teensy bit jaded.