The jacket copy of a book, I’m told, works hand-in-hand with the covering. It is Point of Sale (POS) marketing. The cover and title (and perhaps the author’s name) are what make a prospective book buyer pick a copy off a table or a shelf.
Never mind the other things that POS can stand for.
Anyway, the idea is … you, the reader, are browsing in a store and pick up a book that looks interesting. If it still looks interesting in your hand, you might flip it over and read what’s on the back jacket. If it STILL looks interesting, you might read what’s on the book flaps.
Then, you’ll either buy it or put it down and move on. Unless you’re the author, in which case you might try to arrange the book or books so that they stand out better among the thousands of other books in the store, at least until some employee comes along and undoes your work.
Publishers have not yet figured out much about online bookselling and take all their cues from Amazon, which is making it up as it goes along. Here is the Beauty from Afar page at Amazon. There is no jacket copy, really. There are a bunch of nice reviews, though, and none of them was written by my mom.
I am feeling like this site wouldn’t be complete without at least some photos of the original jacket copy.
You can click on the images to make them enormous, larger than life, the way I felt when I first saw them in a bookstore. Here’s the back cover:
And here’s the inside front flap. There is no particular reason this prose should live forever but I include it for the sake of completeness.
Finally, here’s the back inside flap. Yes, my hair was that that long, for many years. I had to supply my own photo, so that’s what we get …
There. Now I feel like we can … move along, here.
