Blurbs have been (weirdly) in the news lately. There was a gossip-y, fatalist piece in Esquire, then a more informative and contextualized essay in The Atlantic.
Reading those pieces is not necessary to understand the complaints and the proposal I’m making here, but their appearance reminded me of something I’ve wanted to articulate for a while about the possible meaning and role that supporting another writer’s work could take.
I’m not putting this one behind a paywall because I’d like to invite anyone and everyone to consider a possible change to the way we read, write and seek blurbs, but as always I’m deeply appreciative of the paying subscribers. Comments, for once, are open to all.
(And for those less entrenched in book publishing industry woes— A blurb is a short, enthusiastic sentence or two that appears on a novel (or in its accompanying press material) that was written by a fellow (and usually somewhat similar) writer. Blurbers are not paid for the hours it takes to read these books and come up with something to say; rather, blurbing is seen as a kind of mandatory (yet voluntary) service, a necessary evil, a constantly roiling favor economy. I would estimate a published novelist might be asked to blurb between 2-4001 books a year, and though you’re not required to blurb anyone at all there are many reasons a writer may have for doing so. Essentially, a blurb is a unpaid burst of enthusiasm from one writer to another.)
I used to feel that blurbs were arbitrary, ceremonial, that they didn’t have a real impact on book sales, and if it’s somewhat true that they don’t matter and they don’t sell books, that’s only because nothing is fully responsible for a book’s success or failure (except for Oprah).
In fact, a blurb is a piece of an orchestra that can lead a book into a greater and greater place of stability within the ever-shifting publishing landscape. They’re less for the average reader, and more crucial to the months before a book is published when hundreds of people who don’t have time to read 2,000 books in a season make decisions about what to put in their bookstores, or review in their publications, or consider for their book club, or option for a film2, etc.
The Esquire piece unpacks the rampant nepotism of blurbs, a nepotism that makes everyone a bit squeamish though no one seems able or willing to do anything about it.
I’ve certainly written blurbs for friends and friends have written them for me. Sometimes the blurb happens before the friendship, sometimes after. Often I genuinely enjoy the books written by my friends because reflect the way their minds work, which, as their friend, I tend to like. (For the sake of this missive I’m including former students whose work impressed me from the start in the broad category of “friends.”) Several times I’ve been asked to blurb a friend and I’ve said no without even looking at the book because of a traffic jam of other obligations. But more often than not, the fact that I know and like someone has tended to elevate their position in the blurb queue.
And yet! Blurbs from and for friends have always made me little uncomfortable. Not because I think or fear they’re disingenuous. (I tend to be reserved in blurb-language anyway, except when I called Women Talking a ‘perfect work of art’ and a ‘modern classic,’ which it absolutely is but I also called that novel ‘as real and terrifying as a pail of fresh blood,’ which it also is. The marketing people cut the blood pail, which I regret on their behalf.)
No— the practice of blurbing friends irks me because it exacerbates the silos we often exist within as writers. These silos are formed around MFA programs or publishing houses or magazines, and sometimes they form around social circles, class, sexuality, and/or region, but the biggest silo of all is, naturally, your language.3
In an essay by Toni Morrison titled Abrupt Stops and Unexpected Liquidity4, Morrison defines one of the duties of the critic as advocacy. In order for art (and literature) to survive and thrive in an era during which the state is failing to meaningfully support its creation (ahem, like now) the critic has a duty to advocate for the work they find to be the most significant, the work that has the possibility of enriching the lives of others.
When a writer is sent a book to blurb, they are borrowing the costume of the critic. They step into a role, however temporarily, of advocating for a book’s importance or at the very least it’s position within the literary world. A blurb need not even be wildly enthusiastic to have an impact; the simple fact that a writer blurbed this particular book indicates, at the very least, that the blurb-er gave this book their attention for a time and that they’re consenting to having their name associated with it. And even if you’re not out here professionally slinging blurbs in your free time, recommending books on social media, in my opinion, falls into the same category.
So, let’s say you’re sent 100 galleys a year. If you’re like me, you can’t read even half of those books and still keep up with your own work, your bills, your personal life, and your preexisting reading list. I’m not a particularly fast reader, so I estimate I have time for roughly one galley/blurb a month these days.5 But how do you chose which ones you attempt to blurb and which ones you don’t even start reading?
For this, many writers have blurb policies.
I know of one prominent writer only blurbs debuts, another who only blurbs their former students, another friend told me he only blurbs his friends, while another friend will only blurb people they don’t know personally. Still others are on blurb hiatus or went into blurb retirement. Many times I have decided that I’m only open to blurbing books in translation, but then something comes around in English that I’m excited about and I break my policy, which inevitably provokes waves of anxiety that anyone that I turned down for a blurb with the prior line might find out and think that I lied to them. This is admittedly a bit silly and egocentric, but so it goes. We’re writers. We have fragile everythings.
But to go back to Morrison’s idea of advocacy (and that essay is really great, if you can find a copy of The Romare Bearden Reader) I do think it is possible to do this work from a stance that is more thoughtful than just blurbing books that marketing departments think overlap with your books, or blurbing books by authors you taught or authors you’re friends with or kinda friends with or whatever.
I’d like to propose the idea that we could move (and by we I mean whatever writers I’m reaching with this substack) away from blurbing within our silos and start approaching the practice of blurbing as something more exciting and possibly impactful than a chore.
What if you seek out the books you’d like to support rather than waiting for editors to reach out? What if you don’t, as a rule, blurb people you know? What if you blurb at least some percentage of books in translation or from small presses or some other demographic that needs additional support?
This year I have already blurbed about 10 books, at least two or three of them were debuts by writers I’ve known and admired for a long time, and four or five of them were translations, but I’m returning, at least for a time, to the only-blurbing-books-in-translation policy. I liked how it forced me to read more widely and how it brought books I might not have otherwise heard about to my desk. That’s not going to be the right policy for everyone and for some writers it may be particularly important to help amplify the writers in your particular silo, but having some kind of policy and being aware of how you’re occupying your role as an advocate is something that is missing from the whole blurb go-round. The pessimism around the whole practice tells us we’ve lost our way.
I don’t intend to make a blanket statement about what anyone should or shouldn’t read or amplify culturally, but it does seem to me that rather than thinking of these decisions as inconsequential, we could lean into Morrison’s call to be an advocate a bit more consciously. I’m curious about what the tables in bookstores might look like a year from now if writers stopped blurbing people they know and started making it a habit to go searching out books to support rather than letting the marketing engine steer this whole ship.
I totally made this number up! I probably get between 50-100 requests a year, roughly one or two a week. But I imagine some get many more than that. I think Garth Greenwell once wrote that he got five in a single day.
I only have the most marginal evidence that blurbs have an impact in the TV/film option worlds.
This is why I adore translators and feel they are the most unsung heroes in all of publishing. I fucking love you nerds.
It’s in The Romare Bearden Reader, which I found by way of this Merve Emre essay.
This isn’t counting galleys I might read to interview the author for an event or books I might review or books I might advocate for in some other way.
Love this idea of including blurbs in the realm of criticism/advocacy, per Morrison, and for breaking out of silos. Part of what has contributed to blurb meaninglessness to me is how frequently they are just word salad, w/ no real evidence of serious engagement with the text. I do think it's possible to be serious in a sentence or two. And then of course there's the problem of "like-with-like," which makes the backs of books often seem like extensions of the algorithms many of us are trying to disrupt. Your essay thoughtfully grapples with all of this, and presents an exciting alternative...
Having just written a piece on blurbs myself yesterday, and read all of the recent pieces out there, I appreciate your take on this--and the fact that you've put thought into an actual solution that seems entirely reasonable. Thanks for writing.