We were torn between the sheer power of this blurb and the delicate intelligence of the blurb for ‘Madeleine’. In the end ‘Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother’ won out because it is so damn powerful. It is a polemical piece of writing that grabs your attention and really makes you think.
Here is what we said about it at the time:
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.
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