The Rabbit’s Foot of Book Publicity
If you’re a published author, you’ve almost certainly seen one or more jauntily adorning the back cover of your book, or even excerpted across the front, designed to catch the eye even before your (humbler) byline. You may have requested one from a colleague, perhaps on the advice of an editor. Maybe you’ve even written one. I speak of the blurb, the endorsement of a book by another writer.
But is every book deserving of being gushed about? That’s the question raised in an article by Helen Lewis in The Atlantic: “The Blurb Problem Keeps Getting Worse.”
William Shakespeare, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
It’s about the escalating gushiness of jacket blurbs.
Here’s what caught my eye:
These things have been around for a while! Ben Jonson blurbed Shakespeare’s First Folio (well, okay, the quoted line was really from Jonson’s eulogy of Shakespeare, but what a pull quote it is: “…the wonder of our Stage!”)
Blurbs have always been controversial, as spelled out in the backstory in this linked article.
Want a list of words overused in blurbs? Try this: electrifying, essential, profound, masterpiece, vital, important, compelling, revelatory, myth-busting… That’s just for starters.
Blurbs aren’t pull quotes, they’re puff quotes. Hmm, okay.
In the words of John Mitchinson, a co-founder of the book-crowdfunding platform Unbound: “Like a rabbit’s foot … We all do it because we are desperate to prove the book has some merit. There is something slightly troubling about it.”
Classicist Mary Beard won’t do blurbs any more.
For more on this and related matters you may or may not be paying attention to in your writing and publishing life, crack open Louise Willder’s Blurb Your Enthusiasm: An A-Z of Literary Persuasion. It’s very funny.
