Paratext is things marginal to the text that affect how you see the text, before you see it. An epigraph will tell you a lot about a book. So will a dust jacket, with blurbs, an acknowledgments page, an author's photograph, the design of the cover, the physical properties of the book. Is it hardback, trade paperback, mass market paperback, or self-published, short-run, print-on-demand printer?

Will it be reviewed?

Will it be sold in chain bookstores in the mall?

Will it be taught in university writing courses?

There's more to a book than its cover. But the same text with different covers is not the same text. The paratext influences the text, acts as a threshold, a screen, a filter.

Think about a book like On the Road.

Kerouac submitted a proper manuscript. Not a long roll of teletype paper.

On the other hand, he actually typed one version of it on a long roll of teletype paper.

Think about the paperback version of the book. It said on the cover, "Pod...jazz...Zen--these are the boosters of the Beat Generation," and had a picture of a dashing figure with a scarf who looked like an apache dancer in a café in Paris, where existentialists discussed philosophy, man.

Would that make you want to buy the book?

Would it embarrass you, if you were the writer?

We know, now, that, in order to get the book published, Kerouac had to do things his editor, Malcolm Cowley suggested, like eliminate scenes, combine scenes, add transitions, change the names of characters. The legal department had a say.

What would making these changes do to your opinion of yourself as a writer, an artist, a man?

Kerouac talked a good game about spontaneous bop prosody, first thought, right thought, don't change a word--the sacredness of text--but he didn't live it. He paid lip service to it. He must have felt like a whore.

Picture John Cusack hanging out a window and hollering, "I'm a whore." In Bullets Over Broadway.