Judging A Book, On Its Cover. The life of a blurb excerpted from a critic — a book review, say, from NPR — is a fairly simple one. ... Using samples of several thousand participants each, ...

Don’t oversell. Or undersell. Or even sell.

Tolkien’s blurber used this ploy: “The Lord of the Rings is not a book to be described in a few sentences.” For everyone else, there is a craft, and a code, to pitching books to readers.

For example, the 2003 reissue of Dorothy L Sayers’ 1926 classic, ... The American novelist Rick Moody had the last word on that particular cover: “This book does not need a blurb. ...