Blurbs No More
Who Are They Really For, and Why Simon & Schuster's Flagship Imprint Has Done Away with Them
Less than six months into Sean Manning’s tenure as Simon & Schuster’s publisher of its flagship imprint1, he decided to do away with the requirement for authors to obtain blurbs for their books. In his essay explaining why, he said that he always found the practice of authors, editors, and agents soliciting blurbs from other authors weird.
“It takes a lot of time to produce great books, and trying to get blurbs is not a good use of anyone’s time. Instead, authors who are soliciting them could be writing their next book; agents could be trying to find new books; editors could be improving books through revisions; and the solicited authors could be reading books they actually want to read that will benefit their work—rather than reading books they feel they have to read as a courtesy to their editor, their agent, a writer friend or a former student. What’s worse, this kind of favor trading creates an incestuous and unmeritocratic literary ecosystem that often rewards connections over talent.”
Blurbs are the short sentences you see littering book covers that obscure the art that a (hopefully human) cover artist worked very hard to make. Though the word was created and defined by humorist Gelett Burgess, Ralph Waldo Emerson is credited with giving the first ever blurb (as we know it today) to then relatively unknown Walt Whitman.2 Emerson sent Whitman a personal note after reading Leaves of Grass, and Whitman would go on to give it to The New York Tribune months later. In the second edition of Leaves of Grass, a line from Emerson’s letter was printed in gold-leaf lettering on the book’s spine: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career."
While blurbs may have been influential in the past, there has been little data or research collected to prove that they’re still effective. NPR reported back in 2015 that Codex Group, an independent audience research firm, tested several variations of a book’s cover with several thousand participants from major publishers and retailers. They found that about 1% of participants said that the most recent book they purchased was because of a recommendation from their favorite author. When I tried to find Codex Group online, I found a single-page website that has looked the same since 2008, with its last updated copyright on its page being in 2015. Poor, unreliable data at best.
[i]t's less for what the blurb says than who's doing the saying…If I haven't heard of the author writing the book, but it comes with the imprimatur of a reputable writer or someone I respect, that will make a big difference.
With so little information at hand, all we have are anecdotes. And from what I’ve found3, Manning’s estimation of blurb writing’s impact on authors seems accurate. Even though authors may be happy to receive a blurb, many are overwhelmed by the amount of requests that they receive to write one. And if they are the ones sending the requests, their description of the process brings to mind the endless drudgery of applying for jobs. There are those that the author sincerely wants a blurb from, but at the end of the day they will eventually play the numbers game to get one. Blurbs have become more of a polite courtesy amongst other industry professionals.
The actual audience for this form of advertising is booksellers.
According to a 2023 article written by Esquire, “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.” In order to cut through all the noise, booksellers rely on blurbs to be the deciding factor depending on who is writing the blurb, not what the blurb actually says.
In the NPR article mentioned above, former bookseller for Kramer Books and current co-owner of Solid State Books, Jake Cumsky-Whitlock, said that “[i]t's less for what the blurb says than who's doing the saying…If I haven't heard of the author writing the book, but it comes with the imprimatur of a reputable writer or someone I respect, that will make a big difference."
In the Esquire article, Christine Bollow, co-owner of Loyalty Books had this to say about blurbs:
“As a Black, Asian, and Queer-owned bookstore, championing books by marginalized authors is central to everything we do…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.”
While there’s no significant proof that readers still consider blurbs in their purchasing habits, the booksellers still do. Unfortunately, brick and mortar stores are not as central to the publishing industry as before (please support your local bookstores, though). Book marketing has grown increasingly reliant on social media and websites like Bindery, where individual tastemakers can be the difference in a book’s success.
Sean Manning ended his essay saying that the recent success of several blurb-less books under Simon & Schuster’s flagship imprint proves that “readers don’t need the shorthand of blurbs to find great books; they can be trusted to judge quality for themselves.” This focus on readers is besides the point, however. Removing blurbs is an act that centers efficiency when the major publisher’s brand can do the speaking for itself. Publishers have been trying to survive the headwinds of the attention economy and the increasing democratization of the publishing industry, cannibalizing each other while cutting away as many resources and employees as possible. Blurbs just may be the next target for downsizing.
It has always been a marvel to see how the publishing industry continues to evolve with technology (for better or worse). I welcome this change as a reader and someone who has a stake in decentralizing the power major publishers withhold. I don’t mind a single tasteful blurb on the front of a cover, but I’m happy to get them out of the way of the cover art. Time will tell if this becomes a trend amongst established publishers, but I’m hoping there is something that can be done about those gaudy-ass award medals next.
And the covers based on movie adaptations can go kick rocks as well.4
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A flagship imprint is essentially the parent brand name of the publisher. Think Coca Cola (the company name and brand) vs. Fanta, another soda produced by them under a different brand.
There’s also an article in The Atlantic that I’m sure has more examples, but I don’t have a subscription to them yet.
My distaste for movie poster book covers cannot be understated. For the sake of brevity, I will not go into it further here.