The extreme measures writers take for a killer book blurb

Strolling through Dymocks with a friend recently, I spied a book with a rapturous blurb from The Australian on its cover. “A stunning piece of work,” it said.

“I wrote that,” I told my friend, wiping away a little tear of pride. I didn’t mean that I wrote the book. I meant that I wrote the blurb. More precisely, I meant that I had, many years ago, written the book review from which the blurb had been culled.

There’s more to book blurbs than meets the eye. Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto

On the back of the same book were longer blurbs from other people. Unlike me, the authors of these blurbs were identified by name because unlike me these people were famous. Not famous for knowing anything about books, mind you, but famous for other things.

How far should we trust these celebrity book blurbs? Quite often they emanate from close personal friends of the author, who want to remain close personal friends of the author. Sometimes they come from people who are authors themselves, which doesn’t mean much unless their own books are any good. Frequently they’re not.

Blurbs weren’t always so easy to come by. Shakespeare himself struggled to get a decent blurb during his lifetime. Indeed, his collected plays weren’t even published until seven years after his death, when the First Folio appeared.

Looking for a suitably impressive endorsement, the Folio’s editors approached Ben Jonson, the most respected poet-playwright of the time. Privately, Jonson had a few reservations about Shakespeare.

Quite often they emanate from close personal friends of the author, who want to remain close personal friends of the author.

Even so, he coughed up a pretty good blurb, in the form of a dedicatory poem. In it he hailed Shakespeare as the “star of poets” and “wonder of our stage”. But he couldn’t resist throwing in a little dig at the Bard’s relative lack of education. “Thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,” Jonson observed.

Now there was a blurb you could trust – not just because Jonson leavened it with some words of dispraise, but because Shakespeare was dead when he wrote it. Plainly, Jonson wasn’t just blurbing Shakespeare in the hope that Shakespeare would one day blurb him.

Vladimir Nabokov would have killed for a blurb from literary critic friend.Credit: Keystone

Writers can do crazy things in quest of a blurb. When Norman Mailer finished his third novel, The Deer Park, he sent a copy to his hero Ernest Hemingway, hoping the great man would favour him with a blurb for use in the print ads.

Being far too macho to ask nicely, Mailer made his pitch to Hemingway in almost insanely aggressive terms. “If you do not answer,” he wrote, “or if you answer with the kind of crap you use to answer unprofessional writers, sycophants, brown-nosers, etc, then f--- you, and I will never attempt to communicate with you again.”

Papa did not provide the blurb.

Blurbs can be a delicate matter in the book world. They can make or break a literary friendship. When Vladimir Nabokov was struggling to make his name in America in the 1940s, he would have killed for a blurb from his friend Edmund Wilson, who happened to be the nation’s most influential literary critic.

But Wilson seemed curiously reluctant to endorse Nabokov’s work in print. When their friendship imploded years later, the two giants denounced each other in a series of delightfully snide public letters. In one of these, Nabokov very elegantly made it clear that he was still simmering about Wilson’s failure to blurb him.

“During my first decade in America,” Nabokov wrote, Wilson “was most kind to me in various matters, not necessarily pertaining to his profession. I have always been grateful to him for the tact he showed in refraining from reviewing any of my novels.”

American author Gore Vidal, pictured in 2001, and Christoper Hitchens got into a nasty public spat about a blurb.Credit: Reuters

Closer to our own day, Christoper Hitchens and Gore Vidal got into a nasty public spat about a blurb. When Hitchens published his book Unacknowledged Legislation in 2000, a generous endorsement from Vidal appeared on the cover.

“I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, an heir, a dauphin or delfino,” Vidal wrote. “I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens.”

A couple of years later, the two men bitterly fell out, and Vidal took the extraordinary step of trying to retract his blurb. Speaking to a reporter, he claimed to find it baffling that Hitchens had been going around identifying himself as Vidal’s heir.

Hitchens wasn’t about to let that pass. In a fiery magazine article, he insisted that Vidal had offered him the blurb voluntarily – and said that he still had the correspondence to prove it. Anyway, he added, he had “stopped making use of” Vidal’s endorsement fairly quickly, after privately concluding that the man was losing his marbles.

When my second novel came out in 2017, it featured a glowing front-cover endorsement from Clive James. Armed with a killer blurb from Clive, I thought I had it made in the shade. Then certain grim realities of the book business began to impress themselves on me. If people were going to see the blurb, they first had to enter a bookshop and browse the shelves. What percentage of book-buyers still do that?

Then I found, to my horror, that in certain bookstores my book was being shelved spine-out instead of face-out. Other books, with blurbs from people like Russell Brand, were on full-frontal display. To access my blurb, people didn’t just have to approach the right shelf. They had to be so intrigued by my book’s spine that they would feel compelled to expose its cover manually.

Speaking of Clive James, he delivered the best crack about book blurbs that I’ve ever heard. When a prominent Australian author blurbed a second-rate book as “unputdownable,” Clive was sceptical. Perhaps the reason the prominent author couldn’t put the book down, Clive said, was that it was so full of hot air it kept springing back up again.

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