Why Book Blurbs are Crap

Very rarely, a few times in a lifetime, you open a book and when you close it again nothing can ever be the same. Walls have been pulled down, barriers broken, a dimension of feeling, of existence itself, has opened in you that was not there before. To the End of the Land is a book of this magnitude,

Is this blurb by Nichole Krauss for novelist David Grossman's new book the most obsequious to ever grace a book cover, asks The Gawker, while The Guardian's book blog invited readers to out-praise Krauss, and the results are most amusing. (Conversational Reading was the first to highlight this case.)

Laura Miller on the Salon website tells us why blurbs really are actually crap and how the process of blurbing works :

Once a reasonably finished draft of a manuscript has been completed, the author, at his publisher's insistence, begins the grueling and humiliating process of begging blurbs from better-known writers. The aim is to score praise from established authors whose work has a similar appeal -- a wacky, gay-positive memoirist will try for Augusten Burroughs or David Sedaris; a female writer of mordant short stories approaches Mary Gaitskill, and so on -- but these can be nearly impossible to obtain.

The most prominent authors are inundated with such manuscripts, far more than they can ever read, especially if they hope to get on with their real job -- which is, of course, writing their own books. Many have adopted a blanket no-blurb policy, and most of these will at least occasionally wind up departing from that policy, usually for personal reasons. They might do it for a good friend or a former student, or as a favor to their editor or agent.

So when publishing people look at the lineup of testimonials on the back of a new hardcover, they don't see hints as to what the book they're holding might be like. Instead, they see evidence of who the author knows, the influence of his or her agent, and which MFA program in creative writing he or she attended. In other words, blurbs are a product of all the stuff people claim to hate about publishing: its cliquishness and insularity.

The Politics of Blurbing

Caveat lector! The endorsements on books aren’t entirely impartial. Unbeknownst to the average reader, blurbs are more often than not from the writer’s best friends, colleagues or teachers, or from authors who share the same editor, publisher or agent. They represent a tangled mass of friendships, rivalries, favors traded and debts repaid, not always in good faith. There’s some debate about whether blurbs actually help sell books, but publishers agree they can’t hurt. Often, agents try to solicit blurbs even before a publisher buys a book.

As someone who gets called on to write book blurbs occasionally, I really appreciate Rachel Donadio's look at the tricky politics of it in the New York Times. Blurbing up? Blurbing down? Blurbing laterally? There's a whole vocabulary here.

But this really tickled me :

Sometimes blurbish enthusiasm can backfire. Dave Eggers’s first book, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” itself sounds like a blurb, and came with endorsements from David Sedaris (“the force and energy of this book could power a train”) and David Foster Wallace(“this thing took off for me in the basement and didn’t stop”). Since then, Eggers has become such an effusive endorser of his contemporaries that one critic, Andre Mayer, said his blurbs “border on farce.” After Eggers called Sean Wilsey’s memoir, “Oh the Glory of It All,” so “intriguing,” “hilarious,” “jaw-dropping,” “reckless and brilliant and insane” that “at one point I had to burn the second half … so I didn’t distract myself from my own dumb deadlines,” Mayer, writing on the Web site of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation , took him to task: “Isn’t the point of a blurb to kindle interest in the book — and not the blurber?”

Postscript :

Do also see Rebecca Johnson's excellent piece in salon.com - Why Won't You Blurb Me?

(Pic from salon.com)