A philosophy of blurbs
And how to ask for them without losing your mind
Did you know May 6 is only ten weeks away? Did you know ten weeks sounds long, but feels short? If you pre-order my book APOCALYPSE: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures now, it’ll be in your hands before you know it!
It was, shall we say, an interesting experience watching the publishing internet erupt in blurb discourse just as the last of APOCALYPSE’s blurbs were rolling in. For those who don’t obsessively follow media news, the inciting incident was Sean Manning, the publisher of Simon & Schuster’s flagship imprint, saying he will no longer require authors to seek blurbs for their books. According to him, and many others, asking for blurbs is crushingly anxiety producing for the author, writing them is horrifically time consuming for the blurber, and they do little, if anything, to influence book sales. Why are we all doing this again?
It’s not that I don’t agree, in theory. But despite Manning’s best intentions and efforts, the frenzy of discourse itself showed that publishing has projected so much onto blurbs, emotionally and professionally, that I don’t think they’re going anywhere anytime soon. Big name authors will be drowning in blurb requests for the foreseeable future. Smaller name, and especially debut, authors are going to have to keep figuring out how to ask for blurbs in ways that don’t make us want to crawl into a hole and die.
I don’t have any insight into the experience of sought-after blurbers, who shoulder a far heavier burden than the debut authors, editors, and agents asking for blurbs. One of my blurbers, Ed Yong, recently wrote, “I haven’t read anything since 2023 that wasn’t research for my own book, or a request to support someone else’s.” I’m very grateful to Ed for reading and blurbing my book, and I don’t begrudge any author’s decision to step out of that grind, especially if it’s coming at the expense of their own work. In the best case scenario, APOCALYPSE will turn me into one of those authors who is so overwhelmed by blurb requests that I have to say no to most or all of them, and we’ll see what I have to say about blurbs then.
For now, all I can speak to is the experience of a debut author seeking blurbs. It isn’t as much work as reading an endless stream of soon-to-be-published books, or figuring out how to gracefully decline most requests. But it is a fraught experience laden with the possibility of rejection from people you admire, as well as a lifetime of cultural baggage insisting that asking for a favor is a huge and perhaps unforgivable imposition. On top of that, it comes at a tremendously vulnerable time in the publishing process, when you can’t change your book anymore and have to begin to let it exist on its own in the world. For me, my blurbers were the first people not on my publishing team to read the whole book. I knew it was extremely unlikely anyone would tell me they hated it. (If they hate it, they just won’t write a blurb.) But would they get it? Was the book they were reading the same one I thought I had written? I was unspeakably relieved when the answers turned out to be yes.
I have heard so many other would-be and soon-to-be authors declare they are dreading asking for blurbs, sometimes years before they will have to do it. The thought of going out in search of blurbs gets under our skin in a way even the idea of bad reviews doesn’t, because we have to put ourselves out there and ask—for a favor, for attention, for the dreaded unpaid work. We have to ruthlessly leverage the tiniest hint of a relationship—a long-ago Twitter like, a passing introduction at a conference—into a request for someone’s else time and regard. It’s uncomfortable. It’s awkward. It’s draining.
I loved it. Yes, of course I loved getting so many good blurbs; I’m not a monk (yet). But I loved the process of asking for them even more. I got to sit down and write love letters to other people’s work. I got to tell them, directly, how much their books meant to me and share what I’d be able to do in the shadow of their influence. I got to hold out my own work and ask if they might love it, too. It never felt like obsequiously begging for charity or coldly trading favors. It felt like entering a gift economy, in which favors are not exchanged so much as they are mulched into the soil we all need to grow and thrive.
Newsletter patron saint Mandy Brown wrote something similar recently, about leaning on, and feeding back into, networks of professional relationships when deciding to quit a job:
Think of this outreach not as a transaction but as the activation of care, as the engagement (or re-engagement) of a mutual, reciprocal kinship in which you each have each other’s back. They’re going to need to quit someday too, such that their companionship today is your promised future counsel. You’re not asking for charity, but a recognition of interdependence; you’re not reaching out with empty hands but with a full heart and thoughtful, attentive mind.
Here’s the mantra I want all debut authors anxious about asking for blurbs to recite: “They’re going to need [a blurb] someday too.” Will Ed Yong literally need my blurb on his next book? Probably not. Did he once need a blurb from someone further along the path? Yes. Trust in this deep sense of reciprocity should be your driving force as you ask for blurbs; it will infuse your request with the same care and regard you’re hoping to receive. Blurbs are not a transaction. They’re a circle. We receive in order to give back. If you “reach out with…a full heart and thoughtful, attentive mind”—not the self-deprecation, anxiety, or fear that may be a debut author’s instinct, and does NOT come off well in an email—asking can be a gift, too.
Does this approach mean you will receive all the blurbs of your dreams? Of course not. You can’t control other people’s decisions, and anyway, if they don’t write you a blurb it very rarely has anything to do with you or your book. (It has to do with their own time and energy; see Ed’s post and imagine what getting four blurb requests a week must be like.) Still, embracing the gift economy of blurbs can make the process of asking feel fulfilling instead of draining, no matter what the outcome. How much I loved writing those emails, and how nourishing I found it, had nothing to do with who ultimately responded, and what answers they gave.
Is this a trick of capitalism, forcing me to do the publishing industry’s job and think I like it? Almost certainly. But as long as we have to ask for blurbs, we should see it as a chance to practice the generosity and care we need from others, confident that all our gifts will keep flowing.