Getting Rid of Book Blurbs? Easier Said Than Done

I’m sending out advance copies of my new book to ask for blurbs this week. Weird timing! If you’ve been following book-related discourse for the past few weeks, there have been conversations about the value of blurbs seemingly everywhere after S&S announced that they’d no longer require their authors to provide blurbs, even while our government has very rapidly been decimated (for the record I welcomed the low-stakes debates about blurbs at a time when everything else felt unbearably catastrophic). So allow me to be a test case?

As an author I can confirm that it’s pretty humiliating to ask other authors to read your book and then to praise your work out of the goodness of their hearts. I sent two requests in which I said right up front that the idea of doing so was making me nauseous. Will that self-deprecating strategy pay off? Only time will tell (but really, I had to go drink some ginger ale afterward).

I’m sorry to report then, that, as a reader and a reviewer of books, I find blurbs can be helpful. I wish I could say they were entirely unimportant and the work could just speak for itself, but there are some specific cases where they make a lot of sense: for books by authors I haven’t heard of or who haven’t been widely reviewed previously. I remember more than twenty years ago someone handed me a copy of Elizabeth McCracken’s debut story collection Here’s Your Hat, What’s Your Hurry and I knew I wanted to read it right away because of one blurb in particular:

McCracken is a true romantic, not the sloppy, gushy kind who lie to themselves, but the robust, ferocious romantic who sees reality with all its chinks, twitches, and zits, and finds it beautiful.

–Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love.

Ever since I read that first book, McCracken has been one of my favorite fiction writers.

I often bemoan the loss of book coverage in general interest media, with many magazines and newspapers (the ones that are still around, anyway) cutting back their offerings if not abandoning them altogether. With this dearth of criticism comes fewer chances for authors to receive quotable praise for any of the books they write. In this environment blurbs become more important: if an author’s previous book(s) fail to get reviewed widely, then a blurb from another author is the next best thing. This is particularly true for debuts, especially ones by authors like me who don’t have fancy writing school degrees (and the fancy teacher blurbs that come with them).

Another writer who does not have an MFA, the novelist Jami Attenberg, recently told the New York Times that an enthusiastic blurb from Jonathan Franzen for her 2012 novel The Middlesteins was “helpful for the life of my book not just here but abroad, too.” Since then she’s published six incredibly well reviewed books, and I think for her next one she should be exempt from asking other writers for blurbs, given that she’s an established author who has been praised in so many outlets. I, for one, think the back cover of her next book could consist of the entire first paragraph of her most recent New York Times review. Read that paragraph and tell me you don’t want to read everything she’s ever written.

But authors love to argue about the importance of blurbs. They’re humiliating to ask for, and onerous for the one being asked. I don’t blame any overburdened author for wanting to take a break from blurbing for a while, especially when they have, you know, other books they themselves would like to write. Blurbs are the perfect subject for endless discourse.

This is probably just a coincidence, but it’s worth noting that days before the editorial director of S&S wrote that much talked about piece about blurbs, Harper’s Magazine published a piece by Justin Nobel, author of Petroleum-238: Big Oil’s Dangerous Secret and the Grassroots Fight to Stop It. A former S&S author, Nobel canceled his contract with S&S for his book about the dangers of fracking when the company was bought in 2023 by the private equity company, KKR, who “had significant assets in oil and gas” and had, in 2021, formed “its own oil and gas exploration and production company called Crescent Energy.” Nobel’s piece is righteous and infuriating and questions the morality of his former publisher and their complicity in destructive environmental practices.

I have no idea whether I’ll ultimately manage to get a bunch of exuberant quotes from other authors that will make readers want to pick up my book, but I do know that when it’s time to argue about controversial practices by publishers, there are much more pressing topics than blurbs to worry about.