Advertising books: a linguistic analysis of blurbs

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present a preliminary approach to the study of blurbs, brief\ntexts traditionally displayed on bookcovers, and nowadays also on the Internet, which provide\ninformation about a book to potential readers. This study focuses on four of the most widelyknown\npublishing and bookselling companies in the English-speaking world: Penguin,\nBallantine, Routledge, and Barnes & Noble, and analyses more than 60 blurbs displayed on\ntheir web sites. The study indicates that blurbs may constitute a genre characterised by a definite\ncommunicative purpose and by the use of specific linguistic and discourse conventions. Blurbs\nperform an informative function based on the description of the contents of a book. But this\nfunction is secondary to their persuasive purpose, characteristic of advertising discourse,\nbecause blurbs recommend the book by means of review extracts from various sources in an\nattempt to persuade the prospective reader to buy the "product." In order to achieve their\ncommunicative purpose, blurbs make use of a wide range of linguistic and discourse\nconventions typical of advertising discourse: complimenting, elliptical syntactic patterns, the\nimperative, the address form "you," and what I have called "curiosity arousers," usually in the\nform of rhetorical questions and excerpts from the book

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