This back cover is a great bit of design — clean, simple and striking. It conveys perfectly the novel’s juxtaposition of quaint village life and a dark undercurrent, while underlining its epistolary approach. Incorporating the barcode into the image is a really neat, satisfying touch which shows great care and attention to detail.

It’s a real shame, then, that the yellow space has been filled with three very generic quotes that tell the reader nothing at all about what’s inside. And once you find the blurb on the front flap, it’s disheartening to see just how enormously long and overwritten it is — in stark contrast to the immediacy of the design:

This is really disappointing. Even the first paragraph is stretched out by an unnecessary subclause, while the remaining text is full of lists and descriptions that reveal far too much of the book to make it intriguing. The final paragraph — an unofficial review — really grates. Either use a real review or leave the reader to make up their own mind.

It would have been far better to put a pithy, intriguing and funny blurb within the yellow tape on the back. The limited space would have necessitated something short and immediate and would have imposed some positive discipline on the copywriting process. I really hope this is the case with the paperback.

This is a depressingly familiar scenario — a great design let down by sloppy, overlength copy. Setting a tight framework for your blurb (design constraint, a low word count etc) before you start to write can help avoid this sort of mismatch.