On the pages of Publisher’s Weekly, the publisher of Simon & Schuster’s flagship imprint pumped the brakes on blurbs. Sean Manning said that S&S will stop requiring authors to scrape up these bits of praise from other authors. What part of our author career involves finding praise from our colleagues? Apparently not the part where we are published by the S&S flagship. That old publishing flag has floated over Cher, the author of DuneFrank Herbert writing his computer how-to, and Psycho, all riding in the S&S cargo bay of literature. It’s historic.
For the rest of us, publishing in the rest of the worldwide fleet, it’s business as usual. But now we can harbor our doubt about how much difference a blurb can make. We do this blurbing for one another as authors, hoping that our audiences can help the new author get introduced.
You find an author who you admire and ask for their help. “Gathering a nice audience for the book,” I’ve been saying to the authors who I’ve been asking. Sins of Liberty was published with nice, generous blurbs. The four authors have been gracious, and I remain hopeful for their affirmations.
Yes, things are changing a little about eschewing blurbs. Not as much reversion as I want. During the year that I decided my journalism would be a safer exploit than literature for a young veteran of 22, professionals reviewed books. They could write a pan, or a rave, or something in between.
I was accustomed to reviews, since I was an actor in small companies. We lived for the review, that little bit of printed, durable recognition of our craft. Yes, there was always the applause, sometimes ringing onto us through a curtain after an act, or beyond the show’s finale always, but in varied measure. Sometimes during a show we’d know our creation, the character, would land well during a scene when we heard laughter — so long as we were performing a comedy. We could stun them into silence with the drama, but that sound was the same as an audience bored and not gripped by the acting or the play.
Reviews to our rescue
The durable part of the praise that most creators crave? We actors needed reviews and reviewers for that, like the restaurant on the TV show The Bear needs a review to keep drawing diners to the house. People want to know how good something might be, a thing they want to taste for themselves.
So post-drama school, I began to review plays. Not books, not yet. That was for the literature students at the University of Texas. Even with our five days a week of daily newspaper we published, book reviews were ghetto-ized into a Friday arts section.
But there were reviews in the ecosystem, back when endorsements (the industry’s fancy name for blurbs) were not so crucial to gathering an audience. Reviews were harder to get but not easier to write. Your average endorsement today can’t really run much past 50 words, and even Kirkus Reviews will sell you twice that many, along with its human-crafted summary of what your book is about. Kirkus is fussy, so there’s still some accountability being practiced. A reviewing pro is being paid. Author-publishers are part of that transaction. You might only win praise that is wan. The truth is being served there, review by review.
Without reviews, there’s nothing but the blurb to decide what books are worthy of attention. Lincoln Michel explains in a Substack column the true purpose of blurbs.
“Blurbs are one way to help everyone sort out which books to pay attention to. Blurbs aren’t necessarily for readers browsing a bookstore, although I’ve known readers who buy based on blurbs. They are more important behind the scenes. Blurbs are frequently used in publicity pitches to book reviewers.“
He goes on to note the blurb is a unit of praise. Those reviews have always been units of evaluation. The good and the wanna-be-good, that’s what reviewers gave us. When they were working. Critique isn’t as much of a career as it used to be, and those newspapers and magazines that gave way to websites now spend energy to track the non-artistic but oh-so-absurd current events of our lives.
Where publicists will send their pitches for book coverage remains to be seen. But a list of 25 papers with regular book coverage can’t be assembled anymore. Readers and authors can ask one another and scan social media feeds for endorsements. Social media is what passes for real media these days. Books usually get read through a personal recommendation anyway — or the release of a movie or series based on the book. Sometimes films get made from indie-published books, too.
Not to get all curmudgeon-like on you, but I recall when writing about the arts was a fine trade that made consuming them more pleasant. A reader either confirmed what they’d already learned about a book, or discovered something from the mouth of a writer who was not bound to praise you. That’s the blurb contract when you fold in author praise. It’s an honorable one, so much so that publishers always want your blurb list as part of your bona fides.
Not anymore, at least not at one of the most famous imprints in the book world. Well, fine. Resetting the blurb mission at S&S was start, anyway, and Manning’s photo that goes along with his announcement tells us even more about this decision. He’s wearing a chest-length hairdo. And carrying his imprint’s strategy back to the days when that hairstyle said something about hippies and counterculture. Things are changing — maybe for the better. You’ll still see blurbs on S&S books. But maybe some authors who they want to publish will sign a contract, once they learn they don’t have to go hat in hand to ask for praise first. We never had to do that in the theatre. We invited in the critics while we gathered our audience. Nobody stood outside barking praise at the door.
