The Blurbs Conundrum
There are many curious and surreal aspects and rituals involved in writing and publishing books. One of them is that before you put out a book you are often expected to go around asking people of note who you may or may not have a relationship with to take time out of their busy schedules to read your book and then say nice things about it publicly.
It’s a big double ask. You’re asking for them to take hours, if not days, to actually read your book and then to praise it in a way that can directly benefit you professionally and financially.
When I started in this business sometime around 2008 I was incredibly naive about blurbs. For example, I adorably thought that it would be bad form to solicit a blurb from someone you knew, that it would be a conflict of interest that the public would see through.
As a child I used to read Spy. A column called “Logrolling in our time” made a particularly indelible imprint on me. It was devoted to the ostensibly frowned upon but widely condoned, even encouraged process of authors trading effusive blurbs, scratching each others back in literary form with the public none the wiser.
When I became an author I discovered just how nakedly and unapologetically incestuous the publishing world is when it comes to blurbs. In the real world, soliciting blurbs from people that you consider friends, colleagues or coworkers isn’t dirty-dealing or inside dealing or a conflict of interest: it’s just plain business sense.
OF COURSE the people who like and support you and know you are going to take the time to read your fucking book and say nice things about it, although, to be brutally honest there is a VERY good chance that the person gushing effusively about what an incredible contribution to literary history you’ve made did not read your book in its entirety.
There’s a good chance the person blurbing your book did not read two thirds of it. There’s an even better chance that they maybe skimmed through it before deciding to make with the hyperbolic praise.
That bothered me when I was starting out. I felt like a blurb wasn’t genuine and legitimate if the person providing hadn’t done the work of actually reading the book in its entirety. It bothered me briefly that at least one of the famous folks that blurbed one of my books clearly had not read it at all, and wrote a blurb reflecting that inconvenient truth.
The world of blurbs can feel dirty and rigged but it can also be validating on a soul-deep level. When I published my debut memoir The Big Rewind in 2009 I solicited blurbs from somewhere in the ballpark of 20 to 30 people but my mind was stuck on getting the approval of Roger Ebert.
I was obsessed with getting the approval and validation of a towering, larger-than-life inspirational figure like Ebert. So you can imagine how overjoyed I was to come home to a blurb from Ebert comparing my weird little memoir to Dostoyevsky. It felt like the universe was smiling upon me.
That’s the thing about blurbs: asking people you admire and look up to for praise can make you feel incredibly vulnerable and powerless, like you’re an exhausted and defeated Jeb Bush meekly imploring an apathetic world to “please clap” for you so that you feel slightly less ridiculous and alone in your failure and your suffering.
But when you actually do get that approval and validation from your heroes it’s the best fucking feeling in the world. You feel like you can strut down the street like John Travolta at the end of Staying Alive you’re so damned proud.
Soliciting blurbs is crazy-making and stressful. It’s a wildly bipolar process that finds you alternating between giddy highs (They like me! They really, really like me! My book’s gonna be a blockbuster!) and agonizing lows (They hate me! Or even worse, they don’t care, and my book will die in the wind), with little to nothing in between.
I didn’t solicit blurbs for 2013’s You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me, the last book I published physically but Harris Wittels gave me a lovely one anyway that, perhaps unsurprisingly, was an endorsement of the Phish experience as much as my book.
I just started asking for blurbs for the Weird Accordion to Al book and even though my place in the pop culture hierarchy has plummeted since the days I was publishing books with Scribner and Abrams Image and had not only a job, a salary and insurance but a high-profile, prestigious staff writing position, the blurb process for The Weird Accordion to Al has been going really well.
That’s partially attributable to the book being really, really good. Honestly, I am VERY pleasantly surprised at how it turned out. It’s fucking great! And it’s going to be even greater after I do a fifth and final pass on it. But that’s also attributable to the enormous goodwill “Weird Al” Yankovic has accrued through the decades that I was able to tap into with the book.
That said I can always use more blurbs so if you’re a super-famous person like, I dunno, Lady Gaga or Lin-Manuel Miranda, and want to blurb my book hit me up at nathanrabinauthor@gmail.com and we will make the magic happen.
Asking for blurbs can be tough on the old ego but getting them from people who REALLY engage with your book and your ideas, on the other hand, is one of the many things that makes putting out books amazing and ego-inflating as well as ego-shredding and terrifying.
Help ensure a present as well as a future for the Happy Place by pledging over at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace
AND y’all can still get in on the Weird Accordion to Al pre-sale over at https://make-the-weird-accordion-to-al-book-a-ridiculous-r.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders