Is It Time to Kill the Book Blurb?

February 25, 2021 5:21 PM

The pre-publication endorsements—“dazzling!” “a masterwork!”—that litter book covers have long been a staple of publishing. Are they of any value or mere relics that deserve to go? There may be some upside to blurbs. One study from 2013, conducted by BookTrust, a U.K. reading charity, found that of the 1,500 adults surveyed in England, 40 percent choose what books to buy based on “blurbs/book covers,” more than any other aspect, including professional reviews and recommendations from friends and family.
posted by folklore724 (64 comments total)

I'm getting a 404 error for that URL.
posted by hippybear at 5:28 PM on February 25, 2021

"Oh hey this person I like had something nice to say about this book" is a very useful filter when faced with the immense breadth of choice found in the bookstore!
posted by egypturnash at 5:32 PM on February 25, 2021 [17 favorites]

Mod note: fixed link, I think
posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 5:33 PM on February 25, 2021

"Oh hey this person I like had something nice to say about this book" is a very useful filter when faced with the immense breadth of choice found in the bookstore!

It would be if people spontaneously blurbed books based on nothing but sheer quality. But many people blurb books because they're friends with the author, want to endear themselves to the author, or owe the author a favor. Most of the time, blurbs are a better indicator of how well-connected the author is than of the quality of the book. At least, that's my experience, and I was once a marketing associate who solicited blurbs.

Having said that, I think the people who hate them the most are famous/ popular writers, who get solicited for blurbs constantly and have to negotiate the minefield of giving them for not-amazing books or figuring out a graceful way to say no. So I would take some of the quotes in the article with a grain of salt, because they're coming from people who experience the blurbing process as difficult social dilemma.

I could only read the start of the article, btw.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:41 PM on February 25, 2021 [24 favorites]

SPY Magazine used to have a feature called Logrolling In Our Time, where it paired up authors’ blurbs: you’d have , say, Norman Mailer calling John Cheever’s 1985 novel “A towering achievement,” and Cheever praising Mailer’s 1985 novel as “A magnum opus for our times.”
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:45 PM on February 25, 2021 [22 favorites]

When I worked for a small publisher in the late 1990s, I used to write the blurbs for the back covers. They did get faxed to the purported blurbers for approval, but I have never believed a blurb since then.
posted by rikschell at 5:54 PM on February 25, 2021 [32 favorites]

Though it's often used as a blurb for a movie, the most personally annoying example to me of this topic is "A triumph" or perhaps just "Triumphant."
posted by SoberHighland at 5:59 PM on February 25, 2021

The thing I'd most like to see removed from the covers of books is A NOVEL because JESUS FUCK
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:04 PM on February 25, 2021 [28 favorites]

Though it's often used as a blurb for a movie, the most personally annoying example to me of this topic is "A triumph" or perhaps just "Triumphant."

Movie blurbs are a different world; in literary blurbs you get at least a full phrase, and in the first few pages before the title, you might get two or three sentences. On movie posters and DVD covers and such, it is down to a word or two.

Here is a paragraph from Nicholas Rapold's NYT review of Dogtooth, a darkly funny and horrifying psychodrama about three siblings raised by their parents in a rural walled compound, entirely cut off from education and culture and anyone outside of their nuclear family. I have indicated the portion that gets excerpted on the DVD cover:

The never-named siblings, though, aren’t toddlers: they’re in their 20s. And, in the director Yorgos Lanthimos’s dark experiment in absurdism, they have grown up ignorant of the outside world. Rewarded with stickers for completing tasks, and taught odd substitutions for certain words (“sea,” for example, means “chair”), they play games and kill time in a travesty of innocence that’s by turns hilarious, macabre and baffling.

posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:18 PM on February 25, 2021 [10 favorites]

Imagine how disappointed people would be if they got home and discovered they'd bought a novel called The Goldfinch instead of the tiny bird they wanted. Much better to put A NOVEL on the cover.

As for book blurbs, it's always nice to know if you're getting a tour de force from a master storyteller or a dazzling masterpiece.
posted by betweenthebars at 6:21 PM on February 25, 2021 [21 favorites]

The thing I'd most like to see removed from the covers of books is A NOVEL because JESUS FUCK

Hey now, there could be anything behind that cover! What if you opened it up and it's just filled with bees? Nobody's going to put "A BUNCH OF BEES" on the cover of that, so I appreciate the reassurance before flipping one open.

Actually I might be tempted to buy a book that put that on the cover...
posted by sysinfo at 6:21 PM on February 25, 2021 [10 favorites]

To be fair, if the words "A Novel" were not appended to the title of Marisha Pessl's "Special Topics in Calamity Physics" there would likely be a lot of annoyed students.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:24 PM on February 25, 2021 [23 favorites]

The thing I'd most like to see removed from the covers of books is A NOVEL

If people were more willing to buy collections of short stories so that they didn't have to trick novel readers into buying them, other people wouldn't feel it necessary to put "A Novel" on their cover.
posted by 3j0hn at 6:37 PM on February 25, 2021 [4 favorites]

"This article is a stunning tour de force!"
--indexy, author of MetaFilter Comment
posted by indexy at 7:02 PM on February 25, 2021 [24 favorites]

Has no one here heard that wise old aphorism about forming opinions about a tome based on the contents displayed on its wrapper?
posted by njohnson23 at 7:08 PM on February 25, 2021 [4 favorites]

I mostly don't care about blurbs because I don't give them any credence.

I do care, though, that e-book publishers tend to shove them at the front of the "Detail" section so when you want more information about a book, you need to wade through 3 pages of "It's Twilight meets Lord of the Flies if it was written by John Updike!" or "The best book based on a song from a 80s movie to come out in this decade!"

I just want to know if this is book 4 or 5 in the series, people, I already have the damn book!
posted by madajb at 7:20 PM on February 25, 2021 [11 favorites]

But if we did away with blurbs, we'd never get any more gems like Groucho Marx's "From the moment I picked up your book until I put it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it."
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:39 PM on February 25, 2021 [9 favorites]

I'd buy a book blurbed as "A NOVEL" by the right author.
posted by joeyh at 7:45 PM on February 25, 2021 [7 favorites]

My favorite blurb, on a dictionary: “Definitive!”
(I’m not making this up).
posted by Comet Bug at 8:05 PM on February 25, 2021 [10 favorites]

Yes. Get rid of them. Put the summary back on the back, please. Or: more luscious dust jacket art.

I think of blurbs as useful for selling paperbacks at the supermarket. I think supermarket book selling is good for accessibility, but deeply troubling with certain books (see: that time a few years ago when Shusaku Endo's "Silence" was out in mass market paperback due to the Scorsese movie. I mean, out where anybody could pick it up, good grief*).

Which isn't to mention that you can get good recommendations and reviews online very quickly. And hopefully have access to a public librarian who can advise them? Please talk to librarians, they are so smart and have good taste and you can check out books for FREE. Sometimes libraries have themed collections that are fantastic entry points into a genre or topic!!! these are also free!! support your local library!

...Ahem.
But, whatever gets books in carts, I guess.

* I mean this sincerely. that book can and WILL fuck you up.
posted by snerson at 8:06 PM on February 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

Many years ago I kept a spreadsheet of all the books I read for a year. I charted how much I liked the book and where I’d heard about it. At the end of the year I tallied it up and learned that books I choose based on blurb were the second most disliked group I read. I stopped using blurbs to pick out books after that.

(The most disliked group was “books I grabbed randomly at the library because they seemed interesting”. The most enjoyed group was books my friends recommended to me. Data is fun!)
posted by lepus at 8:16 PM on February 25, 2021 [14 favorites]

see: that time a few years ago when Shusaku Endo's "Silence" was out in mass market paperback due to the Scorsese movie.

In 1992, Gary Oldman took the title role in one of endless adaptations of that story about a vampire. The movie was marketed as Bram Stoker's Dracula, but I recall that much more attention was given to the director, just then teetering off the cliff of being a prestige A-list name (two decades before: The Godfather movies and Apocalypse Now; two decades after: Twixt and Distant Vision). Here was a titan of filmmaking directing a monster movie!

As part of the marketing, a novelization appeared. Yes, a novelization of an adaptation of a novel. (I recall a friend of mine was managing a bookstore at the time and his eye rolls were audible.) I suppose that there was more money to be made off a "new" work than a century-old public domain novel, so we had a book that I hope somewhere is listed as Fred Saberhagen's Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 8:42 PM on February 25, 2021 [14 favorites]

That article is "intriguing" as I can only access the first little bit of it. Actually, I find blurbs to be a good general indication of a book, but knowing how the sausage is made does make you wonder. At least a couple of well chosen blurbs can be helpful, but you don't need four pages of them.
posted by blue shadows at 8:46 PM on February 25, 2021

The one time a book blurb sold a book for me, the book was terrible. I feel like most of them are so generic anyway that I just ignore them. I'd rather read an actual review, with actual paragraphs and thoughts and stuff.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:15 PM on February 25, 2021

Metafilter: actual paragraphs and thoughts and stuff
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:48 PM on February 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

The place for terrible and useless blurbs is Bookbub :"a master storyteller" or "a compelling crime drama". But much worse are the capsule summaries which all seem to be variants of "recovering alcoholic, ex-cop returns to quiet home town only to encounter dark secrets from the past" or "Nancy and her lovable K9 friends investigate crimes from her bakery.Will she fall for the handsome local detective?"
posted by bifurcated at 11:25 PM on February 25, 2021 [1 favorite]

Logrolling In Our Time starring John Cheever
posted by rhizome at 12:22 AM on February 26, 2021

I worked at a publisher in the early 1990s. We were publishing a book by a famous best-selling author, in the "true crime" genre, which was, we all knew, a monster turd. As was usual practice, we had asked the author for suggestions of who might blurb their book (this is where the logrolling starts). One of the writers on their list was another best-selling author in the crime fiction genre. I mean, at the time, a "top name." So I wrote this writer a letter with a galley of the book, asking them if they would be so kind as to "blurb it." A week or so later I get a letter back, with what has to be the most tepid two sentences ever written. It was clear they a) hadn't even opened the book and b) had no interest at all in providing a blurb. This was a non blurb. It was in no way usable .

My boss, the book's editor, convinced me to try again, this time suggesting a blurb, which I did. Something like,

"Dear Bigtime Writer, could we politely suggest the following edit to your blurb, to say instead '...this dramatic rendering of a true life crime is gripping, passionate and honest. You won't be able to put it down.'

In other words, shifting the writer from a non-blurb to a ridiculous oversell.

A week or so later, I got the response, by mail, typed, on the writer's letterhead:

"Dear chavenet:

No.

--Bigtime Writer"
posted by chavenet at 1:17 AM on February 26, 2021 [17 favorites]

Oh. Um. I thought "blurb" was literally the stuff on the back of the book[*] - mostly the summary (which is the thing I most rely on when I'm browsing, so when the publishers have decided all I need to know is that the book is a masterpiece, a heartrending modern classic in the making, I will not be buying the book), probably also an endorsement or two from other authors and/or a line quoted from a review, possibly misleadingly.

[*]I also think of books as mass-market paperbacks by default, which seems fair enough, considering the ratio of paperback to hardback fiction in your typical Waterstones.

I do find words like "grotesque", "brutal", "heartrending" and "bittersweet" useful, in that they tell me I probably won't enjoy the book.

If I see that an author I like has endorsed a book by someone new to me, it *does* sway me, but it shouldn't: it's become very clear that not everyone who writes books I enjoy also reads books I enjoy. One of my absolute favourite authors seems to reliably love and recommend (on Goodreads and Twitter as well as on the books themselves) books I struggle to even finish.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 2:00 AM on February 26, 2021 [2 favorites]

But...how will I know if something is a tour de force or not?
posted by voiceofreason at 2:13 AM on February 26, 2021 [10 favorites]

Thank you for giving me this flimsy opportunity to vent my spleen somewhat regarding blurbs.

1) When I ask amazon to send me a Kindle sample to take a peek at, it seems that the first 5-10(!!) "pages" are blurbs, then we get a table of contents, and then we get a weak introduction and then, at last 2 pages of the actual book before you are asked to buy it. GEE THANKS I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT.
2) Because I used to read A Certain Type of Book (self-improvement), I soon saw that the blurbs were all from the same people, in that they all seemed to be doing blurbs for each others books in such a breathless way that I assume circle jerk, they haven't even read the thing, and the book is probably worth skipping.
3) They could do away with blurbs tomorrow and I would be fine, and I would get 5-10 pages back from every eBook. (not really)
4) I have learned that serendipity and/or a personal recommendation from someone I trust is the way to go. That and my self is no longer in need of improvement advice from those knuckleheads and I think I'll just go along my merry way and stick to fiction, which is read first page, see if gripping. If yes, read. If no, either delete sample from iPad or put book back on shelf and keep looking.

My spleen feels much better now.
posted by Bill Watches Movies Podcast at 3:33 AM on February 26, 2021

Kill the blurb.

Nguyen, Orwell, et al. have the right of it.

The rise of self-publishing and its weaselly evolution into “indie” (which used to mean something!), the rise in the number of books published, and the increase in social expectations of authors have rendered blurbs useless at best. The level of logrolling is as bad as ever, but the amount of it! People have to shout louder and louder for attention, and the result is cacophony.

Several years ago I read a book by an author beloved by other authors in his literary nook... and it was mediocre. The blurbs—by damn near every major author in his field—were glowing! Have never trusted a blurb since, of the sincere or the “towering masterpiece” variety.
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:29 AM on February 26, 2021

Blurbs for scholarly monographs are normally taken from the reader's reports, which can sometimes make them more helpful. Sometimes, not in the manner intended: a few months ago I read a book by Well-Known Scholar on TOPIC that is my primary field, and had been, er, baffled by it (in the "...you do realize that your scholarly references are four or five decades out of date and have been superseded, right?" sense). Well-Known Scholar does not normally write on TOPIC. I looked at the blurbs on the back and realized that the blurb-ers don't write on TOPIC, either, and since they were likely to have been the referees...ah.

Of course, sometimes the referee changes their mind. My father was quoted on a book jacket, but returned to the book after it came out and had a "hmmm, not sure about my initial response there" reaction. A short while after that, he had the following conversation at a conference with the classicist Frank Snowden:

SNOWDEN: WHAT THE HELL
DAD: YES FRANK I KNOW

Publishers' catalogs also do the pull-quote thing once reviews come out. One publisher did this to me: my review had said, basically, that the book was pretty wonky (you wouldn't let a student entirely new to the field anywhere near it), but if you were a specialist, it would be a provocative read. Guess which part of the review appeared in the catalog?
posted by thomas j wise at 5:09 AM on February 26, 2021

I’m not at all a fan of dust jacket gimmicks. The fastest way to get me to NOT select a book is to cover it with pointless praise*, to include the line “now a major motion picture” or use a photo of actors FROM the motion picture, to include a “sticker” on the cover that is actually PART of the cover and is not removable (doubly more so if said “sticker” is flogging some famous person’s book club), all of that garbage. If I’m buying a book I generally intend to keep it, and those things irritate me. I don’t want to look at them forever. (It’s the book equivalent of the non-skippable ads embedded in the DVD or BluRay you purchased - I paid for it, why do I have to see this crap for all eternity?)

I AM ok with pull quotes inside the book. A page or two of “praise for this authors previous book(s) from critics or peers you might trust to actually be objective” is a good thing, especially if I am new to the author and would eventually like to find more books by him/her.

I am willing to tolerate these things from free books (library loans or happenstance discoveries in our local LFLs) but if I am buying a copy it is nearly always a book I’ve read before or an author I already enjoy. What I’m looking for is a nice edition, not a crappy version with more added advertising than a NASCAR vehicle.

*the shorter the blurb, the more I assume it was caustic and had to be edited to make it sound good. It’s fun to try and guess what the remainder of the sentence was. “Immensely enjoyable” may have been followed by “...to throw this in the trash”. “Heartbreaking” might have continued “...to think the advances on this garbage could have supported someone with actual talent.” If this becomes a popular party game, remember you saw it first here on Metafilter!
posted by caution live frogs at 5:32 AM on February 26, 2021 [6 favorites]

The only real utility of blurbs is as a tool to ascertain genre when the cover art is vague/minimal and you’ve got minimal time in the airport bookshop before a nine hour flight
posted by thivaia at 5:35 AM on February 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

(Which is to say in beforetimes, when airports or bookshops were things I physically traveled to)
posted by thivaia at 5:36 AM on February 26, 2021 [2 favorites]

Or when bookstores sold books and were not largely devoted to beige picture frames with inspirational quotes.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:42 AM on February 26, 2021 [3 favorites]

40 percent choose what books to buy based on “blurbs/book covers,”

Well, which? For the purposes of this article, it makes a difference.

Original report (2013, needs updating) 56% choose to read based on recommendations of friends and family 34% on reviews of one kind or another. Sounds about right.

Don't see the anti-blurb outrage myself. You don't like them, ignore them, as you might the copyright page or the closing credits of a movie. I say, pity the author who is pressed to impose on people to say nice things, and thank the blurber who is generous enough to take the responsibility to write the endorsement (if not necessarily taking the trouble of reading the book). Writing is a tough and lonely trade, blurbing is authorly solidarity.

A NOVEL - again, don't get the outrage. You can't always judge a book etc. (At least one reviewer thought Flashman was the real thing; though happily, it did not have NOVEL pasted on it.)

the shorter the blurb, the more I assume it was caustic

In the case of review excerpts, perhaps; in the case of actual authorities alone, probably not.
posted by BWA at 5:47 AM on February 26, 2021 [3 favorites]

The only thing I have to add to this discussion is Berkeley Breathed's small essay on book jacket blurbs on the back of Loose Tails (emphasis mine):

"The words that you are reading here replace a cockamamie publisher's blurb that appeared on the original printing of this tome. It's an acknowledged bit of wisdom that authors all learn at one time or another: Don't let your publisher write the promotional material. Words like "countless millions," "knee-slapping hilarious," and "cult following" are found peppering one's sacred book jacket like pigeon droppings on a statue of the Virgin Mary...which naturally is how I think of my work.

The truth is that the only "cult following" my comic strip had when this book appeared consisted of my mother. Bless her heart, she still reads it daily. She'll hand the funny page to me, point to it, scrunch her eyes together and say, "Honey, what were you trying to say here?" If Opus spits watermelon seeds at Milo, she'll say to me, "So this is a sort of comment on the watermelon industry?" So you see, to my publisher and to my mother, I remain a victim of unrealistic expectations.

In the meantime, please accept my apologies for the way Opus is drawn within this volume. I had no experience drawing birds in 1982 and you will notice that his beak tends to randomly shrink or expand. To this day, my mother thinks it symbolically represented the changing fortunes of my bachelor love life. Maybe it did, Mom, and maybe it didn't.

Berke Breathed
August 1987"

posted by deadaluspark at 6:00 AM on February 26, 2021 [3 favorites]

As part of the marketing, a novelization appeared. Yes, a novelization of an adaptation of a novel.

Emma Thompson published her script for Sense & Sensibility, along with journal/notes she'd kept during the production. At one point, she noted that she'd been approached by a publisher about doing a novelization of her script. Her script based on a Jane Austen novel. She very rightly told them no.
posted by Orlop at 6:13 AM on February 26, 2021 [5 favorites]

I am convinced Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth was so successful in at least some small part because of the blurb on the front that describes it as “lesbian necromancers in space.” I am also now eternally suspicious of blurbs because they were in space for like, 5 minutes, and there was far less necromancy than I’d expected. I did get the lesbians I was promised, though.
posted by brook horse at 6:25 AM on February 26, 2021 [10 favorites]

I wonder how many of the people who choose based on blurb do so when buying a book for someone else? I bet I'm not the only one who got book presents from well-meaning people because it said "the next Tolkien" on the front and "well, she likes fantasy..."

I don't mind a couple of quotes on the front cover, or inside, but I hate when there's no back cover summary, and instead a long list of praise featuring every book the author has written (often excepting the one in your hand.)
posted by scorbet at 7:04 AM on February 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

I don't see blurbs as hugely problematic. It's part of marketing hype.

I mean, I might like to live in a world where every product and service is completely upfront about its shortcomings and strengths ("Tide is overpriced but does at least clean clothes fairly well!"), but that's ... not where we live.

And speaking as an author, it takes a lot of work to make a book. After all that work, I don't mind if someone says something nice about me or my work. There's even a small part of me that thinks. "Oh, I got So and So to blurb my book, THAT'S why it's selling so well." Even though probably the nicest blurb I got was for a book that did squat, saleswise.

I would change 1 million other things about publishing before I tore down the blurb system.

(Um. Anyone want to blurb my next book? Please be famous and have flexible standards.)
posted by veggieboy at 7:16 AM on February 26, 2021

"For designers and marketers alike, “A Novel” is a tool that can be used in any number of ways and for any number of conflicting reasons, as wide-ranging and diverse as the genre it describes."
posted by lathrop at 8:04 AM on February 26, 2021

Hey now, there could be anything behind that cover! What if you opened it up and it's just filled with bees? Nobody's going to put "A BUNCH OF BEES" on the cover of that, so I appreciate the reassurance before flipping one open.

I read this and literally got up to see what my copy of Laline Paull's The Bees -- which I have not yet opened -- had to say for itself. I am relieved to report that it is in fact labeled "A Novel."
posted by naoko at 8:25 AM on February 26, 2021 [6 favorites]

When I worked for a small publisher in the late 1990s, I used to write the blurbs for the back covers. They did get faxed to the purported blurbers for approval, but I have never believed a blurb since then.

Well. Yes. This is how I assumed it worked. If Neil Gaiman / Stephen King actually read all the books they blurb, they would never have time to write anything. Follow up question though - are authors contractually obligated to lent their names to a certain number of books when they sign a contract with a publisher?

Incidentally, I've seen at least one book published in the Soviet Union with the "this book sucks, but we hope that the reader will be understanding" in the foreword. I wonder, how well honest blurbs would sell books...
posted by Dotty at 8:43 AM on February 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

If Neil Gaiman / Stephen King actually read all the books they blurb....

Mr. Gaiman says he does. Mr. King, don't know, but the issue has attracted interest.
posted by BWA at 8:55 AM on February 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

I always assumed adding “a novel” meant either “it’s much better than the genre it actually falls into” or “we hope people who are embarrassed to buy romance/horror/sff/crimefic will buy it” or “the author doesn’t want to be tagged as a genre writer because they are still paying off that MFA degree” but I never considered confusion over whether it might be a box of bees. I feel much kinder toward “a novel” now.
posted by zenzenobia at 8:57 AM on February 26, 2021

If Neil Gaiman / Stephen King actually read all the books they blurb, they would never have time to write anything

Stephen King gets royalties for books he doesn't remember writing. Stephen King fell down the stairs and was saved by landing in a pile of pages he'd written the day before. I assume he hates trees. No one's productivity is less in jeopardy, and that which slows him down is likely healthy for him.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 9:06 AM on February 26, 2021 [3 favorites]

"Me, begging, tears in my eyes: please. please just tell me what the book is about. the plot. please

A book annotation on the cover, unfazed: A Subversive Masterpiece. A Deep And Touching Story. The New York Times Bestseller. Go Fuck Yourself"

-- @AmazonMandy
posted by XtinaS at 9:15 AM on February 26, 2021 [3 favorites]

Interestingly, The Liar's Dictionary (the title could suggest novel or not) gets its status slapped on the US edition, but not the UK. (On reflection, more ambiguous is The Liars' Dictionary, but the point remains.)
posted by BWA at 9:31 AM on February 26, 2021

Yes, a novelization of an adaptation of a novel.

she'd been approached by a publisher about doing a novelization of her script. Her script based on a Jane Austen novel.

We found a bunch of these at the old Ann Arbor used bookshop. A novelization of The Time Machine, for example.
posted by doctornemo at 9:33 AM on February 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

I've blurbed books for friends who did good work and whom I wanted to support. I've also emitted blurbs for people who weren't friends but whose writing I thought needed a bigger audience, and I was happy to help if I could.

As a reader I look for who's blurbing and how it plays against what that book might mean for me. If the book is horror, say, a Laird Barron blurb means a very different thing from a Dean Koontz one.
posted by doctornemo at 9:36 AM on February 26, 2021

I find "a novel" useful because I have to write N or F on our non-spine labeled trade paperbacks when they come in so we know whether to shelve them with fiction or nonfiction. The subtitle means that I don't have to look the book up to discover whether it is a depressing-sounding memoir or a depressing-sounding work of fiction. Possibly the people who read realistic fiction also find it useful in that way? (As mentioned above, when the subtitle appears on a work of speculative fiction, I assume it's there to reassure the reader that the fantasy novel they accidentally picked up is Real Adult Literature and they don't have to feel ashamed.)

I stopped trusting/reading blurbs when I was a child and realized that any work of fantasy written for adults that was primarily about animals was going to have a blurb comparing it to Watership Down and that none of them at all were actually going to resemble Watership Down in any way that I found satisfying.
posted by darchildre at 11:54 AM on February 26, 2021 [4 favorites]

I wonder, how well honest blurbs would sell books...

results of recent google on "novel antonym":

hackneyed
old
banal
stale
threadbare
truistic
unimaginative
bromidic
trite
overdone

I love how these all mean slightly different things which I guess means calling something a "novel" actually says a lot.
posted by philip-random at 12:21 PM on February 26, 2021

Imagine how disappointed people would be if they got home and discovered they'd bought a novel called The Goldfinch instead of the tiny bird they wanted. Much better to put A NOVEL on the cover.

Not quite the same, but I remember reading about how, in 1995 when the movie Independence Day came out, people rushed to the bookstore and the sales for the novel shot up. But it came as a disappointment to many that the book they bought was Richard Ford's novel Independence Day, and the story didn't involve aliens at all. Richard Ford probably laughed all the way to the bank, though.
posted by zardoz at 12:34 PM on February 26, 2021 [4 favorites]

I spent a year or so buying books partially on the basis of blurbs (well, selections of reviews from trustworthy publications, not the same thing, I know). Never once did I discover a great book that way. By the way, if I see book club questions (usually at the end), I quickly put it back on the shelf. Leonora Carrington's recently reissued The Hearing Trumpet had a blurb from Luis Buñuel on the back. Now there's a guy whose blurbed book I'd buy any day!
posted by kozad at 12:36 PM on February 26, 2021 [1 favorite]

Possibly the people who read realistic fiction also find it useful in that way?

Yeah, I think the disambiguation is between fiction and non-fiction rather than between bee-containing and non-bee-containing book sized objects.

If you picture yourself browsing stacks in a bookstore you obviously know whether it's fiction, but of course the publishers' dream is the store's put you upright, cover out, on the display tables so announcing what you are is important.

Consistent with this is a very unscientific survey of covers on GoodReads, which suggests that when the book is obviously fictional--like with spaceships on the cover or something--they don't add "a novel."

Blurbs are pretty useless in terms of content, but knowing that author-you-like supposedly likes author-you've-never-heard-of is mildly useful (especially in olden days, when you couldn't just grab a ton more info from your phone while browsing.) I certainly made purchases in used bookstores that were influenced by this sort of thing.
posted by mark k at 12:48 PM on February 26, 2021

What if you opened it up and it's just filled with bees?

In fairness, there was a real buzz around that one.
posted by Phanx at 7:06 AM on February 27, 2021 [3 favorites]

Blurbs are also a real good way to figure out how much money the publisher is spending on marketing. For example, midlist authors often find out that the list of potential blurbers they gave their publisher got thrown away, because midlist books don't get blurbs.

But if the publisher is throwing a shitton of marketing at it, then they ALSO want the guarantee that booksellers will see that X Who Sells is endorsing the next book they want to Sell, and then secondary to that, hope that readers give a shit.
posted by headspace at 5:26 PM on February 27, 2021

far less necromancy than I’d expected

Phew. I bow to your capacity of necromancy-expectation. I myself could not have expected more animated bone material in a month of Sundays.
posted by away for regrooving at 8:51 PM on February 27, 2021

The sequel, incidentally, has both more Space and more Necromancy.
posted by kyrademon at 5:25 PM on March 2, 2021 [1 favorite]

Seen unattributed on the twittertoks:

BOOK BLURBS - GLOSSARY OF TERMS

Enchanting - there's a dog in it
Heart-warming - a dog and a child
Moving - child dies
Heart-rending - dog dies
Thoughtful - mind-numbingly tedious
Haunting - set in the past
Exotic - set abroad
Audacious - set in the future
Award-winning - set in India
Perceptive - set in north London
Provocative - infuriating
Epic - editor cowed by author's reputation
From the pen of a master - same old same old
In the tradition of - shamelessly derivative
Spare and taut - under researched
Richly detailed - over researched
Disturbing - author bonkers
Stellar - author young and photogenic
Classic - author hanging in there
Vintage - author past it

Edit: attribution found - appeared in Foxed Quarterly.
posted by automatronic at 4:03 AM on March 7, 2021 [3 favorites]

BOOK BLURBS - GLOSSARY OF TERMS

To this I can add my own:
lyrical - sentences without verbs
posted by Dotty at 6:18 AM on March 10, 2021 [2 favorites]