As already mentioned, I am currently working on my Master thesis. My thesis, for those of you who don’t know, is about blurbs. I am really passionate about my thesis and therefore like to share my progress here.
Underestimating the work
O my, I did not expect to work this long on my phase 1. I really underestimated gathering the blurbs needed for my thesis. After spending two days of blurb gathering and putting them in an Excel document I was finally done.
A total of 233 blurbs where gathered from 10 different books that belong to the sci-fi/fantasy genre. Yes, that is a lot!
Goodreads is your best friend
To gather the blurbs, I went to the Goodreads website, where there is an ongoing list of best Sci-fi/Fantasy books of all time. I chose this list because, here I knew these books where best-sellers.
Which books are on the list?
The list includes the following books:
- Lord of the rings – Fellowship of the Rings
- Harry Potter and the Sorceress/Philosophers stone
- Dune
- The Hobbit
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
- Ender’s Game
- A Game of Thrones
- 1984
- The Martian
- Fahrenheit 154
Categorizing the blurbs
After gathering the blurbs, I had to categorize them according to the categories predefined by MA Lluïsa Gea Valor in her research Advertising books: a linguistic analysis of blurbs.
More updates coming soon
Today I received feedback on my work on phase one from my thesis supervisor. So tomorrow and after the weekend I will work on this.
Hopefully, I will have more updates for you later next week.
For now, I hope this has been informative, if you have any questions, feel free to contact me!
