back
70 comments
The worst one I've ever seen was: "must be read", prominent on the front cover.

Which probably influenced my decision to buy the book. But later I noticed the sentence that quote was from was something like "This book must be read not as an analysis of X, but as a contribution to Y". I couldn't believe it! It was a serious non-fiction book, I think, and not an obscure one, although sadly I lost track of the book it was years ago. Not easy to google. I'll never forget the unfathomable effrontery/deception of whoever had the idea then OKed it for the cover.

There’s a thin line between “puffery” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery) and deceit. Your example strikes me as crossing the line.
"Puffery" is just legal lying.
I’m always astonished by those blurbs on books in English.

I’m currently reading "The science of story telling" by Will Storr. There are 5 blurbs on the cover, one on the back cover. The book open with 3 full pages containing 18 blurbs.

That’s completely ridiculous. It really deserves the book. It makes it look silly and unconfident.

For French book, it is quite rare. When it happens, it’s a red paper above the cover that you can remove after buying the book.

Is that an American thing?

That's a lot. But blurbs are pretty common in US books, probably especially non-fiction.

A quick glance through some books on my coffee table shows multiple blurbs on the back cover are common, maybe something short and pithy on the front cover, and maybe a page of blurbs when you open up the book.

> It really __deserves__ the book.

Maybe you meant to say disservices?

sorry, I was confused by a French similar word. The intended meaning was "to harm"
I think it's cool and understandable as a sign of reciprocity.. if the book deserves the blurbs then really the blurbs deserve the book they're stuck with. Of course there is not always reciprocity, but apparently aye in this case.
Honestly, I don't know. I've developed "blurb blindness", like "ad blindness", and they just don't register in my mind. I like that because, like ads (not surprising since blurbs are ads), blurbs are without value to me.
No, that’s a French thing.
Being American, I've been put off by the French (or maybe just Gallimard's?) way of doing things, which is to put the author's name in very bold print on the front, and on the back a short passage from the book which may or may not be representative of the book as a whole. Am I supposed to infer from the style of those few sentences whether the book is going to be good? Because as a non-native reader of French I don't feel competent to do that. (And I doubt that many readers can.) And all those cream or off-white covers! Don't get me started.

Having said that, the last American book I bought after studying the blurb and the award medallion was bad enough that I didn't finish reading it.

Since so many French (and not just French) books are sold shrink-wrapped, the only way to get any idea of the book's style is either the except from the text on the back or from the author (as in you already like X's writing). You must literally judge a book by its cover.

Quite a few bookshops discourage you from opening the wrapper, especially, I find, in Germany for some reason.

Funny. I find the short passage more telling than "Awesome, a masterpiece (John Doe)". But the short passage is rare and more "litterary". Usually, it’s a summary of the book (often written by the author himself/herself). Summary is, IMHO, the best way to judge a book. The worst being a summary that spoils the book (yeah, it happens…).
> Am I supposed to infer from the style of those few sentences whether the book is going to be good?

Well.. yes. It's obviously not the best way but it's clearly better than inferring from universally positive blurbs that you get otherwise (hence this article). Have you ever seen a blurb "this book is okish"?

How is that any different from US books?
It's true there's often a tenuous relationship between blurbs and books, but setting up reviews as the more reliable alternative to blurbs is untenable. Most reviews I read, especially in literary publications, have little to do with the book nominally under review. Mostly the book is there to provide the occasion for an essay, and the only part of the book that actually makes an appearance is the title.
This feels like you've never used goodreads, which demonstrates that short form reviews aren't merely tenable, but actually useful and about the contents of book?
That's true, but that's why I read reviews of books I have no intention of ever reading. Conversely, GoodReads or Amazon are for books I might read someday.
Book as occasion for essay is a great genre of essays though.
I don’t think I’ve ever paid attention to a blurb in my life. They are in the same category as those banners at the top of pages and the modals with convenient “X to close” in the top right.
Blurbs affect you even if you think they don’t. They’re funny like that.

I’m reading a great cyberpunk novel about biotech and AI right now (biopunk?). Fun book, very enjoyable. On the cover it has a Neal Stephenson blurb: ”Autonomous is to bio and AI what Necromancer was to the internet”

And without even thinking, that’s exactly how I describe the book to anyone who asks. It’s like the Neuromancer of the tech wave that we’re on the cusp of.

I probably would never be able to come up with that on my own. But I thought I did! I literally thought that was my own description until a few days ago I realized it’s the description I see every time I open the book to read another chapter.

And yes it’s a great book. Totally recommend reading.

> I don’t think I’ve ever paid attention to a blurb in my life.

Dan Simmons writes like a hot-rodding angel and I will be disappointed if his tombstone does not say that verbatim.

Maybe if the blurbs are not worth any attention then the book itself and how it's been edited is barely even deserving of that same attention? I'm sure the free classics from gutenberg.org which one can download on a kindle showcase no blurgs.
The disease of blurbs is not that anyone consciously takes them seriously, but the fact that not having them has become a black mark. People are used to chatty book covers. This is just one of the many tools a dying industry uses to keep its unfair advantages.
6 books of the Expanse series have the exact same blurb on their front covers from George R. R. Martin: "Interplanetary adventure the way it ought to be written."
I distinctly remember reading a very positive review of Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard by Howard Taylor (professional writer) where he described it along the lines of "yet another stellar book by my very good friend". Well, I had a flight coming up, so I bought it.

Mistake. The "very good friend" part was a qualifier, not an endorsement. The book was trash! But Howard, the old pro, was boosting the sales of his bud. Learned to never, ever trust a book review done by a writer.

And, sure enough, checking the Amazon page again there's no fewer than seven blurbs, as well as a tagline that describes it as "The Sixth Sense meets Planet of the Apes". Barf!

Blurbs in book marketing: exactly the same comic content as in movie marketing.

*The greatest story ever told! -- Jonas Logroller, Punxsutawney Herald

if you think reviews are better, be aware that the NYRB is often referred to as "The New York Review of Each Others' Books."

aka 'logrolling'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logrolling

Those in the UK will be very familiar with the satirical column in Private Eye that does precisely this (albeit for UK Publishers).

i've always assumed the blurbs on books are mostly bullshit, but i still find them useful as a signal of other authors the publisher or author wants to be compared to.

if a book has a blurb from Tom Clancy on it, i just interpret that as the same as the publisher putting a label on it saying "fans of Tom Clancy might like this"

This kinda reminds me of movie ads (previews? Not sure what they’re called). Those two minutes have the best scenes from the 90 minute movie. Then you watch the movie, it ends up being ridiculously bad
Trailers. I “love” the ones that make a slow paced romcom look like an action thriller.
You, the reader, are not the only audience for blurbs. They get used all along the sales and marketing chain, because many of those people are never going to read the book, and only want to see that someone has vouched for it. Those people also know how the game is played, and that the blurb might be the author’s friend, the editor’s friend, and so on. If no one is willing to speak up for a book, it looks bad.
I used to work with a guy whose first book was about to be published and it had blurbs from several very prominent people in business and politics. He told me that he and his team wrote each blurb. That’s not to say the people didn’t agree to have the blurb attributed to them, but that they didn’t even write their blurbs (and I’m pretty sure none of them had read the book).
In a sense, it's like every letter of recommendation I've ever had. The people they were "from" asked that I just write it and they'll sign it if they agree.
I usually ignore blurbs. I depend on book reviews and recommendation from authors whose books I've enjoyed in the past or social media posts from people whom I trust to know what they are talking about.
I don’t disagree with the first paragraph, but I still find it amusing that one of the reasons people should beware of blurbs is that it’s not a nice sounding word. That’s well-written.
Blurbs are just advertising. They are typically from more famous authors or celebrities. Sometimes they are just from other authors who are friends.

You agree to write a blurb before even getting a copy of the book. My wife is in this industry with plenty of experience with blurbs.

Somehow the author wrote this article without referencing •Blurb your Enthusiasm•,

https://www.amazon.com/Blurb-Your-Enthusiasm-Z-Persuasion/dp...

Now chatgpt makes makes meaningless writing especially ugly. I predict the blurb’s swift demise.
The good and bad news is that publishing’s social proof is about to lose 98 percent of its value once NLP gets to the point of having as much predictive value as publishing’s signals. We might be there already. That doesn’t mean a program can decide what is and is not great literature. It doesn’t have to. It just to be better than the curators we have. That could probably be written in a hackathon with a decent labeled dataset.

The good news is that this will make it a lot easier for good writers without connections or preexisting celebrity to be discovered. The bad news is that there will be a few people who reverse engineer the AI graders and get millions of readers despite not being all that good.

The Millions has done it again with a crackling, thrill-a-minute joyride that’s whip-smart and unexpectedly devastating.
Is there any market research available that shows that blurbs are actually effective in driving sales or interest in a book?
I kind of feel that they do influence my buying occasionally. A blurb from, say, William Gibson might lead me to pick a book up. I doesn't matter what was blurbed, but gives the idea that the book is something adjacent to ideas and topics and style of Gibson.

Actually, the quote on the cover of Murakami's Dance Dance Dance lead me to consider, and buy the book:

"If Raymond Chandler had lived long enough to see Blade Runner, he might have written something like Dance Dance Dance" -- The Observer.

Now, I don't think that's strictly accurate, but does lend a little of the philosophical flavour and slightly sparse writing style, and I did wind up buying and then enjoying the book, and others of Murakami's, enormously.

The lack of them is probably more harmful than the content is helpful. But I do think they move readers who are on the fence about what to buy. It takes a long time investment to learn whether a novel is any good, so social proof is, unfortunately, a pretty big influence.
"The post of the year!"

"It's un-down-votable!"

Caveat Emptor

Don't judge a book by it's cover

Take you pick.

The best blurb I ever read was:

"A thumping good detective-ghost-horror-whodunit-time-travel-romantic-musical-comedy-epic" -- the author.

Douglas Adams.