Ciao,
I’ve been thinking about blurbs, the lines of advance praise that authors provide for one another’s books. ‘Gripping and necessary’ — Jane Austen, ‘Genre-imploding’ — Leo Tolstoy, ‘Pungent’ — P.G. Wodehouse, et cetera.
Recently I was one of the authors asked to weigh in on this Guardian article about a Simon & Schuster imprint’s recent decision to drop them. Here’s what I said:
Pragmatically speaking, I do give blurbs and am very grateful to receive them because as an individual author, you want to be supportive (and supported) within the industry as it currently stands. But I would be delighted if they were done away with. […] There are famous authors who give blurbs to complete strangers; I’ll never forget Hilary Mantel doing so for my first book. But by and large, blurbs reflect who’s friends with whom. It’s natural, and not at all a bad thing, for writers to find companionship with people whose work they admire. But I think we would all breathe easier in these intellectual friendships if our publishers didn’t constantly make us pester one another for glorified marketing copy.
Like finding an agent, blurbs can seem opaque to those outside the publishing industry. In fact the mechanisms are rather precise. I — and I’d imagine most authors — wind up giving blurbs one of three ways:
The direct approach: someone I personally know asks me to read their book and send their editor something nice. If I have the time and I genuinely admire their work, I do. More often than not I never get around to it because I already review a lot of new fiction, but once a year or so I manage. The fact that I can’t do more causes me constant fear that people will take it personally.
The cold call: An editor or publicist contacts me directly, goes via my agent, or gets my address from a colleague and sends me a proof without asking. The latter pisses me off because it’s a) a breach of privacy and b) wasteful; I move apartment every couple of years and I never have very much space, so I end up having to recycle most proofs I haven’t requested. (You’re not allowed to give them away – understandable for the author’s reputation given they’re uncorrected, but frustrating ecologically.) I sometimes wonder if publishers keep sending books to the apartments I’ve long since vacated and what the new tenant, let’s say Bruce who works for an instant noodle startup, makes of suddenly becoming a tastemaker for contemporary literary fiction. That said, I do blurb at least one complete stranger a year so I’m not just back-patting my mates.
The press extract: I’ve written a review or otherwise publicly praised the novel through an official outlet, and the publisher quotes what I said. This is my favourite way for it to happen; I prefer to meaningfully interpret a book than to send on ‘Stonking good — Naoise Dolan’.
A few years ago I gave a lot more blurbs than I currently do, partly because I was — let’s be honest — flattered to have been asked as someone whose own first novel was only just out, and partly because the exhaustion had not set in. I don’t regret the blurb-happy era. The novels were good and I stand by what I said about them. But it was never going to be sustainable in the long run.
My novels are only a small portion of the writing I publish. I write weekly opinion columns for the Sunday Independent and at least one book review a month for the Irish Times, along with sporadic contributions to UK and US publications like the London Review of Books, the New York Times and the Financial Times. Before even factoring in the books, a typical writing year for me will have around 40 opinion pieces, 15 book reviews, 6 feature articles/pieces of longform criticism, 3 introductions/anthology contributions and a couple of short stories. The pay ranges from moderate to abysmal. I don’t have time for much free labour on top, and I don’t know many jobbing writers who do.
The blurb economy relies on the assumption that authors only exist from book to book. If you publish a novel every 3-4 years, surely you’ll have time in between to regularly churn out free endorsements.
This is … cosmically untrue.
Deduct tax and agent’s commission from most advances, divide by the years they have to last and you’ll quickly realise that’s impossible to rest on your laurels between books without family money, a banker spouse or a freak biological mutation that allows you to live on literal air. Even bestselling novelists largely need day jobs, whether it’s other writing or something less visible to publishers.
The word ‘bestseller’ carries an emotive pull that does not necessarily reflect the actual sums involved. In Ireland, a spell on the bestseller charts might mean a few hundred euro for the author — in the UK, a few thousand if they’re lucky. Most books do not stay there for long. A typical stint on the UK Sunday Times bestseller list amounts to three months’ rent. On the Irish Times list, it’s more like a single round at The Temple Bar provided nobody orders cocktails.
The blurb economy is unsustainable. It’s a testament to the generosity and fellow feeling of writers that any get issued at all. I’ve been well blurbed myself and it’s meant a lot. I try to give back when I can and not to let the process be biased by who has the most access to me. We have to look out for each other within flawed systems, and most of us do.
But publishers should really fucking pay.
They pay for Google ads. Public transport billboards. Candy and confetti and tote bags to send along with the proofs.
Yes, some books receive this level of promotional flourish and others don’t. Yes, paying for blurbs would risk deepening the gap between the books publishers truly push and the ones they passively tip off into the ocean.
But the marketing budget already influences the blurb economy. On the most basic level, it dictates how many proofs publishers send out and how flamboyantly they’re packaged when they arrive. When I get sent a debut a publisher paid £5,000 for, it’s presented much less extravagantly than a six-figure blockbuster. The latter will come with branded stationery, say, or free food. (By the way, I am vegan! Stop sending me milk chocolate! But this is a less urgent complaint.)
I should hope most authors rise above such gimmicks and blurb whatever resonates with them artistically, but it’s naive to pretend that the economics of publishing don’t already influence who blurbs whom. I don’t think paying for blurbs would dramatically change that. It would simply recognise the labour involved.
‘But what if authors turn in sheer fluff on books they haven’t even read?’ — Well, if you want to crunch the numbers, I earn 18-50c per word for most of my reviews, the higher end of this spectrum being a rare and feted event. Even if publishers really went to town and paid £1 per word of a paragraph-long blurb, that would still work out at minimum wage once you factor in reading time. This doesn’t strike me as ‘compromise your integrity to retire in Mallorca’ money so much as ‘nominally recompense intellectual labour on which the industry relies’ money. Blurbing would still be a massive favour, just one afforded the bare minimum of professional respect.
If directly paying for blurbs isn’t a goer, another answer is to simply commission more reviewers and pay them better. Personally I would prefer this: even if handsomely paid to blurb, I think I would still instinctively prefer having the space for proper literary criticism.
Not everyone is like me. Some authors dislike reviewing and would be much happier directly sending the publisher a single well-considered paragraph. It’s still industry-sustaining, mentally demanding labour and it’s disrespectful to rely on them doing it for free.
A third potential solution, and probably the best one, is to stop it with the blurbs altogether. They’re an arms race: when I say the publishing industry relies on them, I mean it’s only considered a black mark against an author not to have them because everyone else does. If no books featured blurbs, they would not be missed. Authors would find other ways to support their peers. If readers currently pay any attention to the quotations on the front — and like I said, I’m sceptical that they do — it would be no bad thing for them to read the first page instead and get an unmediated taste of the author’s prose.
So. Devilishly provocative title aside, here is a summary of my views:
Personally I prefer reviewing to blurbing because I find it more meaningful and honest. I have read literally thousands of books across my lifetime. Most of them are neither all good nor all bad, and usually I’ve got things to say beyond whether I liked it or not. Reviews let me be thoughtful and constructive without collapsing nuance into sales talk. In a way, the fact that reviewing is so shoddily recompensed relieves some of my literary citizenship guilt on the blurb front: authors need reviews, too, and I’m certainly not writing them to get rich.
Publishers should pay for copywriting services as they pay for all other forms of marketing. Blurbs are marketing copy. Often well-written, ingeniously sculpted, agonised over — but marketing copy nonetheless in how they function.
Or blurbs should just be done away with, since authors only need marketing copy in the first place because everyone else has it, too.
I’m not out to knock the contributions of authors who blurb more prolifically than me. You’re fantastic and you’re propping the industry up. I just don’t think you should have to do that without at least nominal financial recognition in return.
Le meas,
N