“I loved this book!”
“I couldn’t put it down!”
“My favorite love story of the year!”
“A must read!!!!”
“An instant classic.”
Pick up any book today and there it is: the ubiquitous author blurb. A few scant lines of professionally administered rapture, these function as a stamp of approval. They reassure you that you’ll enjoy this book because a famous writer has said you will. The blurbs themselves are almost always interchangeable—it is the name underneath that matters. I am not a fan.
The problem isn’t that novelists are insincere. It’s that author blurbs are almost never reward candor. Publishing is a small world, dense with overlap. It is often, as most industries, are, a “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” world. Blurbers and blurbees may know each other or, more likely I think, they share a publisher or a publicist. Or, in the best case scenario, blurbers are doing something kind for a fellow professional. It’s unlikely they are objective.
Whatever the reason for these blurbs, they aren’t actually helpful. For starters, they tend to be astonishingly vague and relentlessly laudatory. See enough and they become a blure of enthusiastic generalities—“a tour de force,” “unforgettable,” “I devoured this”—phrases that sound like praise but say nothing about what the book is actually like.
A quote from an actual review, on the other hand, is does something else entirely. A review is written in public, for readers, by someone whose job is to evaluate books. The shortish excerpts one used to see contained information rather than just praise. They are, in as much as any critical assessment is, objective. Today’s author blurbs are really just professional cheerleading. My advice: ignore them and find an actual book review before you buy. Reviewers may be flawed but they, if they’re ethical, cannot be bought. I’d trust their advice on reading over a breathless blurb any day.
