{"id":28767,"date":"2019-02-28T08:00:50","date_gmt":"2019-02-28T13:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=28767"},"modified":"2019-02-28T08:00:50","modified_gmt":"2019-02-28T13:00:50","slug":"the-rights-and-wrongs-of-taglines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=28767","title":{"rendered":"The Rights and Wrongs of Taglines"},"content":{"rendered":"

Most YA taglines are not so bad. Unfortunately so, since The Scarlet Pimpernell<\/em> is right in observing that “there is nothing quite so bad as something which is not so bad.” Great books deserve great taglines and when they don’t have them it is a miss. Take the tagline for Sally Green’s The Smoke Thieves. <\/em><\/p>\n

“Revenge. Romance.<\/em><\/p>\n

Power. Money. Magic.<\/em><\/p>\n

Which one are you fighting for?”<\/em><\/p>\n

Personally it is none of the above. I’m fighting for a catchier tagline. There is a lot to be said, after all, for a memorable one. An example of a truly great one is Grave Mercy<\/em>‘s “Why be a sheep when you can be the wolf?” I also commend Cinder<\/em>‘s “Even in the future, the story begins with Once Upon a Time\u2026” and The Beginning of Everything<\/em>‘s great tagline, “Everyone Gets a Tragedy.” I love that. It’s both true and totally apropos to the book.
\n
\nThe other day I was struck by a different tagline issue, having encountered the following in Edelweiss.
\n\"\"<\/a>The book comes out in May but what struck me was the deja vu I got from looking at its tagline, “Death was only the beginning.” I remembered a good book I’d encountered last year on the Indie’s Introduce panel …
\n\"\"<\/a>I did a quick search and found that this was a well worn tagline.
\n\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>This raised an issue for me. Should a tagline be book specific, or should one tagline be used for multiple titles? The same title is sometimes duplicated, of course, and I’m not suggesting that is a crime to re-use a tagline, but perhaps they should really be unique to a particular book. Some taglines would be impossible to re-use of course, like this one for Ember in the Ashes, “<\/em>Laia is a slave. Elias is a soldier. Neither is free.” Good luck appropriating that one.
\nDoes it come down to applicability? Take the great tagline of Across the Universe:<\/em> “What does it take to survive aboard a spaceship fueled by lies?” It is not broadly applicable but, as BookRiot rightly pointed out<\/a>, there are certainly other space opera sci-fi fantasies it could work for. At the same time it is such a distinctive phrase that it would be plagiarism to appropriate it ,I think. “Death is only the beginning” and “<\/em>Revenge. Romance. Power. Money. Magic. <\/em>Which one are you fighting for?” <\/em>are a lot more applicable, and also a good deal more nebulous than the tagline from Across the Universe<\/em>, for example. Does it come down to the relative ease in which a tagline can be re-used or is it just a bad practice all around?* I do think it’s a bad practice but I’d love to hear your take on it. Also, if you have a stand out favorite tagline please share it in the comments!
\n*It should be noted that the re-use of taglines is probably prone to parallel evolution, meaning any given case might be done without knowledge that the same tagline has been used before.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is re-using a tagline bad practice or are they fair game?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28767\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}