14 ms·

Beware of Book Blurbs

82 points by samclemens 4y ago

lasereyes136 4y ago
Caveat Emptor Don't judge a book by it's cover Take you pick.
ruricolist 4y ago
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.
- TheRealPomax 4y ago
  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?
  - MrJohz 4y ago
    Eh, I find Goodreads reviews really difficult to get a handle on. Moreso than, say, Rotten Tomatoes, where even if the aggregate rating is different to the rating that I'd give a film, the reviews are at least useful enough that I know what I'm going to get. With Goodreads, it's much more difficult to get a feel for what a book is going to be like based on the reviews. I wonder if this is because the literary world is a lot not heterogenous. Making a film is very expensive, so only a (relatively) small number get made each year, and they tend to fit into specific categories. If you know what sorts of films you like, it's easier to find more films that match what you want. Books, in comparison, have far more niches, and those niches often seem shallower, so that a single book often fits in multiple spaces for different reasons. I think this makes it harder to know exactly what sort of things work well for you in a book, which makes reviews harder to compare, because other people will often be reading a book very differently to you. I think this is similar to board games, which also tend to have many shallower niches, but at least for myself, I know which reviewers match my sort of games, and I know how to interpret their opinions. I don't feel like I have that same intuition in the literary world yet.
  - LesZedCB 4y ago
    Goodreads reviews are only useful for getting a lot of funny opinions after having finished a book. not once have I ever used goodreads reviews for anything other than "damn, 3.6, this must be a polarizing book" before starting it.
  - notatoad 4y ago
    i'm pretty sure this is the first time i've ever heard anybody say anything positive about goodreads reviews.
- EamonnMR 4y ago
  Book as occasion for essay is a great genre of essays though.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  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.
ploum 4y ago
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?
- JohnFen 4y ago
  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.
- wodenokoto 4y ago
  No, that’s a French thing.
- ghaff 4y ago
  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.
- kgwgk 4y ago
  > It really __deserves__ the book. Maybe you meant to say disservices?
  - okvdjv 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - toast0 4y ago
      English generally allows verbing nouns.
fwlr 4y ago
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.
- Swizec 4y ago
  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.
- pilarphosol 4y ago
  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.
- goldfeld 4y ago
  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.
- RunSet 4y ago
  > 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.
akudha 4y ago
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
- bombcar 4y ago
  Trailers. I “love” the ones that make a slow paced romcom look like an action thriller.
  - lelanthran 4y ago
    That sword cuts both ways - enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6QgNuZcxTw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6QgNuZcxTw (See at least until solsbury hill starts :-))
Waterluvian 4y ago
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.
Algemarin 4y ago
Is there any market research available that shows that blurbs are actually effective in driving sales or interest in a book?
- onetokeoverthe 4y ago
  [dead]
- pilarphosol 4y ago
  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.
- MrVandemar 4y ago
  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.
AlbertCory 4y ago
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."
- bonkersbonkers 4y ago
  aka 'logrolling'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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).
wwarner 4y ago
Now chatgpt makes makes meaningless writing especially ugly. I predict the blurb’s swift demise.
- pilarphosol 4y ago
  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.
  - MrVandemar 4y ago
    > 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. This happens anyway regardless. I can't think of any other reason why The DaVinci Code was ever a thing, other than that.
    - sethammons 4y ago
      People have different tastes; oh the horror. I had a lot of fun reading that book.
  - BeFlatXIII 4y ago
    > 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. Don't disrespect the hustle grindset.
lapcat 4y ago
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."
yesenadam 4y ago
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.
- cainxinth 4y ago
  There’s a thin line between “puffery” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery) and deceit. Your example strikes me as crossing the line.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    "Puffery" is just legal lying.
    - yesenadam 4y ago
      (IANAL) Take this, for example, from a jazz/funk/? band I like: "The Funky Knuckles is a world class jazz orchestra made up of genetically enhanced cybernetic super men. They have played at the finest venues around the world delivering mind blowing rhythms and harmonic complexity that will shatter your fragile psyche and leave you drowning in a pool of fresh llama milk. The band members are as brilliant as they are handsome and they have performed with people such as the legendary Phill Aelony. This unstoppable crime fighting squadron will make you dance like a kraken on meth before you burst into tears of joy which can be combined with powder from a ground up cobra skull to synthesize the elixir you need to pass through solid objects." It's cool, funny, seems appropriate to the band, - and also not meant to be taken seriously, so seems to fit that "puffery" definition. But calling it "just legal lying" would...miss the point. https://www.thefunkyknuckles.com/about https://www.thefunkyknuckles.com/about
notatoad 4y ago
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"
MrVandemar 4y ago
The best blurb I ever read was: "A thumping good detective-ghost-horror-whodunit-time-travel-romantic-musical-comedy-epic" -- the author. Douglas Adams.
sohkamyung 4y ago
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.
Finnucane 4y ago
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.
sbierwagen 4y ago
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!
pottertheotter 4y ago
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).
- JohnFen 4y ago
  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.
pseingatl 4y ago
Somehow the author wrote this article without referencing •Blurb your Enthusiasm•, https://www.amazon.com/Blurb-Your-Enthusiasm-Z-Persuasion/dp/0861542177/ https://www.amazon.com/Blurb-Your-Enthusiasm-Z-Persuasion/dp...
euroderf 4y ago
"The post of the year!" "It's un-down-votable!"
canam 4y ago
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.
lfpeb8b45ez 4y ago
The Millions has done it again with a crackling, thrill-a-minute joyride that’s whip-smart and unexpectedly devastating.

82 points by samclemens 4y ago

Caveat Emptor Don't judge a book by it's cover Take you pick.

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.

TheRealPomax 4y ago
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?
- MrJohz 4y ago
  Eh, I find Goodreads reviews really difficult to get a handle on. Moreso than, say, Rotten Tomatoes, where even if the aggregate rating is different to the rating that I'd give a film, the reviews are at least useful enough that I know what I'm going to get. With Goodreads, it's much more difficult to get a feel for what a book is going to be like based on the reviews. I wonder if this is because the literary world is a lot not heterogenous. Making a film is very expensive, so only a (relatively) small number get made each year, and they tend to fit into specific categories. If you know what sorts of films you like, it's easier to find more films that match what you want. Books, in comparison, have far more niches, and those niches often seem shallower, so that a single book often fits in multiple spaces for different reasons. I think this makes it harder to know exactly what sort of things work well for you in a book, which makes reviews harder to compare, because other people will often be reading a book very differently to you. I think this is similar to board games, which also tend to have many shallower niches, but at least for myself, I know which reviewers match my sort of games, and I know how to interpret their opinions. I don't feel like I have that same intuition in the literary world yet.
- LesZedCB 4y ago
  Goodreads reviews are only useful for getting a lot of funny opinions after having finished a book. not once have I ever used goodreads reviews for anything other than "damn, 3.6, this must be a polarizing book" before starting it.
- notatoad 4y ago
  i'm pretty sure this is the first time i've ever heard anybody say anything positive about goodreads reviews.
EamonnMR 4y ago
Book as occasion for essay is a great genre of essays though.
AlbertCory 4y ago
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.

ploum 4y ago

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?

JohnFen 4y ago
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.
wodenokoto 4y ago
No, that’s a French thing.
ghaff 4y ago
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.
kgwgk 4y ago
> It really __deserves__ the book. Maybe you meant to say disservices?
- okvdjv 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - toast0 4y ago
    English generally allows verbing nouns.

fwlr 4y ago

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.

Swizec 4y ago
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.
pilarphosol 4y ago
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.
goldfeld 4y ago
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.
RunSet 4y ago
> 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.

akudha 4y ago

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

bombcar 4y ago
Trailers. I “love” the ones that make a slow paced romcom look like an action thriller.
- lelanthran 4y ago
  That sword cuts both ways - enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6QgNuZcxTw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6QgNuZcxTw (See at least until solsbury hill starts :-))

Waterluvian 4y ago

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.

Algemarin 4y ago

Is there any market research available that shows that blurbs are actually effective in driving sales or interest in a book?

onetokeoverthe 4y ago
[dead]
pilarphosol 4y ago
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.
MrVandemar 4y ago
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.

AlbertCory 4y ago

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."

bonkersbonkers 4y ago
aka 'logrolling'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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).

wwarner 4y ago

Now chatgpt makes makes meaningless writing especially ugly. I predict the blurb’s swift demise.

pilarphosol 4y ago
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.
- MrVandemar 4y ago
  > 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. This happens anyway regardless. I can't think of any other reason why The DaVinci Code was ever a thing, other than that.
  - sethammons 4y ago
    People have different tastes; oh the horror. I had a lot of fun reading that book.
- BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  > 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. Don't disrespect the hustle grindset.

lapcat 4y ago

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."

yesenadam 4y ago

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.

cainxinth 4y ago
There’s a thin line between “puffery” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery) and deceit. Your example strikes me as crossing the line.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  "Puffery" is just legal lying.
  - yesenadam 4y ago
    (IANAL) Take this, for example, from a jazz/funk/? band I like: "The Funky Knuckles is a world class jazz orchestra made up of genetically enhanced cybernetic super men. They have played at the finest venues around the world delivering mind blowing rhythms and harmonic complexity that will shatter your fragile psyche and leave you drowning in a pool of fresh llama milk. The band members are as brilliant as they are handsome and they have performed with people such as the legendary Phill Aelony. This unstoppable crime fighting squadron will make you dance like a kraken on meth before you burst into tears of joy which can be combined with powder from a ground up cobra skull to synthesize the elixir you need to pass through solid objects." It's cool, funny, seems appropriate to the band, - and also not meant to be taken seriously, so seems to fit that "puffery" definition. But calling it "just legal lying" would...miss the point. https://www.thefunkyknuckles.com/about https://www.thefunkyknuckles.com/about

notatoad 4y ago

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"

MrVandemar 4y ago

The best blurb I ever read was: "A thumping good detective-ghost-horror-whodunit-time-travel-romantic-musical-comedy-epic" -- the author. Douglas Adams.

sohkamyung 4y ago

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.

Finnucane 4y ago

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.

sbierwagen 4y ago

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!

pottertheotter 4y ago

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).

JohnFen 4y ago
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.

pseingatl 4y ago

Somehow the author wrote this article without referencing •Blurb your Enthusiasm•, https://www.amazon.com/Blurb-Your-Enthusiasm-Z-Persuasion/dp/0861542177/ https://www.amazon.com/Blurb-Your-Enthusiasm-Z-Persuasion/dp...

euroderf 4y ago

"The post of the year!" "It's un-down-votable!"

canam 4y ago

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.

lfpeb8b45ez 4y ago

The Millions has done it again with a crackling, thrill-a-minute joyride that’s whip-smart and unexpectedly devastating.