Should We Kill The Book Blurb Economy?

A little insider baseball for all the writers out there

I have this theory that there are two kinds of people: writers and everybody else. People usually get this sad look on their face when I tell them that if they think they fall into the latter category because they don’t get paid to write or there’s nothing published with their name to it because life got in the way of living and they had to figure out other, probably smarter ways to earn a salary. They want or wanted to be a writer, but it just didn’t work out. I get that, I’ll say before dropping the good news on them: Mazel tov! You’re a writer!

That’s right, I don’t care if there isn’t a single byline in a magazine or a poem in a literary journal with your name on it, and it doesn’t matter to me if the only time you’ve pressed pen to paper in the last decade was to jot notes down at a work meeting. You don’t need to actually get any writing done to be a writer—God knows plenty of people who are professional writers often don’t—and if you never figure out how to write that book you swear you have in you, then you aren’t the only one. The truth is that if you’re probably a writer if you’re reading this.

I know it sounds very much like the idea that all you have to do is accept Jesus into your heart and you’re saved, but I swear it’s actually a tiny bit more than that. It’s about curiosity and creativity. It’s looking at the world and always asking questions and wondering how things could be different, better, or worse. I also think being a reader makes you a writer. You don’t need to crush a hundred novels a year, or even get through ten; just as long as the urge is there then you’re on the right track. Being a writer is a profession, but it’s also a mindset. I don’t know if we’re born or bred, but I’ll say that writers are in the minority of the population. I don’t think the world cares much for writers because we’re probably annoying to people who just want to get through life as quickly as possible, then wake up one day and wonder why they feel empty inside, as if they’ve missed so much of life. I’ll also note that I generally only tend to get along with people I consider writers, and most of them would tell you they couldn’t compose a decent paragraph if their life depended on it.

For the most part, writers don’t write. If I’m being honest here—and some writers have straight-up admitted this to me—some of them are just lazy and can’t find it in them to start working on something. Others simply can’t because they’re busy working for a living, raising kids, or just trying to get by in this world that makes it nearly impossible to find any time to be creative, let alone allow somebody to do it for a living. Some of them used to write a lot, but burnout is a very real thing that has stopped more than a few great writers from doing what comes natural. That is the one that gets me the most and something I don’t think a lot of people understand: being a writer who writes isn’t exactly manual labor or rocket science, but it’s hard as hell to do. Just finding the time is a challenge, even if you can block out the thousands of distractions going on all around you at once. If you do find enough time, and you write something that you think is good enough to sell to an editor, then you have to live first with the possibility of rejection, and then with the eventual shellacking your writing and ego will take if whatever you wrote sells. There’s the editing process that can be downright daunting, which can sometimes involve multiple people questioning why you used a certain word or basically calling you a bush leaguer for using a corny, overused phrase. Then, after all that, there’s the moment of truth when whatever it is you wrote goes live into the world. You cling to the belief that metrics matter, that every like on social media equals a click on your article or every sale of your book will let you live and write another day. Some people will tell you whatever you wrote was great, others will say it sucks and you’re a dummy, and then, the worst of all, there’s millions of people who won’t even know or care you wrote something. You’re proud for a bit, but then you ask yourself what the point is because that’s what every writer does. Another quality every writer has is we’re never satisfied. We’re writers because the world is far from perfect, and imagining better helps us cope with the cruel truths we’re constantly faced with.

Heavy, right? That’s life, baby! I was just trying to talk up all the really big things before I got to the seemingly minor, stupid things writers have to deal with. I have a list somewhere of things I can’t believe I have to do in order to write for a living, and towards the top is “Asking for blurbs.” I hate it and I think every other writer I know does as well, and the irony is that I don’t think most people outside of the publishing and media bubble even know or care what a blurb is. To begin with, it’s a stupid word. It sounds like a ghost Bill Murray and Harold Ramis should be chasing around and trying to trap, not something that—supposedly—helps sell books. When I tell people who don’t know much about the publishing world, they just go, “Oh, that quote thing on the back of a book.”

This ghost from one of the new Ghostbusters movies should be called Blurb.

Talking about blurbs is something writers actually do sometimes. A big reason is because asking for blurbs is legit terrible. I’d say it’s nearly as traumatic as waiting to see if a publisher is actually going to buy your work, because you’re going out to other writers you respect and asking them to heap praise on you and your work. Sometimes they’re your friends who say yes without hesitation, other times you might not know them but they agree and love the book, and then there are the instances where a writer might say no or, worst of all, they say yes and then don’t like the book. Have I talked with my shrink about this? Come on—have you read anything I’ve written? Of course I have!

One of my favorite writers, Rebecca Makkai, recently made things a little easier on writers who considered asking her for a blurb when she posted on social media that she was taking a break from blurbing. Not long after that, Simon & Schuster publisher Sean Manning wrote a piece for Publishers Weekly about how the famed house won’t be requiring blurbs anymore. Since blurb talk is something to take our minds off all the talk of the world collapsing around us, the New York Times asked Makkai to go a little longer on her announcement, and it’s a very smart look into what a few people have started calling “The Blurb Economy.” Makkai admits right off the bat that a lot of people might not even know what she’s talking about:

For those fortunate enough not to know, blurbing is the laborious process wherein writers beg one another for nice words for the covers of their new books, and, in return, read and provide blurbs for other new books. It’s apparently true that the term originated in 1907 with a fictional character, Belinda Blurb, shouting praise on the cover of the humorist Gelett Burgess’s “Are You a Bromide?” and I guess we’re all still in on the joke — or maybe we are the joke.

Makkai’s reasons for not blurbing make sense. She started out with a mission to blurb as many books as possible, but things started breaking down along the way and it started to eat into her life. Part of it was all the reading she had to do in order to write the blurb, which she says is not something every writer who blurbs actually does. I’ve heard a few people tell me they only read half of a book or simply flipped through novels they’ve blurbed. That seems crazy to me, but I also sort of understand you want to do something nice for somebody but maybe you don’t have the time so you just make something up.

The second reason made the most sense. Something I’ve heard more than a few writers say is either they’re pushed to get blurbs by their publisher, or they feel some need to get as many blurbs as possible. Over-blurbing, so to speak. Maybe they think one out of ten blurbs will be the one that convinces a potential reader to fork over their cash, but sometimes after all that work, the blurb is basically thrown away:

I got a blurb request for a friend through their publisher. This friend is someone I admire, who did something nice for me once, and I was willing to make one of those exceptions at what was otherwise an extremely busy time. Writing this blurb meant not working on my own book, not doing other things I needed or wanted to do, for the 12 hours or so, spread over several days, that it took to read my friend’s book. When the book came out — and I emphasize here that the fault was the publisher’s, not the author’s — my blurb was not on it. The publisher had over-asked, and my blurb was relegated to Amazon. The experience made me seriously question how I was allocating my time.

See, I appreciate what Makkai did. I’ve been in my own season of blurb requests, and while my editor has offered to help out, I feel obligated to do all the asking on my own. It’s a sign of respect to the writer because I want to tell them personally how their work means something to me or they’ve been an influence in some way, so having their thoughts on the back of my book would be incredibly meaningful. Will it move the needle on sales? I’ve never been sure of that, and somebody in publishing probably has better insight, but I’ll say I’ve noticed a big difference between the blurbs I received for my first two books which were nonfiction, and getting the first blurbs for my debut novel that’s out in the fall. I got great blurbs for my memoir and essay collection, and I appreciate all the writers that came out and gave me their support. They got the feel of the book and said very nice things about me as a writer and—dear God, I’m sorry for saying this—a thinker. The fiction blurb feels different. A blurb for a novel feels almost like a nice mini-review, a deep read from a colleague. The first blurb I asked was from the first name I had written down when I started thinking about who I wanted to have blurb Kaplan’s Plot: Megan Abbott.

If you haven’t read Megan’s work, then please go ahead and buy all of her books and have a blast. She’s one of those writers who I think transcends the idea of genre fiction and literary fiction, the way Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, or Lincoln Michel might be as influenced by Franz Kafka or Jorge Luis Borges as they are Stephen King or old sci-fi novels or how John le Carré or Elmore Leonard elevated genres that often get treated like they’re simply for mindless entertainment, Megan blends hardboiled crime fiction, David Lynch, and Alfred Hitchcock, with the precision of somebody who has truly studied writing and literature. She’s one of my favorite writers, and it was while reading one of her novels that I started understanding what I wanted to do a little bit more when it came to switching over, so to speak, from nonfiction and journalism into fiction. I wrote her an e-mail, took a big gulp, and hit send. She said she’d be happy to take a look, and when the e-mail came back with her blurb, my wife caught me tearing up over my keyboard.

A dazzling fictional debut, Jason Diamond’s Kaplan’s Plot calls to mind both John Irving’s darkly funny tales of family dysfunction and E. L. Doctorow’s evocative dives into the early 20th century American underworld. At the same, Diamond sneaks in deeper truths about family history, generational trauma and a quintessentially Midwestern sense of Jewish identity. - Megan Abbott

Wow. Damn. Megan Abbott is out there comparing me to Doctorow and Irving. That’s, uh…I still can’t wrap my head around that. I love it because one of my favorite writers saw exactly what I was going for, but also because I have a hard time with the whole elevator pitch thing when people ask me what I’m writing about. It’s something I need to get better at, and thankfully my publishers wrote some great jacket copy for people who might be browsing for their next read, but damn, that blurb honestly made me forget all the mind-numbing rewrites and hours spent pondering over whether I should do this, that, or the other thing in the plot, and then worrying no editor would buy the book. Now I can just go back to worrying nobody will buy it or like it, but at least Megan Abbott said the greatest things about my book.

So to close this out: asking for blurbs is a really rough process. I don’t know if they help in any way in terms of sales, but in the long slog that is writing and promoting a book, they offer an opportunity to remember to breathe and remind ourselves we’re writers who get to write, and that’s a beautiful thing that shouldn’t be taken for granted.

Speaking of not taking things for granted: I never miss an opportunity to mention you can pre-order Kaplan’s Plot right now at Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, or wherever you get books from. This book is my blood, sweat, tears, and I did the final edits on it whenever my then-newborn baby fell back asleep. If you’re going to buy it, first, thank you. Second, pre-orders are really important. Please consider getting a copy now rather than September when the book is actually out. If you do and you save your receipt, I’m going to be giving away some limited edition merch that I’m just waiting to get back from the printers. It’s pretty impossible to imagine a world where I have a debut novel out and I don’t make some sort of merch for it. I promise it’ll be good and I’ll post about it in the coming weeks, but if you get the book now and just e-mail a pic of the receipt and your address to jasondiamondmelt@gmail.com, I’ll make sure you’re on the list to receive the swag. And for those of you that order direct from your indie bookstore, there’s going to be something even more special for the first 500 people of you who support the locals. I promise it’ll be good.