Bookish Diversions: To Blurb or Not to Blurb?
Should I Seek Blurbs for My Upcoming Book? Publishing Industry Still Debates the Value
¶ To blurb or not? As many of you know I’m publishing a book later this year—a history of the book as an information technology. Cover design, publication date, and other details should be finalized any day now.
In a recent email, my editor at Prometheus, Jake Bonar, mentioned several upcoming production milestones, including the moment he and I are supposed to hit the virtual pavement for blurbs. Should we?
¶ ‘I have always found this so weird.’ Jake raised the question by sending along a PW piece by Simon & Schuster publisher Sean Manning that has since stirred up the industry. No more will Manning require his authors to beg other authors for advance praise for their books to slather across the cover—e.g.,
Incredible. Mesmerizing. I couldn’t put it down. A tour de force.
—[a name you hopefully recognize]Luminous. Heartbreakingly beautiful. I slapped my grandmother.
—[another name you hopefully recognize]
Manning provided a few points of rationale, including the fact that many the biggest books have entered the world without blurbs; it didn’t hurt their sales. What’s more, it wastes time that could be more productively employed by authors, agents, and editors. Author
recently raised the same point here at Substack, announcing she was no longer blurbing other authors’ work—doing so was keeping her from writing her own.Beyond those reasons, the practice, said Manning, “creates an incestuous and unmeritocratic literary ecosystem that often rewards connections over talent.” This reason echoes a growing debate on the supposed value and virtues of blurbs—covered in recent years by such publications as the Atlantic and Esquire. Issues at play include cronyism, favor-trading, ghostblurbing, and even charging for blurbs.
¶ Mixed motives. We find such revelations disturbing because, from the perspective of the author-reader contract, the blurb is supposed to indicate quality. It’s a badge that validates the worth of book, a seal of approval. But if the process is being gamed, doesn’t it undermine the whole enterprise?
Only if we forget that there are other reasons to blurb. There’s another contract in the mix: the publisher-retailer agreement. Blurbs signal to stores that a book has enough oomph behind it to justify stocking on shelves and placing on tables. And once you throw in social media and influencer publicity, all bets are off.
¶ More meh than wow. The right words can put a book over for readers. Sue Gilmore mentions how a blurb by historical novelist Hilary Mantel for a book on Joan of Arc, Katherine J. Chen’s Joan, drew her in.
“Mantel swept away my aversion to reading about a voice-guided religious zealot from the distant past whose life experience probably held little or nothing to inform my own,” says Gilmore. Here’s Mantel’s blurb; I can see why it worked:
It is as if Chen has crept inside a statue and breathed a soul into it—re-creating Joan of Arc as a woman for our time.
If we’re honest, however, most blurbs are more meh than wow. Many are nearly interchangeable, stringing cliches like pearls between conjunctions and em dashes until the whole assemblage bumps into an exclamation point. Swap out the titles and a keyword or two and the same blurb would work on a hundred other titles. (As if to underscore the point, A.J. Jacobs once admitted, “I accidentally used the exact same blurb on two different books.”)
Helen Lewis asked
about some of these hem-worn cliches. He gave her a list, and we could probably pull books at random from our shelves and fill a bingo card in three minutes:electrifying, essential, profound, masterpiece, vital, important, compelling, revelatory, myth-busting, masterful, elegantly written, brave, lucid and engaging, indispensable, enlightening, courageous, powerful.
Some books surely warrant such praise. But all of them?
¶ Shenanigans. And then there are those cases that make you wince—as when an author agrees to blurb a book, then retracts the endorsement, but says he’d be happy to reconsider if the author would revise it to his specifications; or when a publisher transforms a negative review into a positive blurb.
¶ And now to you! So, I’m a little torn, honestly. Should Jake and I skip the whole shebang and let my book blurblessly hit the market, blinking in the new dawn of creation, naked as Adam? Or should we clothe it in a fig leaf of respectability or two?
I put it to you. Should I seek blurbs some for my book or not? What’s the value to your mind? And how do you tend to think of blurbs? What role do they play in your buying decisions? Tell me below!
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You could have satirical blurbs making fun of blurbs. That would get people's attention.
I actually almost reflexively stop looking at a book if it’s covered in blurbs without any real information about the book. I need summaries, not flattery to inform my interest in a piece of writing. I will only go a step further and look up info about a book if something about it has particularly grabbed my attention, but that is almost never because of a blurb.