Who needs blurbs?

The answer is you, but probably not for the reasons you think.

Practically as soon as I started this newsletter in 2020—I want to say week 3?—I went off on blurbs.

Blurbs drive me insane. INSANE. I’m obsessed with them in an unhinged, persecutory way, like Javert with Jean Valjean.

Why? If we didn’t know each other well, I might tell you it’s for the same reasons Sean Manning, Publisher of Simon & Schuster’s flagship imprint, went off on them in Publisher’s Weekly last week, calling the whole industry obsession “so weird.”

Among other things, blurbs cost authors exorbitant amounts of time and anxiety and yield little objective business value in return. I’m not just talking about the cost involved in asking for blurbs, which is ludicrous, or that of writing blurbs, which is even worse; I’m talking about the amount of time and anxiety all of us in publishing waste every year obsessing and fretting over blurbs in general, which is straight-up embarrassing for a practice that has no quantifiable impact on book sales at all.

For heaven’s sake, look at the reaction to Sean’s essay alone: in the middle of a coup, in the same week as the first major American plane crash in 15+ years, with the President of the United States casually promising genocide for funsies, “Simon and Schuster executive makes vague promise to be more chill about blurbs” received coverage in The New York Times (x2), The Guardian, LitHub (x 2), The Conversation, and just about all of the best publishing newsletters, including—cough—this one.

The material benefits of blurbs, such as they are, mainly accrue to in-house publishing people: for publicists and sales staff, they’re fodder for pitch letters and follow-ups; for designers, something to put on a cover; for marketing teams, language for Instagram assets and Amazon A+ Content. (If you’re an author who doesn’t know what Amazon A+ Content is, do click the link; it’s worth knowing.)

Relative to the level all of us think about blurbs, though, even those benefits are paltry. At best, blurbs are MAYBE SOMETIMES helpful in a COMPLETELY UNQUANTIFIABLE WAY—if it’s, like, a debut novelist with a blurb by someone like Margaret Atwood, or a motivational speaker endorsed by James Clear. Otherwise: meh.

For authors who aren’t under contract yet—queriers, e.g.—blurbs are not helpful in the slightest.¹

Why can’t we all shut up about blurbs already!! The little snippets of praise authors offer one another on book jackets should not be taking up this much primo real estate in our heads!!

…I repeat: this is all what I’d tell you if we didn’t know each other that well.

None of it is a lie. You’ve just read some of the logical, professional reasons why blurbs bother me, and they’re all legit.

As I said, however, blurbs don’t just bother me—they drive me insane. And I can tell you from extensive experience that I’m far from the only one. Authors obsess over blurbs: who writes them, what they say, who says no, and whether any of the people who say no do so because they actually dislike the book. Editors obsess over them: why their book didn’t get as many blurbs as that other book; whether they have less pull with colleagues than they used to.

I, meanwhile, obsess over everyone else obsessing, because I go cuckoo in the presence of activated, pointless neuroticism, but the cuckoo is pure projective self-loathing, because I’m the biggest neurotic I know.

For something objectively unimportant to drive so many of us insane—to obsession, distraction—deeper forces than mere logic must be in play. (To remind: Sean’s essay in Publisher’s Weekly got coverage in two separate New York Times pieces.)

There’s got to be something stuck in our collective subconscious—some unmet need within or between us, as yet unacknowledged, repressed, misunderstood. Something—well, “weird,” to borrow Sean’s word.

What is it, do you think?

I have some ideas.