There are different kinds of taglines. Most recently people seem to be calling the pithy-thoughtful-funny bit they attach to the bottom of outgoing emails taglines. There are millions of them. One I used for a long time:
The subliminal thought for today:
I stopped using it because sometimes people emailed back to say the tagline was cut off, and how did it end? That was too depressing.
Taglines are used in marketing and advertising in an attempt to make you remember Brand A when you go to the grocery store or start car shopping. In the entertainment industry, taglines show up on movie posters. That clever one liner that makes you pause is designed to tell you something about the movie in a way that makes you want to see it. He's the first kid to get in trouble before he was born (from Back to the Future). Every father's daughter is a virgin (from Goodbye, Columbus); Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water (from Jaws 2).
From what I can tell by my brief foray into the Amazon database, taglines on novels are historically pretty rare, but are becoming more common. Most usually you'll find them not on the front cover (reserved for necessities like title, author, the infamous BLURB, and review quotes) but on the back cover or inside flap with the rest of the marketing copy. Jenny Crusie, who has cornered the market on great covers on the romance side of things, also seems to come up with the best taglines. I suspect she hunted down some marketing genius, locked him or her in the basement, and allows food and water only as payment for good taglines, like this one for Faking It
What has reality ever done for you?
Taglines seem to show up when there's some ambiguity about a title. As is the case with Tied to the Tracks. Leona liked my title enough to fight for it when the ad people hesitated because, in advertising speak, they couldn't imagine how to market it. So I get to keep the title, but now there's the issue of some kind of tagline that will help convince the casual browser that it's worth a go. When the novel went out to Putnam it already had a quotation on the second page: "Happiness is the china shop, love is the bull." As a tagline I think that works quite well, but apparently readers can be a very literal lot, and they will get irritated when they realize, three or four chapters in, that there's no china shop in the novel. I personally think most people are familiar with the idea of a "bull in a china shop" and more over, I'm not one to cater to those with such a literal and narrow bent, but I am only one voice in the wilderness. The ad/marketing people will prevail.
So I continue to ponder. Someplace on the web I found a suggestion about coming up with a good tagline: make a list of all the words that come to mind when you think about the thing being blurbed, and then play with the list. I play with words all day long, and so this doesn't particularly appeal to me, but it may come to such an end. Or, I may get a phone call with the (not completely unexpected) news that they've come up with a better title after all, in which case this will all be moot.
Which brings me to the topic of tomorrow's dreaded question, on the matter of cover art.
It am reminded of The Beguiled, a 1971 movie directed by Don Siegal and starring a very young Clint Eastwood as a wounded Union soldier who is taken into an isolated school for girls in the deep south. Geraldine Page is the headmistress, a loyal confederate and a woman in serious need of quality time with a therapist. Psychosexual creepiness, and no Dirty Harry anywhere to be found.