YES, FREE US FROM THE BLURB INDUSTRY COMPLEX

we're out of status quo's, let's make it WILD, let's make it FUN.

Do y’all know how many things you could put on a book if you took the blurb space and word count and simply … did other stuff? Used it for unique marketing space. This is in reference to the piece about Sean Manning in Publishers Weekly who was promoted to publisher at Simon & Schuster in September, and is no longer requiring blurbs for the flagship imprint. So, read this first.

Publishing loves (LOVES—big sign Amsterdam style) tradition. But the ask for twenty “publicity” blurbs has gotten more than out of hand. I don’t even know what to do with that many blurbs and I am a publicist (other than pitch ANYONE who loved those writers and exhaust myself and my inbox), and the marketing folks in charge of making the little (NO LONGER SQUARE, I’m looking at you, MARK—selling out over and over and now no square???) graphics for your instagram accounts of each singular blurb, do not have the time to create all those mostly meaningless graphics. They do feel good to post, I’m sure. So, feeling good isn’t meaningless.

And then, THEN, writers (and editors) don’t even use them to the advantage of stretching audience. If you’re writing a hybrid memoir that involves medicine + personal history + a history of a movement, there (I’m arguing) would ideally be blurbs from medical professionals, memoirists, activists within the movement, historians, etc—the blurbs would not be four memoir authors from the last year. Let’s mix it up, people—broaden our audiences and our horizons. We are not using the space wisely, and there are other things that could be done here.

Imagine if we lived in a world with options on back cover copy (or the space above the title on the front cover where a blurb normally goes) instead of blurbs … imagine if it was another way to have a weird little, singular, exciting marketing moment. This may or may not also be an assignment (several assignments) you could do for your book that would give you more insight into how to market the book.

• you use the Karla Strand National Poetry Month effect and you put three big bold words about the book like a billboard, in that blurb space.

• you put a list of alternative titles

• you had an “inspired by” section with a little personal canon

• you wrote how many years the book took to write, edit, and get published

• you had a little yearbook message

• you awarded the book superlatives (or your editorial team did)

• you put your favorite sentence in BOLD

• there were fun facts about this book

• there were weird facts about this book

• a warning label

• a list of ingredients

• a saturated fat percentage

• you got blurbs from your neighbor, from the post man, from your tarot reader

• you made up blurbs, “If Cher read this she would never have written …,” “if the three witches from Hocus Pocus found this book …”

• you had a weird little book-related “where’s Waldo?” Extra points for folks who find the metaphor about Bunnicula

• you got to give your book a slogan—can you imagine how many people would have to be sued by Nike because they put “Just Read It.”

• you put a little comic, a little drawing, a little family photo, a little setting photo, a little symbol, a little glyph, an image of the book characters as Sims, setting as Mine Craft world, a series of emoji (ouuuu even better, the book written in the form of emojis—try it with your fav books, it’s so fun).

• a little note to readers, librarians, your favorite barista

• begging, no one is above begging

• an announcement that a percentage of the royalty proceeds are going somewhere (and that announcement could be, these proceeds are going in my pocket because I’m a person who needs to eat!)

• you included a short list of the titles of your word documents as you were working on the book (I would … this would make me so happy)

• you included a friend’s email note when they read the first six pages and spent a year pretending they read the whole thing.

• you included legal concerns or questions from the legal read (okay, this one might actually be … dangerous, so maybe not).

• you included the first line of your MFA personal statement (if you graduated with an MFA), the last line, some line!

• a little list of writing superstitions that made you write the book

• you included a note from your MFA director’s comments on your first draft of your thesis, or what they said at the end of your defense.

• you put a short erasure poem from the novel’s first page, last page, page 78.

• you included a mysterious message that’s like, “turn to pg 82, 8 lines down, and you’ll find ….”

• you included three people living or dead that would cause you to giggle uncontrollably if you knew they read your work.

• a little “no thanks to …” section / a little revenge

• a little list of five songs you listened to on repeat while you worked / your comfort show

• baby, you could have a scratch and sniff at the back of your book—CAN YOU IMAGINE

What I’m saying is, I wish there were more choices towards innovation in publishing rather than an either/or approach.

You can choose to obtain blurbs or not, okay but if I don’t—what would go in that space? What are my options? I’ve worked on books without blurbs and let me tell you, it makes no difference except to the people who have read and loved those blurbers and/or if the blurber is Carmen Maria Machado, and/or whether the blurber blurbs a lot of books. I have seen a few folks on every. single. book. I pick up to the point, I stopped trusting books blurbed by that writer. We forget that blurbs can also be a TURN OFF. What if the blurb says nothing? What if the blurber doesn’t “get” the book? What if the writer doesn’t like what the blurber said about the book? What if a reader gets the ick from a blurb?

Publishing is like, “You can choose from these three covers that are all either slightly different or wildly different, even though you have no background in design and the publisher has provided no marketing research on how colors impact readers’ buying choices, there are no provided successful covers that they’re using as proof of marketability, no covers that influenced the designer or line of thinking that influenced the designer, no references, or any other info about the designer’s choices.” You may not even know the designer’s name until you see it in the book, if you see it in the book. Love this little breakdown of making her cover from Martha Park today.

“You can have one epigraph, two if you’ve sold more than three books.” Me, personally—I would need a few pages. I have an inability to narrow when it comes to epigraphing.

I realize that there are templates for how we print books, for what distribution needs in order to load books onto retail sites, but let’s be real—we’re out of status quo’s. Barnes & Noble is going to stick a sticker on your book over your favorite part of the cover, and so is Target. And those stickers are going to be impossible to get off even if you watch Youtube videos on how to unstick them with a certain kind of soap. What I’m saying is let’s deconstruct the blurb industry complex even more, until it’s something else altogether—something strange and unique to each project, each writer. Same space, using words, it’s not going to cause a printer to lose their mind.

I remember to this day when Miranda July’s first story collection came out and they published it in four different highlighter colors. Expensive? Yes. Did I need to own all four colors at twenty-two years old? Also, yes. Yes, I did. I still have a yellow and a pink one. Let’s get back to MARKETING books instead of using some beautiful, intimidating, and (often times) reminiscent of a popularity contest blurb cocktail that really only serves a certain subset of writers.

And while we’re at it—let’s mix-up anticipated lists too. Funniest acknowledgements! Best opening line! Reads like this song! weirdest plot twist! made me cry more than three times! most stains because I couldn’t even put it down to eat my Cheetos!

In an ideal world, your book is going to be destroyed with love. It’s going to be annotated, thrown into several bags, read on a boat, corners will be dog-eared, pencil ends will be bitten due to the tension of reading it (or the lust, meow!), post it notes will be stuck throughout, it will be hugged to someone’s chest, placed on the prominent shelf in someone’s bonus room, under four other books in the next to the bed TBR pile (without vacuuming around it regularly), thrown in the back of a car on a road trip, brought camping, colored-in by a toddler (ask me how I know), held up for an Instagram photo shoot or set next to a stylized cappuccino. The goal, at the end of a good book for me, is that I loved it like my baby cousin loved his Elmo as a child—to within a shred of Elmo, to the very red string of him.

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