This most despised author’s task may soon vanish. I won’t miss it

In a move heralded as a brave break with the past, the publisher of Simon & Schuster, Sean Manning, has just declared that, from now, their flagship imprint “will no longer require authors to obtain blurbs for their books”.

Immediately, a shiver of delight ran through writers’ group chats as they considered a world without one of the most awful, awkward jobs of being an author: asking for a blurb (meaning one or two sentences of praise, really) for your soon-to-be published work.

Illustration by Dionne GainCredit:

The New York Times headline was succinct: “The End of the Blurb. Thank God”.

Blurbs have been around for centuries and have long been panned as hyperbole. Even in 1936, George Orwell raged at the “disgusting tripe that is written by the blurb-reviewers”. He cited one from The Sunday Times: “If you can read this book and not shriek with delight, your soul is dead”.

Does anyone buy books for blurbs any more? Do you believe authors when they say nice things about another scribbler, who is most likely a mate? Will we ever get to the point where they don’t matter, when we can let everyone off the hook? Or is the market too crowded, too mean, too hard to enter?

Most parts of the industry seem to hate blurbs. It’s true they are often written for or asked from friends – and I am guilty of this too – as part of what has been labelled a “favour economy”. They have been slammed as a “plague”, a “sorority hazing that never ends”, “a rigged system”, “corrupt on its face”, simply “marketing copy … nothing to do with literary value”.

This is why Manning has decided he is done. In an essay for Publishers Weekly, he listed some titles in their history that had great success without blurbs, including Psycho, Catch-22, All the President’s Men, and Steve Jobs.

Manning finds the assumption blurbs are needed for promotion “weird”, writing: “In no other artistic industry is this common. How often does a blurb from a filmmaker appear on another filmmaker’s movie poster? A blurb from a musician on another musician’s album cover? A blurb from a game designer on another designer’s game box? The argument has always been that this is what makes the book business so special: the collegiality of authors … I disagree. I believe the insistence on blurbs has become incredibly damaging to what should be our industry’s ultimate goal: producing books of the highest possible quality.

“It takes a lot of time to produce great books,” he wrote, “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 favour trading creates an incestuous and unmeritocratic literary ecosystem that often rewards connections over talent.”

Having to ask for blurbs is one of the more humiliating parts of being an author, especially when you’re tugging on the sleeves of a more successful writer. You can imagine my horror when, having summoned the courage to ask someone – a male academic – to blurb my book Phosphorescence a few years ago, he, after reading it, decided he didn’t want to. He told me, with regret, that his readers would find it baffling if he did: “To me, at least,” he wrote, “the book seems quite deep inside female experience, both of weightier kinds and more everyday kinds. One consequence of this is that I think there would be an acute incongruity in my being on the cover of a book with extensive treatments of female friendships and bodily anxieties, issues of physical presentation, and the like.”

He then added in parentheses: “If you can excuse the hubris and hyperbole, imagine the cover of Pride and Prejudice with ‘Yep. This is how it is’ – Ernest Hemingway.”

My first thought was that I’d love to know what Ernest Hemingway thought of Pride and Prejudice, and if he ever read or respected work by female authors, given his fraught relationships with women. My second was: Gah! My book was about awe! Wonder! Not lady parts! My third was: OK, I respect the honesty, and it was decent of him to spend time on it.

But I was stung. Scratch any author and they’ll have a tale to tell you about the uncomfortable process of asking for blurbs, and the equally uncomfortable process of saying no to giving them. I hate saying no, as I want to support fellow authors, especially new voices. I get simultaneously overwhelmed and guilty, as several requests arrive each week, and at times I have been so distracted earnestly reading books for blurbs – each one takes about two days – that I have stopped my own writing for months at a time. Eventually, my publisher forbade me from doing more until my next manuscript was in.

It’s unclear if others will follow Manning’s lead. Writer James Folta argues he is being naive, “assuming an ecosystem with more robust marketing budgets, more reviewers who are covering books, fewer algorithms burping up the same titles, and more readers who are putting in more time to discover new books”.

There are only tiny windows, tiny budgets for promotion. But can we at least rethink this system?

It’s daft that obtaining blurbs is hardest for the unknown, for those who need the most help.

And while we debate how much unpaid labour authors need to do to sell their own and each other’s books, we are still failing to properly interrogate how hard it is to write and sell books today. As Ray Bonner – the Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter who is co-owner of the Bookoccino store in Avalon – pointed out in this masthead, almost two-thirds of Australian bookstores shut their doors between 2013 and 2023. Bonner advocates fixed price laws: disallowing discounting of a book for a short period after first publication, as is the case in many EU and other countries. There, books are cheaper, publishers are thriving, authors are earning better royalties, and books spread from the cities to the suburbs.

Imagine! It’s enough to make one shriek with delight.

Julia Baird is a journalist, author and regular columnist. Her latest book is Bright Shining: How Grace Changes Everything.

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