Dear readers, Of the approximately one zillion decisions that go into making a book catnip to readers — its title, jacket design and typeface, to name just a few — perhaps none are so contested as blurbs. I’m sure you’ve seen thousands of them: the one or two sentence plaudits, plastered on the book’s front and back covers, that stress the originality or artistry or urgency of the book in your hand. In an ideal world, blurbs should act as trail markers, helping you decide if a book is to your taste. In reality, they’re often mortifying to ask for, a time-suck for the people who write them and possibly invisible to civilian readers. So I was intrigued last week when the head of Simon & Schuster announced its flagship imprint would no longer require writers to secure this kind of advance praise for their books. Sean Manning, the publisher, put it simply: “Trying to get blurbs is not a good use of anyone’s time.” Talk about saying the quiet part out loud. If you look hard at enough books, you start to notice a few things. There are some extremely generous blurbers, who seem to hang laurels on nearly every book that crosses their desk. In this context, some wordscan lose nearly all meaning (I’m looking at you, “luminous” and “kaleidoscopic”). And we don’t even know if blurbs even help to sell books: “There’s no metric to tell,” Manning told my colleague Liz Egan in an interview. In an essay for the Book Review, the novelist Rebecca Makkai offered an inside look at the hamster wheel of blurbing, which overwhelmed her to the point that it ate into her own reading and writing time. I greatly appreciated this tidbit about the etymology of the word “blurb”: “the term originated in 1907 with a fictional character, Belinda Blurb, shouting praise on the cover of the humorist Gelett Burgess’ “Are You a Bromide?” At least we’ve cleared that up. See you next week.
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