Jacket Flak

[Dave Monroe]

Jacket Flak
Do Book Blurbs Bear Sincere Praise Of Peers, Or False
Fawning Of Friends?

November 28, 2004
By CAROLE GOLDBERG, Courant Books Editor

Think of them as tiny billboards clamoring for your
attention:

"A stunning debut from an emerging writer!"

"Another richly conceived novel from one of America's
most beloved authors!"

"Once I picked it up, I could not put it down!"

Book blurbs - those back-of-the-jacket hugs-and-kisses
from one author to another - have been around for
about 100 years and are essential weapons in the
ever-more-competitive arena of book marketing. Editors
and publicists play matchmaker to marry appropriate
blurb-writers with the book being launched. Authors
agonize over whom to approach for blurbs and, if
they've become well known themselves, often complain
they are overwhelmed with requests to write them.

Yet as integral to the publishing process as they are,
blurbs still engender some controversy. Are their
always-generous sentiments always genuine? Do some
authors scatter them so indiscriminately that they
earn the nasty epithet blurb whore? Are readers misled
if they aren't aware the blurber may be the good
friend, lover, editor, teacher, mentor or
publishing-house colleague of the blurbee?

[...]

John Freeman of New York, who frequently reviews books
for The Courant and other newspapers, says that while
blurbs can show how well connected an author or
publisher is, the process often is altogether too
cozy.

Authors are often indebted to each other for their
livelihood, he says.

"Writers attend MFA programs together, become friends
and then tap their friends for teaching assignments.
When their books finally make it into print, they can
ask one another for blurbs, for an agent, for
publishing contacts.

"Three out of four blurbs can usually be labeled as
suspect, or even blatant logrolling, " Freeman says.
(Spy magazine, you may recall, ran a snarky column
called "Logrolling in Our Time" that outed authors
engaged in mutual back-scratching via gushy blurbs.)

"Thomas Pynchon, for example, has blurbed books by
several writers represented by his wife, agent Melanie
Jackson; Jay McInerney blurbed his classmate Robert
O'Connor's novel `Buffalo Soldiers,'" Freeman says.
"Almost every back jacket flap contains blurbs by
writers from the same publishing house. Find a back
flap where all three or four blurbs come from house
authors, and something begins to smell a little
fishy." ...

http://www.ctnow.com/entertainment/stage/hc-bookblurbs1128.artnov28,1,2019288.story?coll=hc-headlines-arts


		
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