Are ‘Gripping,’ ‘Brilliant’ Book Blurbs on Their Way Out?
In a provocative essay, a major publisher announced that its authors will no longer be required to solicit glowing reviews for their book jackets, arguing that blurbs don’t reflect a title’s true merit
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“If you can read this book and not shriek with delight, your soul is dead.”
According to George Orwell’s 1936 essay “In Defense of the Novel,” this declaration was part of a particularly egregious book review in the Sunday Times.
“That or something like it is now being written about every novel published, as you can see by studying the quotes on the blurbs,” Orwell wrote. “You must feel so guilty when you fail to shriek with delight.”
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Nearly 90 years later, the guilt of underwhelmed readers like Orwell might finally subside. Sean Manning, the publisher of Simon & Schuster’s flagship imprint, has announced that authors will no longer be required to source glowing praise for their own books.
“It takes a lot of time to produce great books, and trying to get blurbs is not a good use of anyone’s time,” Manning writes in Publishers Weekly.
Typically, the blurb process goes something like this: After writing a manuscript, an author solicits praise from other writers who are usually more established. These writers are expected to read the manuscript and craft a pithy review that publishers will use in promotional material, plastering it on the book’s dust jacket and front and back covers.
Blurbing can easily become a time-consuming “quid pro quo cycle” between authors, editors and publishers, per the New York Times’ Elisabeth Egan. Writerly friends and colleagues lean on each other for kind words and feel obligated to provide the same in return.
“Early in my career, I decided it was my duty to write at least twice as many blurbs as I received,” author Rebecca Makkai writes in an essay for the Times. As her popularity grew, Makkai started getting five to ten requests a week. She found herself spending many of her free hours reading books that she was expected to blurb, and she had little time to read books that she found interesting or instructive for her literary career. She now estimates that she’s written 20 times as many blurbs as she’s received.
Just before Manning’s essay was published in late January, Makkai announced a personal hiatus from blurbing. But she still acknowledges that blurbs are a useful marketing strategy that can help boost young authors’ profiles and signal to prospective readers what they’re getting into.
“I’ve definitely sold books because a customer was browsing and saw a book Ann Patchett had blurbed,” Victoria Ford, the owner of Comma, a bookstore in Minneapolis, tells the Times. “Readers trust her.”
But blurbing often falls short of these ideals. Sometimes, blurb writers don’t read the entire book before heaping praise on an author’s latest effort. For some readers, such accolades read as insincere or overwrought. It doesn’t help that blurbs frequently repeat bromides like “spellbinding,” “riveting” and “a tour de force” until they’ve lost meaning.
“Right from the go, people are suspicious,” Ross Wilson, a literary scholar at the University of Cambridge tells the Economist. As Orwell put it, “When all novels are thrust upon you as words of genius, it is quite natural to assume that all of them are tripe.”
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The word “blurb” was popularized by the American humorist Gelett Burgess in 1907, when he was an honored guest at the American Booksellers’ Association’s annual dinner. He brought along a mock book jacket for his recently published work—Are You a Bromide?—featuring a photo of “Miss Belinda Blurb,” who was pictured “in the act of blurbing.”
Manning positions his decision to remove blurbs as one step toward dismantling “an incestuous and unmeritocratic literary ecosystem that often rewards connections over talent,” as he writes in his essay. “Readers don’t need the shorthand of blurbs to find great books; they can be trusted to judge quality for themselves.”
Meanwhile, Literary Hub’s James Folta hopes that author blurbs will be replaced with excerpts from professional reviewers and publications. “But I’m not holding my breath,” he writes, adding that blurbs foster intrigue and gossip in the publishing world. “In short, ‘they blurbed who?!’ is a genre of book conversation I don’t see any of us giving up.”
Whether Simon & Schuster’s move will drive lasting change in the publishing industry remains to be seen. But it might be the first step toward dismantling the so-called “blurb-industrial complex.”
As Burgess wrote regarding blurbs on his mock book jacket, “All the other publishers commit them. Why shouldn’t we?”
