By PJ Parrish

You tell a lot about a book from its back cover.

I love reading the backcopy of books. It can be a powerful selling tool, summing up in just a couple paragraphs the soul of a story, giving us a glimpse of the plot and characters, without giving away the guts. When backcopy is good, it’s an art. And when it’s bad…well, I guess we can blame that on some poor editor somewhere. (I’ve had my share). Or maybe the problem runs deeper than that. We’ll get back to that…

Years ago, I did a long detailed post about how to write backcopy. Click here, if interested. But what I’d like to talk about today is what is known as the tagline. In usually one to three sentences, a good tagline — like a newspaper headline — tells you in a glance what the book is, at its true heart. And like a well-rendered headline, a book tagline makes you stop for a second or two and maybe get seduced.

I ran across a good example of this recently when I finally cracked open a novel I had gotten for Christmas. It’s set in France, so the giver was sure I would enjoy it. So was I because the tagline was pretty good:

In love we find out who we want to be.
In war we find out who we are.

I won’t be coy. The book is Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale. Now I know this is a hugely popular, even beloved, book. But dang, I just couldn’t get into it, and I gave it about 150 pages. Well written but just not my cup of tea. À chacun son goût.

But as I said, it got me thinking about what makes for good taglines. If you are self-publishing, you need to know about this because it really can make or break a sale for a casually browsing reader. If you don’t believe me, go haunt a (real) bookstore and watch browsers. They pick up a book, drawn maybe by spiffy cover art and then, almost always, they turn it over and read the back.

Movies are really good at taglines, probably because in the good old days, the movie poster was like a carnival barker trying to lure you inside. Here’s maybe my all time favorites:

In space, no one can hear you scream.

Alien, of course. But I like the tagline for the sequel Alien vs Pedator as well:

Whoever wins, we lose.

And then there’s the classic:

Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity is a work of noir genius. Every line of dialogue is as sharp as the tagline itself. This should be assigned viewing for every writer.

And just because I watched the movie again the other night:

Okay, intermission! Time out for a short quiz. See if you can tell which movies match these poster taglines. Answers at the end.

1. You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies
2. When he pours, he reigns
3. Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here.
4. The first casualty of war is innocence.
5. On every street in every city in this country, there’s a nobody who dreams of being a somebody.
6. He was the perfect weapon until he became the target.
7. If you only see one movie this year … You need to get out more.
8. A man went looking for America, and he couldn’t find it anywhere.
9. Don’t get mad. Get everything.
10. She brought a small town to its feet and a corporation to its knees.

I’ve been lucky to have some great editors over my career who shepherded my books through the backcopy and tagline process. For An Unquiet Grave: Not Every Soul Rests In Peace. And one of my faves from my Thomas & Mercer editor for She’s Not There:

A past she can’t remember.
A killer she can’t recongize.
And they’re both catching up with her.

Just for fun I pulled some books off my shelf in search of good taglines. Some taglines are only one juicy line. Some are puns. Others can stretch on into mini-plot summaries. But all tease and tantylize:

• Yesterday was for youthful indiscretions. Today is for consequences. — Sue Grafton’s Y Is For Yesterday.
• A tough detective follows a lead back to a 1960s Borcht Belt resort to crack an unsolved crime — or was it a crime at all? — Reed Farrel Coleman’s Redemption Street.
• From a helicopter high above the empty California desert, a man is sent free-falling into the night…in Chicago, a woman learns that an elite team of ex-army investigators is being hunted down one by one…and on the streets of Portland, Jack Reacher — soldier, cop, hero — is pulled out of his wandering life by a code that few other people could understand. — Lee Child’s Bad Luck and Trouble.

Okay, that last one is not a true tagline, just a good summary. But I really like the tagline for the first Reacher movie: If he’s coming for you, you probably deserve it.

The best taglines distill the core emotional, thematic, or high-stakes essence of your story down into a punchy, memorable phrase. It serves as the HEADLINE above the rest of the backcopy, wherein you can go into more plot and character details. It also hints at the tone of your book — humor, noir, romantic.

Do you really need a tagline? Well, not if you’re famous. A scan of my bookshelf showed me that the bestsellers rarely have them because the big name is lure enough. Sometimes, the space is given over to a blurb from a fellow writer. And if you’re lucky, you’ve hit upon a fabulous title that needs no other help. A few from my bookshelf: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Something Wicked This Way Comes. To Kill A Mockingbird. Midnight In the Garden Of Good And Evil. And David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day because I am still doing my Duolingo French every day.

So, what about it? Can you write a great tagline for your book? Can you boil it down to its purest self and pour it out in one or two pithy lines? It’s hard. It’s an art even.

And at risk of depressing you, let me add a final thought. If you — or your poor overworked editor — can’t come up with a good tagline, well, maybe you’re not really sure, in your heart of hearts, what your story is really about. But that’s a post for another day.

ANSWERS

1. The Social Network
2. Cocktail
3. Interstellar
4. Platoon
5. Taxi Driver
6. Bourne Identity
7. Naked Gun
8. Easy Rider
9. The First Wives Club
10. Erin Brockovich