Aug
20
“A Shocking … Tour de Force …”
My tolerance for book blurbs has officially just bottomed out…
Of course, everyone knows the “Praise for [insert title or author’s name]” in the opening pages of a book are often just cleverly manipulated snippets meant to make a novel sound better than it is. No one in his right mind would expect an “ad card” to be a testimony of the work’s true worth. The fact that a reviewer used the word “Stunning!” “Remarkable!” or “Heartbreaking!” is meaningless—especially since you might find the full text reads “It is stunning that so atrocious a novel could have been written, much less published,” “It’s remarkable that this author ever found an agent,” or “It’s heartbreaking that the editors of this dreck were not dragged into the streets and summarily executed.”
Not only are blurb quotes twisted around so that they sometimes mean the precise opposite of what the reviewer actually said, but often the truly positive ones could only have been written by industry shills. For who else but a shill would call every thriller “edge-of-your-seat action,” or claim of every mystery that “If you start this one on a Friday, clear your schedule for the weekend … once I picked it up, I couldn’t put it down!” or the classic “so-and-so is the new so-and-so-from-ten-years ago: a true master!” Can’t these people at least think of more original glowing praise than “heart-pounding,” “a roller coaster ride,” “author X’s characters are fine-drawn and true to life,” and the ten or so other stock phrases that appear in virtually every book printed?
To my mind, the only good these blurbs might occasionally serve is as a litmus test. If I’m starting up an editing project and I read the ad card and the quotes are themselves badly written or choked with inane platitudes, then I grit my teeth, buckle up my sphincter, and say to myself, “All right, here comes another meteoric turd!” At least I know what I’ve gotten myself into.
For years, I’ve slowly seethed with innocuous disdain for blurbs. But it’s all part of the business of books, take it or leave it. With so many titles published each year, the majority of them god-awful, I would expect nothing less than mendacious rephrasings and critics who do well for themselves by liking everything they read. After all, books need blurbs, right? And luckily, no matter how terrible a book is there’s probably somebody out there who likes it. If we can’t find him, we’ll just toss in some ellipses: “One of … the best … books … of the … year!”
Which brings me to the straw that broke the camel’s back: blog reviews.
Since desperate publishers started relying on blogs for reviews, the floodgates have been opened. A book has no chance in hell of getting a good word from a reputable reviewer? Screw it, quote a blogger … The inspiration for this post was, in fact, a quote topping the ad card of a generic paranormal novel. The blurb quote, which I soon learned was in fact a misquote (thankfully so, as the original was quite stupid), came from a blog with a grand total of eight followers. I took a spin through the reviewer’s site, which had all the design flair, and all the grammatical and spelling mistakes, of a thirteen-year-old’s, and I found that there wasn’t a single comment on any of the reviews he’d posted. So, here’s a reviewer that no one, not even paranormal readers, has ever heard of, expressing an opinion that has no authority (given the author’s own tentative grasp on literacy), drifting out into the void of the Internet unheard—that is, until it ends up on the ad card in a book published by a major house.
It’s embarrassing, frankly. It’s an example a stupid and aggravating practice made stupider and more annoying. I mean, why not just post a quote from the author’s mother: “My boy wrote this book, and I think it’s a humdinger!” That would at least be less misleading.
Or perhaps there’s another answer entirely: Maybe we don’t really need blurbs at all …
