Blurb is the Word
The Necessary Pain in the A** of Publishing
“Biggest” News in Books: Blurbs
What’s a Blurb?
An article that published in The Atlantic this week got a lot of things right about blurbs. Starting off with the fact that blurbs are not for consumers. If you’ve reached this third sentence and are confused, then you are probably an everyday book reader, blissfully unaware of the angst created by blurbs. If you know what a blurb even is, you probably work in some form of publishing or are one degree removed from the book machine.
A “blurb” in its modern iteration is an early endorsement given to a book by another author, a quote, usually 1-4 lines of praise (it seems “blurb” used to refer to lines of advertising copy the publisher supplied, which are now referred to more respectably as “reading lines” [something like “1 billion copies sold”]). I was surprised to learn the origins of the term blurb comes from a humorist poking fun at the outrageous endorsements and over-the-top praise that books used put on their covers. This is as good of a reminder as any that the scorn and skepticism of blurbs and the blurb process has been there from the beginning.
Are Blurbs Real or Important?
Whether you are an insider or an outsider, most often people are mad at blurbs for being dishonest and hyperbolic (see the title of the article that prompted this discussion: “The Blurb Problem Keeps Getting Worse”). People hate that the endorsements on book jackets are often from other authors who know of or are friends with the author, and who are hardly unbiased when it comes to offering an honest analysis of the work. It is, socially, very hard to tell a friend you don’t fully love the art they created, especially if you work in the same business. Blurbs don’t come in the “mixed review” variety (if the review is bad, the publisher wouldn’t put it on the jacket for all to see), so this criticism of the practice is sort of fair.
But what is the alternative to blurbs? As The Atlantic article also smartly points out, the dwindling of review coverage for books is almost the direct cause in the rise of blurb culture. When newspapers and print media were in their halcyon days, publishers and editors used to be able to leave it to media and the market to decide what to pay attention to and who to praise—there were even full-time critics to do this. But with huge cutbacks to these outlets and most of the review space occupied by already established authors, it’s near impossible to feel that if you just put a book out that’s really good it will in turn get coverage. There aren’t even a lot of reviewers left who aren’t also authors (you’ll notice in the New York Times for example that lots of their reviews are written by other writers with expertise in that topic or genre, not professional critics), meaning reviews often have those same problems of bias that blurbers are more often derided for.
More to the point, blurbs aren’t, in practice, deceiving, because the people who they are actually for know enough not to take them as gospel. Being a lifelong reader who only discovered book publishing as an industry well into my twenties comes with the advantage of remembering what it is like to be this average consumer. Quotes on book jackets may tip an interested consumer over the edge to purchasing a book, but largely average readers, at best, glance fleetingly at blurbs. As Mark Richards, a publisher at an independent press, says in the article, these words of praise are not really for consumers. Rather, they’re quotes from book people for book people:
“’The biggest thing to understand is that blurbs aren’t principally, or even really at all, aimed at the consumer…They are instead aimed at literary editors and buyers for the bookstores—in a sea of new books, having blurbs from, ideally, lots of famous writers will make it more likely that they will review/stock your book.’”
As of 2019, the Big 5 book publishers have 90% of the hardcover market share—the format most analogous with new books—and publish around 30,000 new books a year. The overall estimates for all new books published in a year, including self-published titles, range from hundreds of thousands to millions. The point is that even among the rarified air of publishing at a major trade house there are a sea of new books to choose from. Without blurbs, there is no one but the editor to shout at their sales force, booksellers, and early readers about how great something is. While blurbs are hardly perfect, they do offer some kind of outside stamp that can get someone to pay attention and crack the spine of one of their hundreds of choices for their next read.
The Process Sucks
For editors, writers, agents, everyone, the process of getting blurbs is not fun. Since far fewer books are financially successful these days it means finding an author’s name that carries the necessary weight with sales forces and booksellers to make for an effective blurb is increasingly hard. Everyone is vying for the same big names to blurb their books, and often it takes a few quotes from a few different big names to make a splash and break through the noise. These factors create a sort of no-win arm’s race and ensures that only a handful of authors get hit up for dozens if not hundreds of requests a year, especially for certain genres. Have a serious debut memoir? A mystery set in the south? A funny literary novel? It wouldn’t take an editor more than a few minutes to give you the dozen names nearly everyone is pursuing for quotes in those spaces.
The actual nitty-gritty work for the editor in the blurb process involves writing dozens of letters and emails—with untold hours to personalize them in an attempt, once again, to cut through the mountain of books vying for blurb attention—and sending them into a black hole or getting a quick “too busy at the moment” response. The shortcut is, of course, sending out for blurbs to people you or your author actually know—authors published by the same imprint, authors the editor may have worked with when they were an assistant, etc. While this sounds like ugly cronyism, in my experience a lot of the blurbing process is done in good faith and genuine admiration, not by authors paying each other or trading favors. It is also difficult to begrudge authors who are often trying to form communities and help each other out in the trenches of a largely unforgiving profession.
Staying on the track of unforgiving, some also argue that blurbs entail asking authors for free labor, and I don’t really think there’s a way around the fact that they kind of do. However, one of the many magic tricks of publishing is that the work can feel, at the best of times, not like work. It doesn’t ever feel like a burden to read a great book, and it doesn’t take a lot of work if you love or even really like a book to conjure up a few positive words about why you do. It's also a labor that many of us—reading long into ours night and weekends—are already doing and that doesn’t require much more effort to pay it forward. Every writer is a reader. Authors Ann Patchett and Emma Straub, for instance, own bookstores and have to read a lot of books as a consequence. They also give a lot of blurbs, especially considering how busy they are. Authors are simply experiencing with blurbs what literary agents do with queries and what editors do with submissions—there is a lot of volume. My advice to any author would be to treat them as such. Authors can’t read every book from the writers who reach out to them—there’s simply not enough time. Give everything a chance, but filter out as needed, put better requests to the top of the pile (like if you know the person and have read their work before, that’s pretty good vetting), be judicious but generous—95% of writers would just love a shot at your reading their first five pages rather than being rejected out of hand.
How to Read Blurbs
Like a cinephile who doesn’t trust Rotten Tomatoes scores, you, too, can learn how to read between the lines of blurbs with a few blanket rules.
First, stop and read the entire blurb, especially if it’s given in full on the back of the hardcover jacket. Read for specifics and actual commentary on the novel, not the punchy adjectives that editors like to pull out for our attention-deficit-plagued society such as “electrifying,” “riveting,” or “exhilarating” (there are a comically finite number of nice-sounding superlatives).
Secondly, gloss over clichéd hyperbole: “one of the best books I’ve ever read,” “greatest living novelists,” “tour-de-force.” Especially if this hyperbole has no qualifier—such as “in recent memory” or “in space opera fiction”—you’re likely looking into the eye of a publishing hype machine that goes far beyond the blurbs, meaning the plaudits are fairly useless in making an informed decision. Blurbs are more genuine when their writers reach for more complex metaphors or phrase things in unique ways (hey, just like books themselves). Basically, the less an editor, like me, can successfully snip it out of context, the better the quote is.
Finally, here are a few “good” blurbs for fun about some wacky but great books:
“Beagin’s voice is an engine all its own, and I delighted in this cynical, sexy, hopeless, hopeful, Hudson Valley jubilee. Come for the bees, stay for the donkeys!” —Melissa Broder (on Big Swiss)
“Bonnaffons reveals the mysteries inside of us, just waiting to make themselves known.” —Kevin Wilson (on The Regrets)
“When you’re reading this, you can’t help but feel like you’re in on an inside joke that keeps on getting funnier. Jason Mott truly has written one hell of a book.” —Candice Carty-William (on Hell of a Book)
EABC September: The Rachel Incident by Caroline O'Donoghue
If you missed last month’s Editorial Assistant Book Club over the molasses month of August, we read All-Night Pharmacy by Ruth Madievsky, which, like most contemporary books, had some good parts and some less good parts. Now we’re going to be reading The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue, which has a lot of high praise, industry buzz, and a description that starts “Rachel is a student working at a bookstore…”—what could be more publishing than that?
This will be the final EABC for a while, as in the fall I plan to get back into the cold weather and hard reality by reading a daunting classic, this time a work of nonfiction that can double as a deadly weapon because of its size and weight.