Promoting Literary Products: Book Blurbs as a Genre

Abstract

The aim of this study is to present an approach to the study of book blurbs which are short texts usually included on bookcovers, and also on the Web-pages of publishing houses to supply information about a book to potential readers. This study focuses on four of the biggest publishing and bookselling companies in Turkey. The corpus of the study consists of 20 blurbs of novels from modern Turkish literature chosen by a random sampling. The findings of the study show that blurbs may be considered as a genre which have a definite communicative purpose and they include the use of specific linguistic and rhetoric conventions. In parallel to this, there is a cognitive move structure in blurbs designed by the editors for a specific aim. Blurbs, in this regard, perform an informative function based on the description of the contents of a book. But this function is secondary to their persuasive purpose which is also a characteristic of advertising discourse. It can be suggested that blurbs are attempted to sell the book to the readers, the customers of a publishing company. To reach this communicative purpose, blurbs employ a wide variety of linguistic and rhetoric features similar to advertising genres: complimenting, elliptical syntactic patterns, the imperative, as well as puns, hyperboles, rhetorical questions and excerpts from the book to attract the attention of readers.