Blurb Chatter Roundup
Recent links making the rounds
I’ve seen some chatter going around on what’s left of Twitter, largely inspired by these two big pieces linked below. Rather than weigh in directly, I’ll just leave you with some quotes from each and share a bonus post from
at the ever-useful . Feel free to discuss in the comments!
From The Atlantic piece (by Helen Lewis):
“Blurbs have always been controversial—too clichéd, too subject to cronyism—but lately, as review space shrinks and the noise level of the marketplace increases, the pursuit of ever more fawning praise from luminaries has become absurd.”
And check out this additional post from March linked in the quote: Beware of Book Blurbs - The Millions
“What’s behind the blurb arms race? Two things: the switch across the arts from a traditional critical culture to an internet-centered one driven by influencers and reliant on user reviews, combined with a superstar system where a handful of titles account for the great majority of sales.”
“Authors, being authors, largely complain about them to their friends. They tell stories of being asked for a blurb and then having their tightly constructed praise discarded in favor of a tossed-off sentence by a more fashionable writer….They claim never to be swayed by blurbs themselves, before revealing that praise from a favorite author did, in fact, prompt them to buy a now-beloved title.”
From Esquire (by Sophie Vershbow):
“On their surface, book blurbs seem fairly innocuous, but in reality, they’re a small piece of the puzzle with a big impact—one that represents so much of what’s broken within the traditional publishing establishment. Blurbs expose this ecosystem for what it really is: a nepotism-filled system that everyone endures for a chance of ‘making it’ in an impossible industry for most.”
Quoting Andrea Bartz: “I'm asked to blurb FAR more books than I could actually read,” she told me (emphasis her own). “I want to be a supportive member of the writing community and I'm deeply grateful to everyone who's blurbed me (including when I was a debut), but if I said yes to every request, I wouldn't have any time left to write my own books.”
The section about how blurbs influence booksellers I found particularly interesting.
“For authors outside of the Big Five, blurbs can play an even larger role at giving a book gravitas and getting it noticed.”
“While several publishing insiders I spoke to claimed to know anecdotally that blurbs have no real effect on book sales—especially when those blurbs are not from a household name—I find that hard to believe. As someone who reads approximately 50 books a year and relies heavily on book blurbs from more than just marquee authors to decide what to read next, I know the purchasing power of seeing your favorite author gush about a previously unknown author’s book—and that’s with my existing knowledge that blurbs are a rigged system.”
“The question then becomes: if not blurbs, then what? Armies of booksellers aren’t about to read every book published each year to determine which are the most worthy of attention based on literary merit alone. And with recent layoffs affecting several publishers, it’s unlikely that in-house staffs will magically expand to take on the extra marketing, publicity, or sales work needed to fill the promotional void left by blurbs.”
Literary agent Lucy Carson says that without blurbs, “The burden would be on the catalog copy, cover art, and trade reviews to really carry their weight in making a title land. I think truly, if we all stripped the blurbs away at once, we have plenty of other mechanisms to work with that are already in place.”
Suggestions for alternatives:
“First: cut out (or at least down) the blurb process for established authors by instead relying on ‘praise for the author’ quotes about past works, as opposed to going out for new blurbs every few years.”
“Second: stop pressuring authors to secure blurbs early enough to include in the book proposal that goes out to potential publishing houses….Less reliance on blurbs so early in the process makes room for other signifiers to step in, hopefully allowing for a wider array of books to come to the front of the list.”
Maybe I’ll reflect on this more at some point, maybe I won’t—but in any case, I hope this gives you food for thought.