JOPLIN, Mo. —
So what’s your position on blurbs?
That’s book blurbs I’m talking about. You’ve doubtless seen and read many of them, probably in an offhand way without much attention. Or maybe I have that wrong.
Blurbs are all that gushing praise sometimes printed on the back of the book, or occasionally on the cover, proclaiming the superiority of the contents. Blurbs come from famous authors or celebrities and they’re supposed to make us insanely eager to buy the book.
Do they work?
Not on me, and probably not on most writers. We know how this happens. The writer asks writer friends; the literary agent asks other clients; the publisher asks their other writers and so forth. Blurbs must work for readers, though, or there wouldn’t be so many of them piled on a couple of current releases.
According to NationalPost.com, Nathan Englander is the recipient of the greatest compilation of blurbs ever. His new collection of short stories, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” has a “Murderers’ Row” of author blurbs from Michael Chabon, Jonathan Franzen, Colum McCann, Jonathan Safran Foer, Gary Shteyngart, Jonthan Lethem, Dave Eggers and Richard Russo.
The attributes accredited to the author include everything short of walking on water, such qualities as “utterly haunting ... Like Faulkner it tells the tangled truth of life ... you can hear Englander’s heart thumping feverishly on every page.” Does this leave you eager to read the book or is it overkill?
Then there are the books with fewer but even more effusive blurbs. The Guardian Weekly books blog points to Nicole Krauss’ praise for David Grossman’s “To the End of the Land” as “strikingly effusive.”
I can agree, to wit: “Very rarely, a few times in a lifetime, you open a book and when you close it again nothing can ever be the same. Walls have been pulled down, barriers broken, a dimension of feeling, of existence itself, has opened in you that was not there before ... may be the most gifted writer I’ve ever read; gifted not just because of his imagination, his energy, his originality, but because he has access to the unutterable, because he can look inside a person and discover the unique essence of her humanity.”
To read the book, she says, “is to have yourself taken apart, undone, touched at the place of your own essence.” Said the blog Conversational Reading, “I think I can live without having Grossman’s book touch me at the place of my own essence.”
There’s more but you probably couldn’t take it. I know I can’t. There are a lot of book and publishing people out there making fun of all this and I’ll bet Krauss is greatly embarrassed by her hyperbole. I sure would be.
I happen to think a book blurb should tell you what the book’s about, plain and simple. How about you?
Badly rated books still do well
Writers don’t like bad reviews but everybody gets them now and then. The very worst: the one star judgment. I know a writer who got the dreaded “one” from Romantic Times and turned it around. She made herself a badge which she wore to a writer’s conference. It read: “I’m Number One with RT!”
Good attitude. An even better attitude is to become a bestseller despite one-star reviews. Galley Cat lists a number of books that did just that:
~ “Twilight” by Stephenie Meyer (669 one-star reviews)
~ “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” by Stieg Larsson (396 one-star reviews)
~ “A Dance with Dragons” by George R.R. Martin (344 one-star reviews)
~ “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett (169 one-star reviews)
~ “Water for Elephants” by Sara Gruen (157 one-star reviews).
There are several messages here, including one for authors: bad reviews won’t necessarily kill your book; and readers buy what appeals to them, reviews be damned.
Month of Letters Challenge
Author Mary Robinette Kowal has launched the Month of Letters Challenge which urges writers around the world to post a letter each day of February.
I can’t imagine why. Writers write all the time. If anyone received an honest to gosh letter from me, they’d faint.
One reason offered for letter writing: You might enjoy a trip to the mailbox.
No, I wouldn’t and I don’t. My mailbox is across the street and I go there all the time for bills and magazines and catalogues. This is not the highlight of my day.
Anyway, you’ve been warned. If you get a letter from a writer, don’t faint. It will only continue for a month and then everyone will go back to e-mail.
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