Last year, the author Jeanette Winterson posted a photo on Twitter of her books being burned. Cancel culture? No — the person burning her books was Winterson herself. “Absolutely hated the cosy little domestic blurbs on my new covers,” she wrote, in characteristically pugnacious style. “Nothing playful or strange or the ahead of time stuff that’s in there. So I set them on fire.”
The blurbs — the publishers’ sales-pitch text on the back cover — did indeed take a revisionist view of Winterson’s experimental, eccentric work. Her modernist love story Written on the Body was blurbed on publication in 1992 with phrases like “Generous in scope, sumptuous in detail, this is a story told by a vulnerable and subversive Lothario, gender undeclared.” The new blurb began: “In a quiet English suburb, a love affair ignites.”
You can see why Winterson considered the new blurbs bathetic: they sought to make the books sound like generic literary fiction, and any new reader approaching them like that will be disappointed. On the other hand, her publisher was trying to introduce Winterson — a writer who has drifted from the cutting edge to the back room of the literary establishment — to new readers, which will be to her benefit too.
Louise Willder, a professional blurb-writer for Penguin Books for 25 years, keeps her views to herself on the Winterson affair: it gets only a passing mention in her book Blurb Your Enthusiasm. But she gives us plenty of juice on other aspects of “the outside story of books” in this well-filled bran tub of nuggets about covers, designs, puff quotes, and more.
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Blurbs operate in the shadow-world of literature: they are of crucial importance given that they are one of the first things readers will see in a book, after the title and cover design, and yet they don’t form part of the reading experience. Their job is to persuade the reader on to the first page, and then fade away.
They require meticulous precision, reflecting the feel of the book but not spoiling it (“you can’t sell them the experience of the book — you have to sell them the expectation of reading it”): and the blurber must produce what James Baldwin called “a sentence as clean as a bone”, though they will get none of the credit that the author does.
The fewer words you have, the harder it gets, and it’s little wonder that many blurbs devolve into what Willder considers to be unforgivable cliches of the form, like the “three adjectives and an adverb formula” (“a shocking, hilarious and strangely tender novel …”). Others happily break the rules, and it’s no surprise that the master of the logorrhoeic blurb is Salman Rushdie, one of whose recent novels had a description 324 words long on the cover.
We also get asides on things like cover design, with award-winning designer David Pearson declaring that he enjoys “occupying this space between artistic integrity and the flogging of units.” Wilder seems firmly on the flogging-units side of things. She is cynical about blurbs from the past that assume knowledge on the part of the reader — like one for Greene’s The Power and the Glory referring to a “whiskey priest” — for not “making it easy”; but why not, in an age when we all have Google in our pockets?
Similarly, Wilder is impatient with a new Kurt Vonnegut blurb that “gives little clue as to what the book is about,” when anyone who has read Vonnegut knows that that’s the least interesting thing about his novels (and, arguably, most novels) anyway. The fact that the blurb captures the voice and spirit of Vonnegut is far more important — to readers anyway, if not to unit-floggers.
Sometimes Blurb Your Enthusiasm could do with being a bit more inside than outside. Some chapters are little more than compendiums of examples, when I would have liked more back room stories of the battles over blurbs, or how they evolve between author and publisher.
We do get some nice stuff like that, such as finding out that Donna Tartt has rejected all attempts to change the blurb or cover for The Secret History, and an acceptance that publishers, in pretending that all their books are brilliant, are essentially lying, or at least fibbing.
Willder also acknowledges that she (presumably not alone among her colleagues) has invented quotes of praise from other authors to put on the covers of new books — with, of course, the approval of said author who didn’t have time to read the book that they are nonetheless sure is quite brilliant.
It needn’t be this way. As Willder notes, there are means for the busy author to provide a quote for a friend, as Alan Coren did when Jeffrey Archer asked him for a puff quote for a new book that he didn’t really like. “Fans of Jeffrey Archer,” Coren wrote masterfully, “will not be disappointed.”
