What's in a blurb?
I recently reread an essay on cover blurbs by Pico Iyer – ironically, it’s collected in Tropical Classical, which comes with a cover blurb from the Los Angeles Times proclaiming Iyer "a formidable talent … a pacesetter among a new breed of travel writers" – and it got me thinking about how many times I’ve cringed and even publicly apologized about the cover blurb for Harvest Season. "Chris Taylor" it alleges "knows China better than anyone". As the author, this reads more like a cruel joke – an invitation to ridicule – than praise. Of course, it’s patently untrue, but more than that it shouldn’t be there – and not simply for the obvious reason I’ve just stated.
For one, the blurb shouldn’t be there because it incorrectly categorizes the book – and me. Harvest Season is not a book about China, and I’ve never paraded myself as a China expert. The novel is about the travel scene, if it’s about anything, and it happens to be set in China because I came across several relatively unexploited places in southwest China that lent themselves to the themes I was interested in. Secondly – and with all respect to the author of the quote – if the publisher wanted to use some kind words from Simon Lewis (disclosure: we’re friends) on the cover of the book, he should have been acknowledged as the author of Go, not of Bad Traffic, Lewis’s venture into crime fiction. Go, along with The Beach, by Alex Garland, and Are You Experienced? by William Sutcliffe, were, after all, the three novels of the mid- to late-90s that seemed to herald a new direction in travel writing – travel literature that explored the ethos of the bargain-basement margins of the travel industry.
What happened to that "movement" – and I suspect it lost steam because the authors were all in their twenties and ran out of material to mine after their three seminal novels had whipped through the experience of being young and on the road in Asia for the first time – is a question for another blog. But for marketers and publishers the blurb poses a dilemma when a riposte comes along that attempts to paint the scene those books described in both more considered and broader brush strokes. Because the blurb – if it's not simply a glowing assessment of a writer’s promise and money-making potential ("Think Joyce meets JK Rowling") – is a marketing-placement job.
The theme of Iyer’s essay, "Perhaps the Best Article on Blurbs I’ve Written Today", is probably best summed up as "to blurb or not to blurb?" For Iyer, it is an act that "requires advanced degrees in politics, economics, and just plain manners", and this makes him sympathetic to writers who "have an unbending policy of just saying no". Iyer is also concerned with the blurb itself as a "subset of literature" and he concludes by wondering: "Can the day be far off when every book will be read only on its cover?" This, of course, is another way of simply saying that the blurb is here to stay.
That being the case, the onus is on authors to be sure that their cover blurb actually speaks to potential readers about the book and the realm – or marketing niche, if you like – it inhabits.