on The Book Designer:
When I was in college, one of the girls in my dorm terrified us with the “true” story of “The Hook,” a killer with a hook for a hand who attacked a couple in a parked car.
The storyteller insisted it was true because it happened to the cousin of a friend of a friend on Long Island. How could we argue with that? TRUTH!
You’ve probably heard the story, too, and by now we all know it’s a classic urban legend.
Urban legends aren’t limited to horror stories, though. In the book publishing industry, a better term for them is “myths,” and there are a lot of book marketing myths.
