On Blurbing

Rachel Donadio (New York Times Book Review) has done it again—written a back-page essay that demands to be read first. This time her piece is called "He Blurbed, She Blurbed," and the opening graf contains the strange but apparently true tidbit that a new enterprise called Blurbings LLC has emerged. In this case, the name does say it all: By surrendering a mere $19.95 or up, clients (those would be the book-writing sorts, the ones who hope to someday capture some fraction of the book-buying market) can buy themselves a whopping ten book blurbs.

Oh. My.

Let me just say for the record that hoping for blurbs, which can sometimes mean scrounging for them, is one of the least attractive aspects of an author's entire existence. It's just not a situation most of us want to find ourselves in. When you ask another for a blurb, you are asking for their time, you are trading on their reputation, you are putting the ineffable at risk.

It isn't pretty.

But let me also say this, for this blogging record. Some of my most treasured friendships emerged from, or were succored by, that timid request for a blurb, when truly good souls like Katrina Kenison or Jennie Nash or Susan Straight or Kate Moses or Robb Forman Dew or Lauren Winner reached out and gave me the words—the hope—that I as a writer needed just then. Jayne Anne Phillips and Rosellen Brown, my first two teachers, gave me words to live on. Buzz Bissinger, a fellow Penn alum and extremely good all-around sort (don't let his sometimes-growl fool you—not ever), lent his ear and his thoughts to FLOW, and in that way made that book eternally alive for me.

We don't want to broker for blurbs, as authors, but we do care what our heroes and heroines in books think of the stories we have deigned to tell. Sometimes a blurb is the yield one writer passes on to another. The light turned on at the end of a long and harrowing process.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/books/review/Donadio-t.html?ref=books