Back cover copy crap

I would rather pass a quivering kidney stone than write back copy cover for my book. Boiling a 75,000 word masterpiece of accessible complexity down to 50 words? It’s like making a reduction from a 1945 Rothschild. Making a cozy fire with your stash of African Blackwood. Turning your ’36 Knucklehead into a sump pump. It’s awful and shouldn’t be done. People should read my whole book and then decide if they want to read it. That is the only sound way to establish a full appreciation of the work.

I think my next novel’s back cover will read:

Read. I didn’t spend 600 hours on this thing because it’s crap.

There is an art to back cover copy, but – like ice sculpture – it’s better if someone else does it. I helped with the guest list when I got married, deciding who was cool and who not cool enough, and it’s not something I ever want to do again. It is one of the five reasons I stay married. Simmering my novel down to back cover copy is the same thing. Which of my preciously little notions is fun enough to make the cut?

I’ve arrived at this –

An assassin, a priest, and a schoolteacher walk into a secret nuclear power plant – to Edwin McCallum, detective by trade and artist by desire – there’s something wrong with this picture. He’s going to figure out what it is if it kills him. The Link Boy is the second novel set in the Freeworld, a post-government future, where there are no laws. Just bottom lines.

Let me know what you think.