In her book talk on NPR Nancy Pearl highlights a few select "under the radar" favorites from her Book Lust series.
Her book descriptions are all fairly concise and to the point. She uses the following tools to greatest effect: her tone of voice which she uses to personalize and ultimately sell both A Gay and Melancholy Sound and Treasure Island!!! as sincerely endorsed favorites; her relative brevity of description, which she uses to succinctly set the scene in her description of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk; and finally her use of strong adjectives to punctuate the appeal factors of individual titles, as she did to greatest effect in outlining her reasons for enjoying Lost (nice writing, flawed but appealing hero, complex plot, and historical setting).
In each of these she really only gives a couple of sentences to outline the plot, which I found to be sufficient in 3 out of 4 of the cases. I could not only grasp, but could also remember the basic plot for all of them, excepting the first, A Gay and Melancholy Sound, for which I really only remembered her enthusiasm and her citation of that work as the "purest autobiography" she's ever read.
It really depends on what will most appeal to a given customer during RA as to which of these elements is the strongest for selling a book or other material. Nancy's enthusiasm may well be enough to sell the first title to some customers, but I think it's her latter descriptions (involving succinct descriptions of plot and character, as well as powerful adjectives to define appeal factors) that will - as a general rule - result in more universally successful RA.
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