Blurbs are like creampuffs

Doug Johnstone hates blurbs and he’s happy to tell anyone in the near vicinity just how much:

This irritation comes in two incarnations. Firstly there is the

uncredited puff by someone in the marketing department of the

publishing house, declaring the book to be “a tour de force” or “an

outstanding, memorable and moving tale, brimming with laughter and

passion”. The author will be “one of the most remarkable writers of

his/her generation” and, naturally, a “singular and unique new voice”.

Says who, exactly? Say the people trying to sell me the book, that’s

who. A bit of self-promotion is understandable, but when such effusive

hyperbole declares everything “brilliant”, “superb” and “amazing” it

all ceases to mean anything, and leads to a depressing sense of

deflation when you come to read the thing, and it’s just OK.

The other distinct type of exasperating blurb is the quote from a

fellow author, telling me that one of the writer’s peers thinks he or

she is “a master of narrative and prose” and the book is “wholly fresh

and original”. Of course nepotism is rife across the arts but nowhere

is it more obvious than here, where the bigger name author (it’s always

a bigger name, of course) is clearly either a pal or shares the same

publisher or agent. And it’s always the same names cropping up. For

years you couldn’t pick up any urban Scottish novel without Irvine

Welsh telling you how bloody great it was. These days everyone is at

it. I don’t want Louise Welsh, Andrew O’Hagan or Nick Hornby telling me

how awesome a novel is, I want to make that decision for myself. Let

the book stand or fall on its own merits. Writing and publishing are

undoubtedly hard worlds in which to make a living; but a tad more

dignity and a little less hyperbole would not go amiss.

Well yes, it’s all true, but the blurbs aren’t for readers like Johnstone, they are for marketing people to position the book properly and get excited in-house. A blurb by author X might signify it’s a completely different book than if author Y blurbed it. And if an unexpected author’s name appears on the back page, you start wondering why their words were solicited.

That said, author blurbs could have an interesting benefit if publishers approached it properly. This idea belongs to a writer I had a recent conversation with about the sales of his earlier books and where to take his career now. He wondered why bookstores don’t take a bestselling author’s books and put them next to those books he or she has blurbed. It takes the “if you like” part of bookselling to a different level, does it not?

Thoughts on this in the backblog, if you choose to.