Luminous! A masterpiece! Why publishing can't stop debating blurbs.

Vox

10-02-2025

For the past few months, publishing has been consumed with debate over that ever-divisive topic: blurbs, those breathless little testimonials from other writers that appear on the back of a book's cover, which hardly anyone likes to write and even fewer people like to ask for.
One big author and one major publisher announced within weeks of each other that they were through with the practice of blurbs, and the resulting conversation threw publishing into a tizzy. In the process, it provided a new lens on who has access to clout and resources in an increasingly precarious industry.
Authors traditionally set out to procure blurbs after their books have been accepted by publishers and gone through the editorial process, but before the books have been finalized, typeset, and printed. At that point, some combination of author, editor, and publicist reaches out to other writers, ideally famous ones, and ask them to read the manuscript and write a few nice words to go on the back of the published book.
Sometimes the people being asked to blurb the book are close connections — a former teacher, an MFA classmate, a fellow author under the same editor — and sometimes it's a cold pitch to a publishing heavyweight. (Stephen King sometimes blurbs suspense novels, and it's always a big deal when he does.) Either way, the idea is that these blurbs will act as a kind of sympathetic magic, one author lending their own established brand to another as the new book makes its way down the gauntlet of publication.
Authors have long groused about blurbs, but the current conversation began in December, when the bestselling author Rebecca Makkai posted to Substack that she was taking a hiatus from blurbing for at least the next two years. She had realized that reading unpublished manuscripts and blurbing them was taking up more of the time she had allotted for her own reading and writing, and she could no longer justify the time and energy.
'As of this fall, I was getting about five to ten requests a week. And I'm sure there are people out there getting a lot more,' Makkai wrote. 'I do think it's important for writers to understand this when they set out to procure blurbs.'
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A few weeks after Makkai's newsletter, Simon & Schuster publisher Sean Manning published his own anti-blurbing manifesto. '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,' Manning wrote in an essay in Publishers Weekly. 'It takes a lot of time to produce great books, and trying to get blurbs is not a good use of anyone's time.' Further, he argued, blurbing was inherently a kind of cronyism, one that 'rewards connections over talent.' For that reason, Manning went on, Simon & Schuster will no longer require authors to obtain blurbs for their books.
Further, he argued, blurbing was inherently a kind of cronyism, one that 'rewards connections over talent.'
It's not entirely clear what this policy actually means. Manning says that S&S will continue to use any blurbs they receive, but that 'there will no longer be an excessive amount of time spent on blurb outreach.' That leaves plenty of room for publicists and editors to continue requesting blurbs on their authors' behalves — or to make other efforts to get attention for books, like pitching one of the increasingly few outlets that offer book reviews. (By the way, Vox has a book recommendation newsletter you ought to subscribe to.)
Publishing nonetheless reacted with shock to Manning's announcement. Every bookish Substack put out one essay after another on the state of the blurb.
'I've seen many anti-blurb takes over the years that were from bestselling and/or award-winning authors who, having reached a place where blurbs no longer helped their career, decided the practice should end. Those can feel a bit 'pulling the ladder up behind you,'' the novelist Lincoln Michel wrote. 'What's refreshing about Manning's article is that it was written by a publisher who is actually in a position to change things.' Michel included a platform of suggestions for reforming the blurb economy, including a demand that blurbs be reserved for those writers who are not household names. 'There is no reason a bestselling, award-winning writer needs blurbs for their new book,' Michel wrote. 'Save the blurbs for the midlisters and debuts.'
'Asking for blurbs is a really rough process,' the writer Johnny Diamond mused. 'I don't know if they help in any way in terms of sales, but in the long slog that is writing and promoting a book, [blurbs] offer an opportunity to remember to breathe and remind ourselves we're writers who get to write, and that's a beautiful thing that shouldn't be taken for granted.'
At stake in all this worrying about the blurb is a lot of fear about the state of the economy of publishing. As was discussed in detail during the 2022 lawsuit blocking a merger between Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House, contemporary corporate publishing relies on publishers saving as many of their resources as possible for those lucky few books they expect to sell very, very well. Once those books have taken their share of the pie, there are mere scraps left for the books that are expected to sell only okay. Blurbs, which you can get for free, are one of the few advantages many writers feel they can scrape together for themselves when they aren't sure they can rely on their publishers for marketing and promotional firepower.
'There's not a lot in place to pick up the slack if blurbs go away,' James Folta fretted at LitHub. 'Blurbing functions to paper over a lot of the gaps in publishing's existing systems, at least to my eye. If a publisher is only going to spend so much on marketing and promotion, and only for a handful of titles, does it make sense for an author to spend big bucks to hire their own promotional team, especially when they can cold-email folks and try to land a big name blurb? Which is more fair?'
The blurb economy is so dysfunctional that you can't always rely on those blurbs to guide you through a pile of unread books as well as you would like.
No one knows if blurbs are all that useful to the average reader, but they're very useful to their true audience, which is people who read professionally and don't have time to carefully evaluate each and every book that crosses their path before they winnow them down. Booksellers refer to blurbs to figure out which books are worth spotlighting in their stores. Prize juries refer to blurbs to decide which manuscripts will deserve special focus as they make their way through their overflowing piles. As a book critic, I receive dozens of pitches a year for literary novels about sad young women. It is physically impossible for me to read all of them. But if one of them comes with a note from Lauren Groff saying she thought the sentences were good, then I will make that book the one in its genre that I am sure to read.
Then again, the blurb economy is so dysfunctional that you can't always rely on those blurbs to guide you through a pile of unread books as well as you would like. Some writers have a reputation for blurbing everything they're asked to, so that in the end, their endorsement comes to mean nothing. (Long before Neil Gaiman's disgrace, I knew that his blurb meant a book was bad.) Even authors who are more selective have so much to read that few blurbs come in with the full focus and attention of their author. As Makkai quipped in her essay, sometimes, the blurbs seem to exist simply to tell us where the author of the book in question got their MFA, because all the blurbers are faculty there.
Blurbs are both time consuming and exhausting on all ends of the process — to solicit and to write. They reward the well-connected mediocrity at the expense of the talented unknown. They are so fulsome and omnipresent that they frequently fail to guide readers to the kinds of books they are looking for. Nonetheless, publishing is such a precarious industry that blurbs arrive with the feeling of a magic shield.
An anxious author may not be able to control their book's marketing and publicity budget, or how many reviews they'll get, or whether anyone will write a profile about them. But they can, by god, reach far and wide to get the best blurbs they possibly can. At least for now, while the blurb economy awaits reforms.