Authors hate them. Publishers love them. They’re often made-up.
Whip-smart, unputdownable, lyrical, dazzling, pitch-perfect. Taut, tender, a tour de force. A triumph. Unflinching, stunning, mesmerizing, evocative. You will have seen a book—probably many, many books—with some of these words, what one might call blurbiage, if one were being annoying, on its cover. Often, these quotes will be just that one word. But the process by which those single words are acquired is a fraught one. So much so that last week, one top editor at a major publisher, Sean Manning at Simon & Schuster, made an unusual and attention-grabbing announcement about them. In his eight years at the company, he wrote in an essay for Publishers Weekly, “it has been tacitly expected that authors—with the help of their agents and editors—do everything in their power to obtain blurbs to use on their book cover and in promotional material.” No longer. Under his leadership, authors won’t be “required” to spend “an excessive amount of time” getting blurbs for their books.
Here’s how blurbs work, in general. An author writes a book. If the author is very lucky, a publisher gives them a deal for that book. The publisher’s marketing team then draws up a plan for how best to get readers, bookshops, and book reviewers interested in the book. That plan will include getting other authors to say that they think the book is good: a blurb. The author, the editors, and the marketing team will send versions of the book, in digital and physical “proof” formats, out to authors with some name recognition that they think might read the book ahead of its publication and offer their positive feedback, so that when the book is released into the world at large, it will do so with those quotes on its cover.
Sounds good, on the face of it. Books go out to readers adorned with reassuring evidence that the book is worth that reader’s time. But almost everybody in the literary world hates them. And depending on what corner of that world people occupy—reviewer, author, bookshop buyer, bookseller, book critic, agent, book editor, marketing professional—they hate them for slightly different, often conflicting reasons. On the heels of the Simon & Schuster news, I asked people from across this ecosystem to anonymously dish the dirt: What’s so bad about blurbs?
One of the first novelists I asked, a British author whom I will not name, went in hard. “I think it’s a lazy tactic made popular by publishers who can’t be arsed to fairly distribute and creatively employ a marketing budget to anyone who isn’t Sally Rooney or Richard Osman,” she said. Editors complained that it was “ludicrously labor-intensive” putting out requests, nudges about those requests, second nudges about them, to established authors to read new books. “You spend literally weeks sending polite/desperate emails to authors’ editors and agents, or trying to DM them on social media, asking if you could possibly send them a copy,” said an editor at a big publishing house. “It is the bane of my life.”
“I was really horrified the first time someone said I should just make something up for them to approve,” one author raves.
Debut authors also told me that it had “taken over their lives” sending out “begging letters” for blurbs, and more established ones said their lives had been taken over by the barrage of unsolicited proofs to blurb that they were receiving. “A lot of publicists are probably paid too poorly to really sit and consider which authors might genuinely like which book,” one novelist said, “but I wish this meant they just sent out less requests in general instead of taking this scatter-gun spam-bot approach.”
So many book proofs are getting sent out, and authors are being pursued so relentlessly for comment, that it has become common enough practice to blurb a book without having actually read it. “I was really horrified the first time someone said I should just make something up for them to approve,” said one debut nonfiction writer, who had a book out last year. This happens all the time, people told me.
Much of the blurb game is built on existing acquaintances. There is enormous social pressure to blurb books for people you sort of know. So people either lie about liking a book, because they don’t want things to be awkward, or end up ghosting the requests, or blurb it positively because they are “blinded by affection,” one nonfiction author told me. “The only time I’ve heard of someone having the balls to say ‘I haven’t blurbed your book because I didn’t actually like it’ is Sarah Schulman,” she added. According to another novelist, “It turns the entire industry into this fucking Regency-era tea party, where we all just owe each other favors and there’s actually no meritocracy or peer review or even admiration going on.”
But what if you are one of the vast majority of authors who don’t have author friends to strong-arm into saying they liked your book? Too bad. “Some authors can summon 20-plus semifamous friends to say something lovely about them within a week, whereas other brilliantly talented debuts spend grueling months trying to get their foot in the networking door and feel horribly rejected by the whole thing,” said one editor.
I’ve often wondered, while walking around a bookshop, whether consumers are swayed by all these shouts of “extraordinary” and “brilliant” on book covers from known names. I don’t feel that I am, personally. But it turns out that blurbs aren’t really for catching the eyes of readers. They’re for catching the eyes of people who decide which books are going in the bookshops and which books are getting reviewed in the media. “As a huge bitch who works for a publisher,” one person began, “it annoys me, to be honest, how obsessed everyone is with them, because I feel like they rarely move the dial in a potential customer’s mind and are more about the industry representing itself to itself.” Another person who works at a publishing house said: “If retailers and media stopped putting so much importance in it, we would be more than happy to dispense with them.”
Some people on that side of the industry did say they need and like blurbs. One nonfiction editor at a big newspaper said blurbs are “incredibly useful” if you are someone, like he is, “who must sort through literally hundreds of books.” But in general, across the board, when people were positive about them, they were positive because of a perception that, although deeply flawed and incredibly annoying to procure, they can make or break a book. As one editor put it: “If you get, say, a blurb from a massive name for a debut, you’re more likely to get decent orders from retailers and more likely to get press. It completely changes a book’s fortunes.”
This may well be true, but it is difficult to quantify. Nobody knows how many sales can be linked to one name on any one cover. “I find that not having enough blurbs or big enough names blurbing is an excuse marketing will give for why a campaign isn’t working,” said an editorial director at one large publishing house. “But then we see well-blurbed books flop too!” Authors complained that they felt marketing teams had misrepresented the importance of blurbs to them. “I got a blurb from Gabrielle Zevin, who had the biggest book of 2022 with Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,” said one novelist, “and it didn’t change the amount that retailers had ordered my book in at all. And I was like, Wait, so how much do these fucking blurbs actually matter if having none punishes me, but also having one that’s really good and important seems to do nothing?”
Even if it really does matter, it has in the past decade or so apparently gotten harder and harder to get these big-name blurbs. “More and more of the big names are adopting a blanket no-proofs policy,” said a nonfiction editor. Another agreed: “Yeah, loads of them blanket refuse books these days and then just blurb their mates.”
The bad feeling surrounding blurbs is ultimately not about blurbs. It’s a symptom of where the publishing industry is these days in terms of the sheer number of titles being published and the limited time and money everybody in the industry has to pay attention to them. “There are more and more every year, so each book has to fight harder and harder to actually be visible in any way. Check out the frankly ridiculous production values on lots of books nowadays—holographic foils, elaborate printed edges,” one marketing director told me. “Blurbs are a similar arms race. Every book has a blurb, so every book needs a blurb, and so it goes on, forever.” In Manning’s essay for Publishers Weekly, he noted that Catch-22, one of the bestselling novels of all time, was not blurbed on its original publication. “But I wonder how many books were published in 1961 vs. 2025?” responded someone in marketing. “Would it need some cringey blurb nowadays, or would it reach a massive readership on its own merits? I’d like to think the latter, but I would for sure be in a meeting right now about our Catch-22 TikTok influencer strategy.”
Book marketing and publicity budgets are shrinking, and at the same time publicists now must be on top of not just printed books but Goodreads, NetGalley, and all social media platforms, all while muscling for ever-diminishing review-page space. “It’s like a roulette table where nobody knows where to put their chips,” said one novelist, “so they’re just putting the responsibility on authors to just be friends with everyone in the casino.”
Maybe Simon & Schuster won’t be putting the responsibility there anymore. (Although it’s worth noting that even Manning, in his essay, hastens to add that if an author just so happens to read a book, and just so happens to feel moved to send along some nice words about it, “we will be all too happy to put it to use.”) But will the publisher’s announcement push the first domino on dismantling this whole system? Lead us into a bright new era where the blurbing circus is a thing of the past? The resounding answer I got from those I asked was: no. Alas. To truly put an end to the madness, people said, would require an entire industry to buy in. And somehow, books will always need to stand out from the crowd, be it by the quality of their blurbs or through some other means. As one person put it, “I welcome a blurb-less future where we can judge books by sensible things, like their covers.”
