The Sword and Laser discussion

Marie Myung-Ok Lee over at The Millions argues that we need to destroy the blurbing industrial complex. She says that blurbing takes away from time that authors could be using to write their own stories and that most people don't even know what a blurb is. Lee asked random people for this piece and they aren't quoted. 24% of Americans don't read books so it's not exactly surprising that random people are unfamiliar with blurbs.

So do blurbs even matter? If an author you like blurbs a book, are you more likely to buy it? Do you read blurbs at all when you browse books?

And any authors here, do blurb requests take up as much time as Lee claims? I'm genuinely curious if your experiences are similar to her's.

I feel like blurbs are completely ignorable. No one is ever going to write a scathing critique and it end up on the cover. And it just makes me sad to see my favorite authors doing it.

I would love for it to go away.

In general, I don't read blurbs and they don't affect my purchase choice.

Sure blurbs can take up your time, but writers like to support writers, and if it is genuine it can, at least, boost the writers' confidence if not always his or her sales. The first blurb I received was from Ray Bradbury. It was deeply meaningful to me. And it did call attention to my novel. And let me add -- I love reading blurbs. I always have.

I agree that authors blurbing would seem to take away from their authoring time.

However, I support blurbs from publications and reviewers.

Disclaimer, when I was reviewing books, I got blurbed for Far Orbit: Speculative Space Adventures and it was one of the highlights of my book reviewing endeavor.

I've never cared enough to actually read the page with blurbs and always skip it. I *might* skim a blurb on the cover, but I mostly tend to be annoyed that they're ruining the artwork.

I've never purchased a book based on a blurb but if I see someone that I know and respect blurb something I already bought, I feel reassured that I'll like it.

I read blurbs when I was younger, but after a while I noticed that the same people blurbing the book were also listed in the acknowledgements, meaning they were all friends. Kinda diminished that coin.

One book I saw back in the early 90s had the best blurbs on it. They were all things like, “‘This book is amazing and the author is so handsome!’ — author’s mom.” And “‘Buy this book, the author owes me twenty bucks.’ — author’s roommate.” I wish I’d bought the thing just for the send-up of the blurbs, because now I have no idea who that was.

I have bought many a book based on the blurbs. Before the internet there wan't much to tell you what was good or not. A positive blurb by another author I liked, or a respectable review publication was sometime as much as you got.

I bought "Lord of the Rings" in 1979 based purely on this blurb.

"The English speaking world is divided into those who have read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and those who are going to read them"
Sunday Times

Trike wrote: "One book I saw back in the early 90s had the best blurbs on it. They were all things like, “‘This book is amazing and the author is so handsome!’ — author’s mom.” And “‘Buy this book, the author owes me twenty bucks.’ — author’s roommate.”..."

That sounds really familiar... Anyone recall what book that was?

Yah, Kevin that sounded really familiar to me as well. Almost too familiar, even though I don’t believe I read it on a book. I almost want to say I saw it in another medium, like a tv show or movie, but I have no clue what that would be. Oh well, maybe somebody else will get it, and probably prove me completely wrong.

I think I've read blurbs like that in books by people like Dave Barry or Scott Adams.

Phil wrote: "I think I've read blurbs like that in books by people like Dave Barry or Scott Adams."

Yeah, I was going to guess Dave Barry. But he's written a few books.

It was SFF if that helps.

For anyone interested in getting a pretty deep dive into the publishing side of blurbs, the latest episode of the Graphic Novel TK podcast spends an hour on the topic with Tor editor Diana Pho.

http://www.comicsbeat.com/graphic-nov...


Trike: Any chance you're thinking of Neil Gaiman's non-fiction overview of The Hitchhiker's Guide from the '89 or so? I think that had funny and/or fake blurbs.

I don’t think so, but after 30 years I can’t be sure.

I feel like I'm more likely to give a book a chance if an author I already like recommends it through their usual channels (social media, newsletter, website, etc.). But if they're recommending it, I'm assuming they read it, and if they've read it, that's probably 90% of the work involved in writing a blurb, right?

That said, I think the practice was more collegial and informal back when a decent midlist author could make a living writing full-time just by putting out one novel every year or two, and the number of writers was kept relatively small by the gatekeeping of the big publishers.

Now there are thousands of authors publishing on a dozen platforms, churning out novels, novellas, and short stories for traditional publishers, digital-only publishers, on self-publishing platforms, on top of all the self-promotion and social media they have to do because their publishers only do that for their already best-selling authors, while also holding down one or two day jobs. I can completely understand why blurbing would feel onerous and wasteful under those conditions.