Mitali Perkins brought up blurbing at her blog last week and now Salon has an article on the same subject.
I may have mentioned before that no one at my publishing house has ever said a word to me about blurbs for my books. This may be that I'm so far down the food chain it doesn't matter. I wasn't even aware that authors had to look for their own blurbs until I heard writers talking about it on-line. I don't think I even wondered about why other authors' books had blurbs and mine didn't. Though, I hope that at some point I would have just as proof that I wasn't braindead.
I don't think I have to worry too much about my publisher asking me to look for blurbers at this point because of all the negative things I've said about blurbs here at Original Content. Plus, there's a possibility that I may have ticked off a lot of people here and so would be wasting my time asking for blurbs, anyway. So I'm hoping I'm safe from the whole blurb issue.
3 comments:
I recently finished reading the second book in a (wait for it) soon-to-be-trilogy (quel surprise!). I really liked the first book and was quite eager to read the second. And I liked that one, too. But it stuck in my craw that the half dozen or so blurbs on the cover were all from people that I know the author pals around with on a regular basis (videos prove it). Can we have just a semblance of objectivity here? Honestly, I lost a little respect for the author when I saw this. The books are good. I'm sure people other than her friends would have said equally kind things.
(Now to go read the actual post you cited!)
Sometimes I think we're supposed to believe that the blurbers are the author's friends. As in "You should read my book because I have cool friends" or "You should read my book because I have serious writer friends."
Well, in this case, I'm wondering if the book you picked up is the book I'm referring to, too. If it is, then I'm pretty sure at least two of the blurbers' names are prominently displayed because there's no absolutely no question that the publishers are hoping for success by association. They have very large and/or devoted fan bases. Though to be fair, the first book seems to have gotten a very good reception (at least at my library) without such an obvious grasping of coat tails.
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