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BOOKS — My blurb or yours? |
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Written by asap
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Saturday, 12 August 2006 |
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AP Photo Illustration/Shazna Nessa
Will you judge me by my cover?
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Say you’re a book on a bookstore shelf. A first novel perhaps, or something by a lesser-known author. According to marketing expert Dan Poynter, book buyers look at a book for an average of 23 seconds (eight for the front, fifteen for the back) before making a positive or negative decision on it.
Does it help if you have Bret Easton Ellis or Sue Grafton trumpeting your skills? What if the prospective reader hates Bret Easton Ellis? Working at a bookstore, I see people judging books by their covers all the time. Heck, everyone I work with does it, too.
If J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher In the Rye” didn’t have blurbs when it came out, why does the latest John Updike book have to? Granted, some well-known authors have replaced back covers full of hype with dorky full-color head shots (see Anne Rice and James Patterson). But in a time when book sales are not as strong as publishers hope, the blurb has become a vital tool in selling a book.
“I think if you see a book that doesn’t have blurbs, people don’t understand why,” says Emily Chenowith, a former review editor at Publishers Weekly. “I think they’re almost required.” Augusten Burroughs wrote candidly about his struggles as a new author trying to get blurbs in his essay, “Blurb Whore,” which appeared in advance reading copies of his book “Magical Thinking.” Oddly, the essay was taken out when the book was officially released. Was it a case of St. Martin’s Press shielding the inner sanctum of book marketing?
Of course, it’s not hard to imagine where writers get blurbs. “It’s often quite clear the connections between the author and the blurber,” says Chenowith. “They have the same editor, went to the same writing program, or have the same agent.” For smaller presses, the blurb is a way to get the attention of more than just a potential reader. “A few good blurbs, from writers who each have either a widely endorsed critical reputation, or a cult audience-like Chuck Palahniuk or George Saunders-can make the difference between a book that sinks, and a book that has a legitimate shot at breaking out,” says Soft Skull publisher Richard Nash. “Blurbs will mean something to book review editors and the people who order books for bookstores, even if the consumer could care less.”
Steven Salardino of Skylight Books in Los Angeles says blurbs do sway people. “Notable authors with trustworthy taste, Dave Eggers types, definitely help sell a book. A quote from a heavy hitter like Pynchon or someone I like such as Dennis Cooper definitely makes me look at a book with a closer eye.”
Some authors say they’re not impressed with blurbs even if they see their importance. “They seem so ridiculous and over the top and cliched most of the time,” says Miriam Toews, author of “A Boy of Good Breeding.”“Readers probably assume they’re written by friends of the authors or writers with the same publisher, but on the other hand I know that I always do look at them, maybe more just to get a sense of what the book is about than how spectacular or whatever it is.”
“I never paid attention to blurbs -- as a reader -- before I got published myself,” says Laila Lalami, author of “Hope & Other Dangerous Pursuits” and the woman behind moorishgirl.com, a blog that focuses on worldly writers. “My hunch is that blurbs matter for international fiction especially, because American readers are supposedly weary of translated fiction.”
Some sources say the word “blurb” was first used in 1906, making this year its 100th anniversary. Humorist Gelett Burgess used it on a book called “Are You a Bromite?” As publishers started to print more blurbs on their books, some authors became favorite targets. Margaret Atwood got so sick of the pestering she composed a sort of form letter/poem reply: “So I wish you good luck, and your author and book, Which I hope to read later, with glee. Long may you publish and search out the blurbs, Though you will not get any from me.”
In the early ’70s, when Elmore Leonard’s publisher sent out one of his books to prospective blurbers, John D. McDonald, the award-winning author responded, perhaps annoyed, with, “Who is Elmore Leonard?” Leonard’s publisher, Donald Fine, turned that quote into an unexpected media buzz.
Ryan Boudinot is new to the game of getting blurbs (his story collection, “The Littlest Hitler,” comes out in September) but because of his day job, he’s not ignorant about the business element of it. “I’m in a funny position in that I work as an editor at Amazon.com, and I’ve witnessed how products get presented behind closed doors by sales reps from publishers. I know I’m supposed to turn my nose up at the marketing apparati that create demand for media products, but I’m honestly fascinated by the ways in which books can become insulated in their own meta-story and grow in a sort of consumer collective consciousness.”
Eli Horowitz, an editor at McSweeney’s, is less enamored with blurbs, calling them “icky” and saying, “At best, they’re still advertising for the book and we want the book to be just the book. We don’t want the book to be an advertisement for the book.”
A new hazard concerning blurbs arose recently with Ken Foster’s memoir, “The Dogs Who Found Me.” James Frey, the infamous ex-Oprah-endorsed author, had supplied a quote. “I sent him my book because he has written about pit bulls. He was very nice about giving me a blurb, and as I had hoped, he made the pit bulls the focus of his quote. My publisher was thrilled, and then the scandal broke. My editor didn’t think it was a big deal, but after a few weeks she decided that since certain publications were bizarrely fixated on the scandal maybe the quote should be in a less prominent place.” Frey’s blurb ended up on the back cover, sixth from the top.
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Kevin Sampsell is asap’s Book Pusher, reporting on the word scene from the inside. Sampsell is an event coordinator at Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore. He also runs a micro empire called Future Tense Publishing.
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