Claire Mabey explores the pros and cons of puff quotes on book covers.
In January, Publishers Weekly put out an article by Sean Manning – publisher of Simon & Schuster’s flagship US imprint – in which he said he’d “no longer require authors to obtain blurbs for their books”.
The “blurb” in this context does not mean the summary of the book on the back cover, as we know it here. Manning means puff quotes – endorsement quotes like “a gripping tour-de-force by a luminous new voice” attributed to a more famous author, usually printed on the cover. Endorsements are ubiquitous these days. Some books have pages and pages of them printed in the front matter before you even get to the novel that the famous people are so extremely enthused about.
In the article, Manning says he got thinking about the practice of blurbs after looking back at older, bestselling titles on his list (he mentions Psycho, Catch-22, and All the President’s Men among others) and noticing how none of those books had endorsements on their first printings. Those blurb-free print runs are in high contrast to the puff-laden novels coming out now. “While there has never been a formal mandatory policy in the eight years I’ve been with the Simon & Schuster imprint,” he writes, “it has been tacitly expected that authors — with the help of their agents and editors — do everything in their power to obtain blurbs to use on their book cover and in promotional material. I have always found this so weird.”
In general, Manning’s announcement was met with glee, relief and words to the effect of “about fucking time”. Such responses were mostly from writers delighted at the idea of not having to ask people (often authors they revere and would like to be as successful as) to spend hours of unpaid time reading their work with a view to spruiking it. (And facing the terrifying prospect of people agreeing to blurb then taking it back, like in this case.) American writer Christopher Buckley was so jazzed by Manning’s stance that he wrote a NY Times op ed – ‘The End of the Blurb. Thank God.’ – on the ego-crushing business of blurb-begging, and their duplicitous tendencies: “On the higher slopes of Mount Olympus, blurbs are a way by which the gods speak to each other in code, with the whole world watching.”
“It’s a circle jerk,” said teacher and writer Laura Surynt in response to my social media call out for thoughts and feelings about endorsements. “It [the blurb industry] feels a bit icky,” she explained, “a capitalist publishing machine / not actually about the writing but who you know.” Surynt wasn’t the only one: many people responded to say they ignored puff quotes; or were actively turned off a book if it sported an endorsement by a writer they didn’t like. Others expressed skepticism over the fact that endorsements were never going to express anything other than hyperbolic positivity about the work, so why bother.
But are endorsements pointless? Are they “weird”? If they’re not useful then why do so many books have them? It has been decades since Psycho (1959) and Catch-22 (1961) first saw the light of day. There wasn’t such a relentless stream of books being poured into shops then, there wasn’t any social media, none of the connective digital tissue that knits us together like fascia. Today, it’s a bold choice to go entirely blurb-free; a choice usually reserved for big names, hardbacks, and literary fiction. Like Deborah Levy, whose latest novel August Blue sports a cover as sparkly clean as the Aegean sea featured in it.
I have been asked to blurb quite a few books. I’ve said yes to all of the requests so far because I like to support authors and as an enthusiast with a healthy baseline of curiosity I don’t have difficulty seeing good qualities in a work. To me, blurbing is a lovely part of the publishing process. But it is time-consuming and there’s no remuneration for it. Several writers told me they’ve had to start declining requests for endorsements because, as much as they’d like to be supportive, they can’t afford the time. It’s a common downside to blurbage: for those writers with integrity who actually read the books, it’s hours of free labour.
Writer Rebecca K Reilly has experienced varying shades of blurbage across the New Zealand and American markets. When her debut novel Greta & Valdin was published in Aotearoa, her publishers used a quote from her Masters of Creative writing report (where she wrote the novel) because Reilly had never given the manuscript to anyone else to read. As a published author, Reilly has never been asked to blurb a book in New Zealand but did provide an endorsement for a friend’s poetry book once, “and people were weird about that to me because I’m not a poet. If the blurb industry in New Zealand is a problem, I do not know about it.”
America, however, is another story. Over there, “proofs are a massive thing,” Reilly said. In New Zealand the publicity cycle mostly begins after the book comes out (the book is launched and publicity is lined up from that point on to make sure that the book is already on the shelves, ready for buyers to respond once they see the interviews and articles and social media posts). In the US, however, publication day marks the end of the publicity cycle. Before publication, Reilly had to fill out a form asking if she knew any celebrities (she didn’t) and her publishers sent the proofs to a long list of people. Reilly said she felt bad bothering them, “but I am the sort of person who thinks I’m bothering people by liking their posts or replying to their texts”.
In the end, the US edition of Greta & Valdin got most of its blurbs through her agent’s network. Since then, Reilly gets so many requests for book blurbs that her agent has to screen them. In general, she’s happy to endorse if she’s interested in the premise of the book and the writer is like her, “outside the main centres of publishing”. But her openness to blurbage has curtailed her reading life: “I haven’t read a book I’ve chosen myself in a shop or at the library for two years. And I feel terrible when I agree to read a proof and it gets sent across the world to me and it sucks. Also my autistic brain struggles to write anything that I feel is even mildly untrue or exaggerated so I spend a lot of time thinking of potential blurbs like ‘this book is competently written’ or ‘a lot was attempted here.’ I will only submit a blurb if I’m truly committed to the success of the book.”
Such integrity is not always the case. The internet is rife with suspicion that some authors quoted on covers didn’t actually read the novel first. Whether there’s truth there or not, though, is somewhat beside the point. The question is: are blurbs valuable? Why are they there?
To writers, blurbs can be a godsend. I can attest that receiving blurbs for my own novel gave my quivering ego a mega boost when pre-publication doubt and anxiety had properly set in. Forthcoming short story writer Michelle Duff said that as a new author, having a couple of quotes from established writers she admires makes it feel “like someone has my back”. To help her when she’s having trouble writing, novelist Josie Shapiro turns to Canva to mock up book covers with invented quotes from her favourite authors on them. “One of my made up quotes right now is ‘Brilliant and devastating’,” says Shapiro. “How cringe is that but also it’s like a dream to be described that way.”
And for so many it is just that: a dream. More than one debut New Zealand author told me that, for them, getting endorsements was a hellish proposition as they didn’t feel like they knew anyone well enough in the book world to ask, which left them feeling like outsiders.
Reader-responses to blurbs range from love to loathing. For some, the circle-jerk nature of blurbs is actively off-putting. Others find them useful: one reader shyly told me she was afraid she used them to navigate her way around what to read next, with blurbs from writers she liked helping her decide what book to go for. Blurbs can certainly help contextualise the unknown. Even if the words don’t matter the kind of writer the blurb is attributed to can signal tone, genre, a sign of what to expect. Reilly says that as a reader she would be more interested in picking up a book “if an author whose work I respected had endorsed it, but at the same time we have no way of knowing if authors are totally willing to risk their reputation to say ‘brilliant and luminous’ about any old writing or if they just know each other from a social scene we’re not part of.”
In the end, Manning’s article in Publishers Weekly is far from a call to ban the blurb. He’s hedging as much as anyone else: “this isn’t to say that we will outright refuse to include blurbs on our book covers and in promotional materials. If a writer reads a book because they want to (not because they feel beholden) and comes away so moved by it that they can’t resist offering an endorsement, we will be all too happy to put it to use.”