'A Plague on the Industry': Book Publishing's Broken Blurb System
When an author I’d worked with a decade ago at Simon & Schuster emailed me asking if she could send over an advance copy of her new novel, I of course said yes. But what really got me to read her book over all of the many unread books in my apartment was this quote from mystery writer S.A. Cosby on the cover: “Polly Stewart's The Good Ones is a fantastic achievement. A classic Southern Gothic tale told through the prism of modern-day sensibilities. Not to be missed.”
Having been unable to stop thinking about Cosby’s heartbreaking thriller Razorblade Tears ever since I read it, I inherently trusted him to guide me to my next great summer read (spoiler alert: he was right).
That quote from Cosby is what’s known as a book blurb, or more commonly, just a blurb. These endorsements from other authors or relevant notables are included on book covers, press releases, bookseller letters, and other promotional materials both before and after publication. Requests for blurbs are commonly made author-to-author or otherwise put into motion through their editors or agents ahead of publication, as soon as the manuscript is ready to send out—the earlier, the better.
On their surface, book blurbs seem fairly innocuous, but in reality, they’re a small piece of the puzzle with a big impact—one that represents so much of what’s broken within the traditional publishing establishment. Blurbs expose this ecosystem for what it really is: a nepotism-filled system that everyone endures for a chance of “making it” in an impossible industry for most. To borrow a phrase from Shakespeare enthusiast Cher Horowitz, “Blurbs are a full-on Monet. From far away, they’re okay, but up close, they’re a big old mess.”
“[Blurbs] are a PLAGUE on this industry” said Lucy Carson (emphasis her own), a literary agent at The Friedrich Agency who has worked with literary bigwigs like Pulitzer Prize-winner Elizabeth Strout. “Authors hate them (both asking for them and being asked), agents hate them, and publishers hate them.”
The many authors I spoke to for this piece described the process of asking for blurbs as “excruciating,” “anxiety-riddled,” “deeply dreaded,” and “the worst part of the publishing process.” It turns out that asking authors you admire to do you an unpaid favor is stressful—go figure! As author L’Oreal Thompson Payton wrote in her Substack on the topic, “Don’t get me wrong, writing the book itself was a feat. But somehow having to email authors and influencers I look up to and ask them to spend (unpaid) time and energy reading said book and then writing kind words about it made me feel like [a] high school girl all over again.”
A few authors shared fondly about how blurbs helped launch their literary careers, but their praise of blurbs was for the outcome, not the process. Even those lucky writers who reaped the rewards of a few big name blurbs spoke of how much unpaid effort went into the process of securing them.
The pressure of requesting blurbs isn’t just isolated to authors. An editorial director within the Big Five (the five largest publishing houses: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Hachette) who asked to remain anonymous told me that he spends about a third of his week dealing with blurbs, which includes tasks like making wish lists with the author and their agent, sending queries, and chasing down ‘drop dead’ due dates. He completes these tasks, he joked, “all while coaching my author to stay calm or gently explaining to them why Donna Tartt isn't really an option.”
This cycle of blurb requests can feel endless for authors who regularly publish new books. A major bestselling mystery author who asked to remain anonymous vividly compared this Groundhog Day nightmare to “ a sorority hazing that never ends.” She continued, “You never get initiated, and you have to keep proving to the actives that you will do this humiliating task over and over and over again—it is Sisyphean.”
For authors in the upper echelons of literary and commercial success, the other side of the equation can be just as stressful. “You have 5% of authors who are getting 95% of blurb requests, because there’s no middle class in publishing,” pointed out author and professor Clayton Childress, whose 2017 book Under The Cover followed the publication of a single work of fiction from beginning to end. For every book to which Stephen King or Margaret Atwood generously lends their praise, there are countless others unsuccessfully pitched.
After hitting it big, some authors find themselves unable to keep up with the new onslaught of blurb requests. Andrea Bartz, whose 2021 thriller We Were Never Here was selected for Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine Book Club, says she had no idea that writing blurbs would consume so much of her time as a successful author. “I'm asked to blurb FAR more books than I could actually read,” she told me (emphasis her own). “I want to be a supportive member of the writing community and I'm deeply grateful to everyone who's blurbed me (including when I was a debut), but if I said yes to every request, I wouldn't have any time left to write my own books.”
As Childress points out, in a notoriously challenging industry, “People feel a bit of survivor’s guilt when they’re successful. I do think that is a motivation if not to pay it forward, then pay it down.”
My sources consistently acknowledged that submitting a glowing blurb without actually liking the book was commonplace in the industry.
“Nobody has ever said this explicitly to me, but it seems implied that blurbs need to be fawning,” confessed a contemporary fiction author who asked to remain anonymous. She shared, “In two cases, I've written blurbs for books I actually hated. One was for a friend; there was no way I could've said no. The other was for a debut novelist of color. I thought her book had a fantastic premise and the cultural representation was beautiful, but the writing really did not hold up for me. I felt really torn but ultimately submitted a glowing blurb because I wanted to support her and didn't know how to say no.”
One bestselling author I spoke to who also asked to remain anonymous shared another perspective as to why authors blurb books they don’t like. “We just do,” she said. “We owe someone a favor, or our agent or editor mentions it would (ahem) be really, really good to prioritize this one if you have time, or we can tell it's well done even though it's not for us, or we know we'll want a favor from that author in the future. Authoring runs on a favor economy.”
Blurbs are hardly the only part of the publishing process that authors dislike, but what makes book blurbs so significant is their ubiquitousness as industry signals of which books matter.
Simply put, booksellers, sales representatives, members of the media, and other people involved in deciding which books end up on shelves cannot possibly read every book that comes across their desks. Between 500,000 and 1,000,000 new titles are published by traditional publishers in the US each year—and that’s not even counting the two to three million additional self-published titles released through various channels. Only a minute percentage of those books receive significant marketing budgets from their publishers, get selected for a major national book club, or even make it onto the “hot new releases” table at regional Barnes & Noble stores.
Former bookseller Sarah Cahill told me that in her 15 years of buying for large bookseller chains, she often relied on blurbs to decide which titles would appeal to customers. She explained, “I was buying about 250-300 titles a month and probably seeing about 500-600. You only have so much time. Book blurbs allowed me to quickly figure out the rough target audience they were going for. I worked in airport retail for a while, and if you’ve got John Grisham saying this new crime novel is great, it’s likely it’ll suit airport retailers.”
Bookstores, especially independent ones, tend to run on razor-thin margins, and as Cahill points out, “A number of blurbs also made it more of a fail safe. If you got that many people to say it’s good, it’s probably not bad and less of a risk for me to buy for the stores.”
Paul Bogaards, former Director of Publicity and Media Relations at Alfred A. Knopf until 2022, who now runs his own public relations firm, provided a perfect example of how impactful blurbs can be for booksellers drowning in galleys all being hailed as the next Gone Girl.
“Clemence Michallon recently published her debut thriller, The Quiet Tenant, but the long work of establishing her bona fides began early last year when we sent the manuscript out to people like Megan Abbott, Alafair Burke, Kimberly McCreight, James Patterson, Alex Segura, and Brad Thor,” Bogaards told me. “When all those writers began weighing in with meaningful endorsements prior to publication, it not only helped position the book for consumers, it helped position the novel with booksellers. The result: a book key retail partners might have overlooked in terms of reading became one they wanted to pick up. That helped The Quiet Tenant become an Indie Next pick.”
Blurbs can also provide important signals to booksellers about which authors to champion at their particular stores. Christine Bollow, co-owner and director of programs at Loyalty Bookstore in Washington, DC, said that blurbs are one of the first things she looks at as a bookseller. “As a Black, Asian, and Queer-owned bookstore, championing books by marginalized authors is central to everything we do,” Bollow told me. “Oftentimes, these aren’t the books getting the big budgets from publishers, so I look to what books authors I respect are reading and loving. These are authors whose taste I trust. If it’s a debut author or a new to me author, I check who has blurbed it. If it’s blurbed by someone I love, there’s a much better chance I’ll pick up the advance copy, add it to our ‘Preorder BIPOC Books’ page on Loyalty’s website, request an event, or say yes to an event requested by the publisher.”
Blurbs are also heavily relied on by publicists and marketers when convincing book media and book influencers to pay attention to their book over all the others being pitched. Of course, blurbs aren’t the only thing publishers use to promote a book, but in an overcrowded sea of unread pages, blurbs send up an easily understood smoke signal.
“As someone who has been doing book publicity for almost 30 years, I can attest to how grateful we publicists are when we have blurbs to work with when pitching the media,” shared Lissa Warren of Lissa Warren Public Relations. “That way, it's not just us saying the book is great—it's a disinterested third party. Of course that disinterested third party probably shares an agent with the author they're blurbing, or an editor, or they know each other from grad school, or they're a friend of a writer friend. Regardless, we need their blurbs.”
For authors outside of the Big Five, blurbs can play an even larger role at giving a book gravitas and getting it noticed. Author Courtney Sender, who secured pre-publication blurbs from bestsellers like Ann Patchett and Alice McDermott through personal connections from working in the publishing industry for a decade, told me, “Blurbs are basically signals about seriousness, and the importance of those signals is probably inversely proportional to your publisher's reputation. In other words, big-name blurbs are going to matter more for books outside the Big Five.”
Sender, whose debut story collection In Other Lifetimes All I’ve Lost Comes Back to Me was published by West Virginia University Press in spring 2023, believes that blurbs were hugely impactful in getting her book taken seriously by visible commercial and literary outlets like The New York Times and Oprah’s Book Club, which might otherwise have overlooked her book.
While there’s nothing inherently wrong with relying on praise from authors and notable figures to decide which books are worthy of industry attention, most authors secure blurbs not based on the merit of their work alone, but rather who they know. And as is the case in all walks of life, who you know is often directly linked to the level of privilege you carry within that community. In this way, blurbs can demonstrate which authors are the most connected within the industry, perhaps more than whether or not a book is actually “luminous.”
“Most people understand that the blurbs are meant to create excitement ‘in-house,’” shared the bestselling mystery writer I spoke to. “It’s not the blurbs per se; it’s the gathering of the blurbs. It shows how gung-ho a writer is, how connected, and what favors they are willing to call in. It sounds shocking, but it's commonsensical that no one at any publishing house can read everything. How could they? So in-house excitement has to be built around easily understood externals: blurbs, orders, reviews, book club picks.” As already mentioned, blurbs can be a direct factor in whether the reviews and book club picks materialize at all.
Think about it. You do the years-long work of writing a book, signing with a literary agent, and selling it to a publisher, only to be kneecapped by your lack of connections within the publishing industry, which might prevent your book from getting the internal buzz it needs to justify investments in marketing, bookstore events, and publicity prioritization. Of course, a blurb isn’t the only way to do this, but it’s undeniably a major factor that reverberates throughout the entire publication process, starting with the moment you list your connections in a book proposal.
If blurbs are primarily understood as signals of importance, we have to ask ourselves: just who is sending up those signals? It’s no secret that book publishing, like many legacy industries, still suffers from a serious diversity problem, which shapes what books make it to print. According to a 2020 New York Times data project, a whopping 89% of US books published in 2018 were by non-hispanic white authors. As a consequence of this long-term inequity, there are fewer non-white bestselling authors available to provide blurbs. “Only a few Black authors have made it to the level that their blurbs really affect the branding of our books,” said author Davon Loeb, who suggested that the reduced pool also causes any successful BIPOC author to be flooded with blurb requests.
Childress points out the effects of merit being rewarded by an insular community with historical inequality. He said, “Blurbs as a marketing and promotional tool almost definitionally create a self-reproducing system which then also almost definitionally leads to inequality, because it is based on social networks and who you know."
Consider the problem of MFA programs and other writing workshops, where authors notoriously make the connections that lead to securing blurbs from “who they know” down the line. Meg Reid, Executive Director at Hub City Writers Project, explained, “If you've spent any time in the industry, you know that a packed roster of blurbs often has more to do with which MFA program or elite writing conference the writer attended or the other writers in their publisher's stable, rather than whether the book is truly great or not.”
Like book publishing, elite writing programs have their own diversity issues to contend with, which reverberate out into who gets published and which books are ultimately recognized. According to a 2015 survey of creative writing programs by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), white students made up 75% of creative writing programs on average, and as Katerina Ivanov Prado wrote in a 2022 essay for Catapult, even fully-funded MFA programs are significantly more accessible to writers who come from higher socioeconomic classes.
One multi-book contemporary fiction author who asked to remain anonymous candidly shared how she “had a huge leg up when it came to the blurb game,” as well as her publishing career as a whole. She told me, “I had a job at a glossy magazine that probably made me sound like a writer on the rise. I graduated from a prestigious college with no student loans. I'm white, I'm thin, I live in New York, and I already had a decent following on Twitter and Instagram. I'm sure these factors made an enormous difference in how I was perceived by fellow writers and publishing professionals.”
You may have noticed that we’ve come a long way without delving into what happens after a book goes on sale to the public. While several publishing insiders I spoke to claimed to know anecdotally that blurbs have no real effect on book sales—especially when those blurbs are not from a household name—I find that hard to believe. As someone who reads approximately 50 books a year and relies heavily on book blurbs from more than just marquee authors to decide what to read next, I know the purchasing power of seeing your favorite author gush about a previously unknown author’s book—and that’s with my existing knowledge that blurbs are a rigged system.
“Many readers shop by genre affinity,” explained Bogaards. “For example, if you are a debut thriller writer, you want to develop an affinity with other writers in that pool. A bevy of endorsements will suggest that this previously unknown writer has written a book that may appeal to them.”
Blurbs can also play a role in how books are surfaced online—a critical factor in the success of a book, given that 71.2% of books sales took place online in 2020, a trend that continues to rise. Ricardo Fayet, co-founder Reedsy and author of How to Market a Book: Overperform in a Crowded Market, said, “One of the reasons why book blurbs are so powerful is that they can be showcased in the Editorial Reviews sections of retailer pages. They're a great way to catch the eye of readers scrolling down in search of reviews."
While there are no scientific studies into the effects of blurbs on purchase behavior—publishers aren’t spending their limited funds removing blurbs from half their covers to run A/B tests in the name of general industry knowledge—it’s impossible to deny the impact a blurb can have on the full commercial lifespan of a book. In an industry drowning in content, a blurb from a highly notable person signals, “Hey, look over here!” From internal support (financial and otherwise) to bookseller excitement to determining which publicity pitches get read by journalists, blurbs pack a powerful punch that ultimately affects consumer activity. It’s a rigged system long overdue for a change.
The question then becomes: if not blurbs, then what? Armies of booksellers aren’t about to read every book published each year to determine which are the most worthy of attention based on literary merit alone. And with recent layoffs affecting several publishers, it’s unlikely that in-house staffs will magically expand to take on the extra marketing, publicity, or sales work needed to fill the promotional void left by blurbs.
Literary agent Lucy Carson says that without blurbs, “The burden would be on the catalog copy, cover art, and trade reviews to really carry their weight in making a title land. I think truly, if we all stripped the blurbs away at once, we have plenty of other mechanisms to work with that are already in place. And those mechanisms don’t require unpaid labor from authors or unfair advantages to those who are already ‘connected.’”
While promoting another author’s book on social media is still technically unpaid labor, several authors I spoke to said they’d rather ditch the blurb and cut to the chase of this literary quid pro quo. “Do you actually want a blurb or do you simply want me to know about this book and share it on social media?” asked Andrea Bartz. “I wish more people would give me a choice. I'm always happy to champion other writers, especially debuts. There are so many ways to do that that aren't blurbing (and many of them are just as impactful).”
Although social media is a good alternative for those unable to blurb a book who still want to support an author, many were quick to point out that they received social media support from authors who blurbed their books—and who likely wouldn’t have posted if their name wasn’t also listed on the back cover.
“Blurbs aren't about the blurb; they're about opening the value exchange,” explained Jonathan Jacobs, a marketing strategist who has worked with several bestselling authors. “You blurb my book, I blurb yours. We do a Live together. We hit our email lists. It opens up the opportunity to continuously tap into someone else's audience.”
While dismantling the blurb system from the larger issues of legacy publishing would be nearly impossible without an industry-wide agreement to ditch them (spoiler alert: not happening anytime soon), there are two manageable adjustments that bubbled up in my conversations.
First: cut out (or at least down) the blurb process for established authors by instead relying on “praise for the author” quotes about past works, as opposed to going out for new blurbs every few years. This would not only free up certain authors from dipping into their writing time to secure new, theoretically unnecessary blurbs, but also redirect what capacity they do have for blurbing to championing new and diverse voices, rather than being beholden to the tit-for-tat blurb dance that so many authors are engaged with amongst their equally successful peers.
Second: stop pressuring authors to secure blurbs early enough to include in the book proposal that goes out to potential publishing houses. This adds pressure to build buzz for books earlier and earlier, which is more easily done when authors come in with established connections. As award-winning author Rebecca Makkai put it, “A writer coming out of a top MFA program is going to have a very different experience of that than a writer who's been working for the phone company for the past twelve years. At this point in time, do we really want to invent new ways to make publishing a who-you-know game?” Less reliance on blurbs so early in the process makes room for other signifiers to step in, hopefully allowing for a wider array of books to come to the front of the list.
As someone who uses blurbs as a guidepost when visiting my local indie, I would never tell you not to consider them, but after reading this, I hope you do so with a grain of salt. Blurbs are advertising, like anything else, and as we know, ads are not always as they appear. You may judge a book by its cover, but try not to judge it by its blurbs alone.
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