The eNotes Blog Small Spaces, Powerful Words Penguin Books Making the Mini ModernClassics

Small Spaces, Powerful Words Penguin Books Making the Mini ModernClassics Penguin Books Modern Classics line   is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year. To honor that landmark, the press is offering fifty titles in mini form. Each text measures a mere six inches by four inches. You can purchase each one individually or buy the entire box set. The works offered range from Beckett to Saki, Nabokov to Kafka and Updike to Wodehouse. When the company decided to offer this anniversary item to the public, the format presented some unique challenges for the copywriters who compose the blurbs on the back of each text.  Those writers have just a few inches, and therefore, only a few seconds, to convince you to buy the book. They must get across what makes each writers work unique, what their style is, their importance, their influence, and give a flavor of what is actually in the stories as well all in about fifty words. Louise Willder, the Copywriting Manager at Penguin, explains that they had a bit under nine months to write all fifty blurbs with their in-house copywriting staff- not a great deal of time to have read, absorbed, and researched relevant facts. The blurbs were then reviewed and refined by the entire staff until everyone was happy with them. You can listen to those involved with the process speak a bit more in-depth about the making of the Mini-Classics in a series of videos produced by Penguin. Here is Part Five, Making the Mini Modern Classics: Copywriting.