Click

I saw this book Click the other day in a train station WHSmith. Having just published a book on a related subject I was intrigued enough to pick it up.

The back cover blurb starts with what would normally be 3 bullet points (except there are no bullets.) They are as follows:

British teenagers furiously search for "prom dresses" and "limousines" in advance of their end-of-year school balls.

A correct prediction, several weeks in advance of the final show, that Mark Ramprakash would be the winner of Strictly Come Dancing season 4.

Internet user behaviour around visits to the Arctic Monkeys' website from social networks and search engines drive the band to the top of the album chart.

These 3 statements don't make any sense to me. Do they make sense to you? On the face of it they don't tell me anything I might not have guessed. They certainly don't tell me anything I might care about and they really don't tell me much about the book - unless the book is about conspiracies on the internet - but I don't think it is.

I'm tempted to suggest that both the book and the blurb are about keyword searches - Mark Ramprakash, Strictly Come Dancing, Arctic Monkeys and Prom (mistyped as Porn?) but who knows. I doubt the blurb was written by the author but he must have approved it. Anyway I got no further which just goes to show the importance of getting the blurb right. I think I'm probably interested in the subject of the book but already my reading experience is off-putting and I haven't even opened it yet.

I've lots of sympathy though for the poor marketing junior who probably did write this. I used to have write blurbs in the past (and occasionally still do if we're really desperate) and I am rubbish at it. However I don't think I ever produced anything as bad as this. It is a real skill and an underestimated one.