Book Jackets Gain Clout as Selling Points

Last week, for the first time in my life, I heard someone use the word encomia in a sentence.

Since then, I have been springing it on highly literate friends and people in the book business; virtually no one knows what it means. But they all know what encomia do. Encomia (en-KO-mee-a, plural of en-KO-mee-um) are the endorsements that go on book jackets, and people believe they sell books.

Marketing and advertising departments love them. Suzanne Wickham, a Tarzana resident who is West Coast editor of Villard, an imprint of Random House, recently edited a book called “What to Do When Someone You Love Is Depressed,” by Mitch and Susan K. Golant.

Mitch Golant is a respected psychologist, Susan Golant is a well-regarded writer on health and mental health, but neither is a household name. So Wickham, who is also the West Coast publicity director for Random House, was thrilled when she got four key endorsements for the book, including one from former First Lady Rosalynn Carter.

Wickham believes blurbs have their greatest impact on browsers in bookstores crowded with titles on the same topic. “When you’re looking through a section of a bookstore, when you’re looking for a book on depression, you have choices,” she says. Carter is a well-known mental health advocate who wrote her own highly praised book on care giving (with Susan Golant), and Carter’s assessment that this is a “compassionate, helpful book” (only a fragment of the blurb) may induce a buyer to choose the Golants’ book over the one next to it.

Lee Goldberg, a TV writer-producer who lives in Tarzana, has no doubt that encomia move books. In addition to being a supervising producer on CBS’s “Diagnosis Murder,” Goldberg will soon publish his second comic mystery, “Beyond the Beyond,” sequel to his “My Gun Has Bullets” (St. Martin’s).

“If someone would look at my book and see a blurb by Sue Grafton saying ‘I had 17 orgasms reading this book and it changed my view of literature,’ it would sell 100,000 more copies,” says Goldberg.

While that is not likely to happen any time soon, Goldberg was happy to get endorsements for his novels, which deal with nefarious doings in the television industry, from Dan Petrie Jr., who wrote “The Big Easy,” and Stephen J. Cannell, who, as Goldberg notes, “has written more cop shows than anyone else on the planet.”

As to encomia (say it three times and it’s yours forever), Goldberg has a current favorite. He recently got an advance-reading copy of a mystery (its title escapes him for the moment) with the following enigmatic words of praise from writer James Ellroy: “This book will vibrate your vindaloo!” Goldberg couldn’t resist. “I read the book,” he recalls, “and kept waiting for my vindaloo to vibrate so I’d know what it was.”

Hyperion publisher Bob Miller thinks blurbs are helpful, but only if the author is little known or if a big name is changing direction and needs to establish his or her bona fides in a new field (in other words, John Grisham needs encomia the day he does that book on hydroponic gardening).

Some 50,000 titles are published annually, Miller points out, and the right jacket blurbs can establish a new author “as a writer who is being touted by a whole range of people besides the publisher.”

“We sell books twice--once to bookstores and then to people who get them in bookstores,” Miller says. Thus, several years ago, when Hyperion decided to go all out for a first novel called “Bone” by Fae Myenne Ng, it held the manuscript for a full year, while amassing tributes from such highly regarded writers as Tillie Olson, Rosellen Brown, Ishmael Reed and Edmund White.

These were included in the sales catalog, which is closely read by booksellers. Miller believes that the endorsements were a major factor in “Bone’s very respectable sales of some 28,000 copies.”

Some writers endorse their friends’ books as a matter of course. Goldberg knows of a writer who blurbs any book he is asked to, reasoning that any time his name appears in print, it’s good for his own sales. Goldberg says he would never endorse a book he didn’t like; his credibility is at stake.

Lawrence Schiller, whose “American Tragedy: The Uncensored Story of the Simpson Defense” currently tops the best-seller list, got dream blurbs from Norman Mailer and Dominick Dunne, but not the way you might expect.

Schiller, who lives in Studio City, collaborated with Mailer on “The Executioner’s Song,” but he was loath to approach Mailer about blurbing his latest book, written with James Willwerth.

“You don’t even want to ask a friend,” Schiller explains. Instead, he first sent the book to Dunne, who had covered the O.J. trial for Vanity Fair but was more rival than friend. Dunne called Schiller and told him he found the book “riveting.”

Schiller said, “Then call Jason Epstein [Schiller’s editor at Random House] and give him that for a blurb.”

The next time Schiller spoke to Mailer, he told him that Dunne said the book was riveting. “I say it’s a page-turner,” Mailer responded. “It’s not my kind of book, but I couldn’t put it down.” Mailer, too, was referred to Epstein.

If you can’t get Norman Mailer to call your book a page-turner or James Ellroy to speculate on what it will do to a reader’s vindaloo, you may not want any encomia at all. Faint praise isn’t pretty. Every year, Partners & Crime, a mystery bookseller in Manhattan, hands out its Nevermore awards, a kind of anti-Edgar (the prize given by the Mystery Writers of America).

As partner John Douglas explains, the Nevermores are “given to real authors for mostly inadvertent achievements in crime fiction” (don’t ask about this year’s Heidi Fleiss Culinary Award). Among the categories: “most off-putting book jacket quote.”

This year, says Douglas, the jacket of Ralph McInerny’s “Abracadaver” could have swept the field all by itself. “Readable to the end,” Kirkus Reviews yawned, limply adding, “fans won’t be disappointed” (praise almost as ambiguous as the infamous “I can’t recommend this book too highly”). And the Nevermore goes to McInerny’s tepid endorsement by the Philadelphia Inquirer, which mustered only “a pretty good book.”

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The Mystery Writers of America, Southern California chapter, will hold an all-day seminar Saturday on selling your first book or screenplay. Called “Breaking and Entering,” the program will feature TV and film executives as well as writers. It’s at Sportsman’s Lodge in Studio City, starting at 10 a.m. Cost is $75. Call (310) 392-1438.