How do you choose your next read?

How do you choose your next read? Will you take any notice of the blurb on the back-cover?

“What we’re looking for as readers is a hint of what’s inside – it shouldn’t be a precis,” said Bethan Ferguson, marketing director at Quercus Books.

But Prof Sarah Churchwell criticised some dust jackets for deliberately misrepresenting the book in order to sell it better.

One dust jacket for Elizabeth Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Innocence sold the novel "like a Mills and Boon”, said the professor of American Literature at the University of East Anglia, citing her research into the issue.