Whither blurbs?
Plus odds and ends, including an ask: is there any interest in regular posts on tech/societal issues?
Chances are you didn’t hear about this when it happened a few weeks ago, but the book world went bonkers when the Simon & Schuster imprint announced that it would no longer require its books to have blurbs.
For those who aren’t sure what a blurb is, it’s that little quote on the front or back of a book jacket, written by another author, praising the book you’re holding in your hand. Blurbs have long been considered a selling tool, even though most readers say they don’t take blurbs in consideration at all.
It provoked a lot of discussion among book people. The NYT ran an op-ed written by Christopher Buckley. Articles like this one in Vox were everywhere. And Substack—it seemed everyone had something to say.
Nobody likes writing them, no one likes asking for them. Writers declare themselves on blurb hiatus but the requests keep coming anyway. I am not an A-list writer and I still get an average of probably two or three asks a week. I found out, when a debut novelist spilled the beans, that editors like to ask me because I’m a soft touch. My blurbs are their back-ups, in case bigger names don’t come through. It stung a little to hear, but it’s made it easier for me to say no.
But it cuts both ways. Simon & Schuster’s position comes at a time when publishers seem to think the more blurbs, the better. It used to be you’d get two or three, and you’d be golden. Now you need to get enough to cover the entire back of the dust cover. And I tend to think (with no data to back this up) that blurbs don’t entice layman readers but are more effective with book sellers and librarians. Not many readers will recognize the names of the majority of blurbers, B- and C-listers like myself, but booksellers and librarians, for whom this is a job, are more likely to.
I don’t think blurbs will go away. More than ever, with all the disruption in advertising, publishers need every tool at their disposal to try to sell books. (In fact, they could use a few more.) Will S&S’s books suffer for not having blurbs? Will that put them at a disadvantage? It will be interesting to see how this plays out, if anyone crunches the numbers a year from now.
Feel free to share in the comments how you feel about blurbs. Do they ever sway you to pick up a book? Do you have a favorite blurb?
Speaking of blurbs: In other news, it looks like Marvel will be using my blurb for their Winter Soldier special edition, containing his entire story with a newly written “frame”. I don’t expect to ever touch the Marvel Universe again in the course of my career, so please forgive my indulgence:
Mostly I did it because it came up at a time when punching Nazis seemed like a really good idea.
As I may have mentioned before, about a year ago I stopped consulting as a tech futurist. (No reason to feel badly for me; it worked out just fine as it takes a metric ton of work to keep up with tech news these days.) This was prompted by the elimination of the government office that I’d worked with for over six years. Why it was eliminated is a bit of a mystery, since it was beloved throughout the Intelligence Community. But there’s a lot of that going around lately [inset winking emoji here].
Anyhoo, I have this library of over 200 articles I’d written for them. Some topics are still germane to what we’re going through and I got to thinking that, I could rework some and repost them here. Pieces on the rise of authoritarianism, or where the world’s population is really heading, as well as more on generativeAI and whether your cell phones are spying on you (spoiler alert: yes). Because I’m an analyst and not a journalist, I think you’ll find them different from what you read elsewhere. It might represent a different way of looking at our common problems.
I’d do it on a different day, say Thursday or Friday, and it would just be tech stories. I can see where a lot of you wouldn’t be interested, so I’d love if you could vote below, to give me some idea how bad of an idea this might be.
Recommendations: Looking for something different to read? Much beloved cult-ish writer Sara Gran recently self-released a collection of, well, not exactly short stories but not exactly not. Maybe vignettes is the most apt word. Little Mysteries is out now. You can download the ebook or order the slim little paperback (which is what I did). Most of the vignettes feature Claire DeWitt, her recurring detective character. Speaking of blurbs, here’s what Ed Brubaker (writer of the Winter Soldier compendium, talk about coincidence) had to say about it: “Full of wisdom and life and perfect sentences that make other writers tear their hair out in jealousy.” Yup.
I believe the author of the blurb article was Christopher Buckley. William Buckley died in 2008, although he still couild be writing from the grave.
For me, I think more than blurbs it's the authors that champion the book elsewhere (like author's newsletters/ social media) that grabs my attention (sometimes it's highlighting that they blurbed the book, sometimes it's a book that they didn't blurb but just liked). Recommendations like this feel more like you are getting a genuine opinion, rather than x number of words written on assignment. That being said, good blurb writers can really give a sense of the feel/ vibe of the book with how the blurb is crafted (more that this popular thing meets this other popular thing) and that's probably why it resonates more with sellers and librarians because it helps with pairing readers with books based on other things they like.