The pitfalls of book blurbs

14:28The behind-the-scenes business of book blurbs

Readers have long been warned not to judge a book by its cover, but what happens when that cover has an endorsement by your favourite author on it?

Chances are you're going to pick it up, but as it turns out, the process of getting a book blurb may have more to do with personal connections than a book's real merit.

Elamin Abdelmahmoud delves into why blurbing can be such an essential, yet painful, part of writing a book with fellow authors Jen Sookfong Lee and Anakana Schofield.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Anakana, when you hear the word "blurb," what feelings bubble up for you?

Anakana: Well, I have been eternally grateful to receive them, and God bless anybody that ever said a kind word about me or anything I wrote — and a curse upon those that said rude things. It has literally taken years off my life, writing them. When I get asked to write one, it's something akin to anaphylaxis. I'm from Ireland originally. I grew up a Catholic, so I'm just plagued with guilt. You want to say yes, but … there was a time when I would get a request every 34 minutes. I think then people figured out that my name on their book would be the death knell of it, so fortunately that calmed down. And then I just concluded that I couldn't write them. I'm just no good at writing them.

Elamin: Jen, do you have similarly strong feelings about being asked to blurb?

Jen: I actually really love blurbs, the blurbing process. I love saying no to blurbs if I don't have time. I have no problem with that…. As an editor, when I'm asking other people for blurbs, I have zero shame. I don't care. I will ask the most famous writer you've ever heard of for a blurb, because what's the worst thing that's going to happen?... I've been ghosted by so many famous authors, it's not even funny.

Elamin: You're an author, but you're also an editor. Why do blurbs matter so much in the industry?

Jen: I don't think blurbs matter to your average reader…. I think where it matters is to the bookseller — the person at the bookstore who thinks, "How is this book going to sell?" I think it matters to people who are organizing events, because when they look at who has blurbed a book, they're going to know who this author is either friends with or has contact with, or what kind of community they belong to — and then they're going to know who's going to come to this event. So all of that, I think, is where blurbs are important.

Elamin: Anakana, you're not a big believer in the power of blurbs. Why not?

Anakana: Well, I think that there's something very anachronistic about them…. Before we came on the air, I took a look at my long shelf of orange Penguin paperbacks. What about the '60s and '70s? The '80s? There wasn't a single blurb on any of those books. Iris Murdoch didn't have a blurb from Charles Dickens or whomever. It was always quotes from reviews, because there was a critical culture. The space in which we get to talk about, think about reading has so contracted.

But no, I don't actually think they matter as much as writers are led to believe. I think Jen makes some really great points, but the landscape in which book editors are trying to choose whatever three books per week to review is so difficult right now. I'd like to see more imaginative ideas. I'd like to see us gathering in public places to read. I'd like to hear us talking about the actual prose, rather than us making up stuff on the back of books; sometimes, the reality is many readers who have to blurb books don't have the time to read the entire book.

Elamin: I want to pick up on the point that you just raised about the idea of maybe we have lost some of the critical culture, because I think there's truth to that. Jen, do you sense that there's a sort of decline in critical culture as well?

Jen: Yeah, 100 per cent.... A full feature review is really, really tough to get. So when you've got, say, 200 novels coming out in Canada a year vying for those ten full feature spots, you're not going to get the pull quote from The Globe and Mail or whatever place you're getting it from. So in the absence of that, in the great vacuum of critical material that book publishers can pull from, the only thing that fills that void are blurbs from other authors — and the more famous, the better. I hate to say that because I love a good review. I love a great big article about a new book in The Globe and Mail … but we don't get those anymore, not really.

Elamin: If there's a young author who is really dreading the prospect of navigating the world of blurbs, any advice to that person?

Jen: I don't want them to dread it; their publishers are there to support them through it, first of all. And second of all, no author is angry because you ask. They'll just say no, or they'll ghost you, but they're not going to be mad at you. It's all professional; we all have to do it, and we all hate it. It's okay.

Elamin: We all have to do it. We all hate it. That's the perfect conclusion to a conversation about blurbs.

Anakana: I think we should move to bribes instead of blurbs.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Jess Low.