Simon & Schuster: "Book blurbs? Who needs them?" [the inside skinny]

Elisabeth Egan, What Are Book Blurbs, and How Much Do They Matter in Publishing? NYTimes, Feb. 4, 2025.

The famously fractious publishing community seems to agree on this point: Blurb collection is a time-consuming, dispiriting and occasionally mortifying process, one that takes time away from the actual writing and editing of books.

But until last week, the quid pro quo cycle felt inescapable, an essential part of rolling out a book and giving it a fighting chance in a crowded marketplace.

Then, on Thursday, Sean Manning, the publisher of Simon & Schuster, announced in an essay in Publishers Weekly that authors under contract with the house’s flagship imprint would no longer be expected to solicit feedback from fellow writers.

“Trying to get blurbs is not a good use of anyone’s time,” Manning wrote. He commended “the collegiality of authors,” but pointed out that “favor trading creates an incestuous and unmeritocratic literary ecosystem that often rewards connections over talent.”

Later:

“I don’t know if blurbs have ever worked,” Manning said. “There’s no metric to tell.”

Victoria Ford, the owner of Comma, a bookstore in Minneapolis, said, “My initial reaction was that blurbs don’t matter at all.” She’d rather read a thorough summary on the back of a book, or a lively description on the flyleaf, than rely on a few beats from an established author who might have a personal relationship with the author in question.

There's more at the link. But.....

I can tell you something about blurbs, something that's not in the article. The people who sign the blurbs didn't necessarily write them. I wrote some of the blurbs for my book, Beethoven's Anvil, but I'm not going to tell you which ones I wrote. I asked some friends for blurbs, and they agreed, on one condition: that I write the blurb. They then signed it. 

OTOH, one of the people who blurbed the book is someone I didn't know. I thought this person might be interested, so I asked my editor to contact them. He did, and the person agreed, on one condition: that not a single word in the blurb was changed. Once the book was published, my editor put me in touch with this person and we had extensive correspondence for a couple of years. 

One never knows, do one?