By challenging convention, with a simple graphic and a non-glossy finish, Fish immediately stands out in a crowded market.

This stunning cover has turned it from the functional to the desirable — a coffee-table cook book that everyone will want to display as well as use.

Phaidon’s design pedigree is serving it incredibly well in the cookery section. More conventional publishers would do well to learn some lessons from this.

Just look at this image of the spine on a shelf.

It is extraordinary how little it takes to stand out.

Simply by using bold blocks of colour and disrupting the conventional, linear approach to spine design, this book screams at you from across the store.

It ain’t rocket science.

And maybe that is the problem with this blurb: There is just too much talking.

There is one killer point that comes through in Jonathan Franzen’s quote — “First novels this complete and consuming come along very, very seldom”.

In other words — this is a special book…

Rare, desirable and precious…

A one-off that needs to be seized upon…

This is the point that the publishers should have rammed home — but instead they got caught up in the breathless eloquence of long quotes and witty baseball metaphors.

(Hardly motivational for readers in a country that knows sod all about baseball and shows absolutely no interest in learning more about it either)

This blurb would have been much tighter if the publishers had showed more restraint and edited the quotes so that they all reinforced Franzen’s central message. After all, in among the baseball references, each of the quotes pick up on the same theme:

For example James Patterson exclaims: “The Art of Fielding is one of those rare novels that seems to appear out of nowhere, and then dazzles and bewitches and inspires until you nearly lose your breath from the enjoyment and satisfaction”

Seldom…Rare…these are big motivational words that are getting lost amongst all the others

The bottom line here is this — When putting together a blurb it is nearly always better to focus on one powerful message than to get distracted by lots of other themes (no matter how positive and tempting they might be).

But this one is just beautiful. It looks astonishing at actual size.

And, what’s more, it works really well as a thumbnail — the incredibly strong pattern more than compensates for the small typography to give it real shout and an instant identity on a web page.

We have just one complaint, which many of you will have predicted already… We KNOW it’s a novel. You don’t need to tell us.

Losing that totally unnecessary central insert would give the designers a bit more space to up the font size of the title a little, which would only increase the cover’s impact at a small scale.

But it’s a stunner.

Elegant. Simple. Different.

Here is a spine that kicks the asses of the books unfortunate enough to be placed around it on a bookshelf.

Just look at it.

It shouts at you.

The publishers have very wisely focused everything on the unusual title.

The difficult author name (Wu Ming) isn’t going to help anybody so it has been kept out of the way.

Instead, they have bought the cover image of a man’s face to the fore. This makes eminent sense as it adds a human dimension to the obscure title. Also, the image is cropped neatly so that we see just one eye peaking from round the corner of the spine. It communicates far more than one might expect. He looks…dangerous.

This is a spine that you want to pick off the shelf — just to learn more about it.

Job done.

This is a POWER BLURB.

The kind of book description that picks you up by the scruff of the neck, slaps you around the face and then dumps you in a crumpled heap on the floor, leaving you wondering what has just happened.

No wonder everyone is talking about Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.  The author is on television and radio all the time and the book is splashed across the review pages of the press.

Not since Gina Ford have so many smug middle-class mums raged so much about a book.

The publishers must be rubbing their hands in glee as they watch the PR machine hit overdrive and the book scream up the sales charts.

The writers of the blurb should take huge credit for the furore that surrounds this title. Few blurbs in recent memory have been so polemic.

But this is not simply a case of a book selling itself because of its controversial content. There is genuine skill at work here. The publishers have used the blurb to manipulate consumer emotions in the deftest of ways.

For a start, the blurb is written as a series of killer soundbites, each listed as a bullet point which makes them quick to read and easy to pass on through the all-important word of mouth.

The final bullet — linking as it does to the previous one — is a wonderful shock at the end of the piece. It ratchets up the tension just as you think it couldn’t get more extreme.

6) THE ONLY ACTIVITIES YOUR CHILD SHOULD BE PERMITTED TO DO ARE THOSE IN WHICH THEY CAN EVENTUALLY WIN A MEDAL

7) THAT MEDAL MUST BE GOLD

Few people could read this without wanting to:

A) Throw the book at somebody

B) Read the inside cover with the same kind of fascination and horror as one watches a car crash

C) Talk about it with their friends

The other strength of the bullet point format is that it reads like a manifesto. This is crucial as it makes the book appear very aggressive and didactic.

Even the use of upper case letters makes it feel as though the author is shouting at us.

All more grist to the PR mill…

It feels like every aspect of this back cover has been crafted to create outrage and column inches. And it has worked.

But…

From our point of view, the most interesting dynamic at work here is the fact that this blurb is not very representative of the book itself.

In reality this book is a story — the journey of a mother.

And even though it has all the elements that have been picked up on by the media, it is much more open and the author is far more vulnerable than the blurb would have us believe.

The first hint of this comes in the inside cover, which does a very good job of shaking the consumer out of their initial rage.

The line “It was supposed to be a story about…” is brilliant.

At once we are disarmed by the honesty of the writer and realise she is not the sanctimonious ogre we had first thought. The sharp contrast between this and the shock of the back cover is very potent and before we know it we are reading on..and on…

Sadly, of course not everyone will do this. Many people will only read the headlines and be left with a very innacurate view of this book. But at least they have heard about it, talked about it and may even want to find out more.

So this blurb works precisely because it is a poor representation of the book it is trying to sell. Years ago this would have been a criticism but increasingly marketing is taking over from editorial when it comes to defining the role of the blurb and its subsequent content. Nowadays (especially within non-fiction), publishers are happy to take awareness versus understanding because noise is what sells.

We’ve featured some fantastic examples of the use of photography to tell a story in political non-fiction — take a look at A Journey or The Third Man.

This cover, however, takes it to a whole new level. For those who know about the Milibands’ rivalry, this image says everything and tells you immediately that this is not a straight biography of Ed but an analysis of a bitter struggle, hidden behind public displays of unity. This is the story that most people want to read and it’s cleverly communicated by this choice of photo, which would work even without the strapline.

The book’s approach and conclusions, however, are rendered ambiguous by this image. Has Ed emerged triumphant from his brother’s shadow? Or will he be haunted and hampered by David for the rest of his career? Any reader will want to pick this up to find out which angle the authors have taken.

For anyone unfamiliar with the story, this picture is both striking and intriguing. Why, on a biography of a political leader, are there two people featured on the front? There must be more to this than a straightforward political profile.

Striking, communicative and well chosen — the perfect approach to a cover image.

In this case, both versions work within the ‘Standard Crime Palate’ of red, black and white but the similarities end there.

In terms of design and messaging, they have each taken vastly different approaches;

The US version (on the right) published by Minotaur Books, uses a strong block of red to cut through the clutter around it while the ‘tear’ acts like a little peak into something dark and mysterious. This is reinforced by the contrasting black and white photography (A tried and tested signifier of ‘gritty crime’)

The Americans have also put a lot of emphasis on the author name and for some reason felt compelled to add the painful “A novel” product descriptor. Maybe they were worried that the photograph would confuse people and make them believe the book is about a real event.

The UK version really is very different.

In our view it is far more interesting and communicates a hell of a lot more.

For a start, the large, close-up image of the Japanese woman instantly sets the scene of the story and hints at the subject of Suspect X’s devotion.

The red circle is very bold way of holding the title and as such it leaps off the page.

It also reinforces the Japanese roots of the novel.

To some, it also looks like a mouth screaming. For others it hints at a mouth covered by a gag.

Who knows…but we are aware that Crime Readers like decoding all the symbolism on a cover so it will tease them wonderfully.

The author name is very clear but given his lack of fame in the UK, it is rightfully given secondary billing in the communication hierarchy.

And finally, there is no need to add a silly product descriptor to warn readers that this is a novel — the design itself has made that abundantly obvious (which is exactly what it is supposed to do)

We have just seen a good spine for Ciara Geraghty (Elsewhere on this site) which took its lead from the spine for The Raw Shark Texts (Also elsewhere on this site) and now we have a really strong set of spines for Darren Shan’s ‘Demonata’ series inspired by no less a publishing power-brand than the Mr Men series.

It might be an old trick but just look at how well it stands out on the shelf.

And it will fit perfectly with the ‘Collector / Completist’ tendencies’ of many of its young male audience.

Sometimes designers don’t need to re-invent the wheel to make an impact — they just need to put in a bit of effort.

How depressing, then, to see this lame excuse for a hardback — and particularly this utter waste of a back cover. Surely, SURELY, the days are gone when a couple of generic quotes were considered enough to make someone spend money on a premium book? Blurbs need to sell, to convince, to enchant. This text does none of those things… and it looks unbelievably boring as well.

Can you think of any other product category in which this sort of thing would be acceptable? This makes us want to weep.

Come ON, publishers — put some proper selling copy on the back of your hardbacks. Build the design around that copy to make it sing. Get us excited by what we see there. Show us that you believe in your book and we might believe in it enough to shell out £20.