The horror of the blurb

I’ve got a book coming out this year! This should be exciting, it’s the culmination of a year’s work after all. Instead, this run up is the bit I’ve come to dread, all because I know at some point in the next three months, someone at my publishers is going to raise the painful topic of blurbs. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, a blurb is that little endorsement boldly printed across the top of a book, or coyly to one side. “A book so good you will end up dying alone if you don’t read it” ELTON JOHN*. It’s a little push if you’re not already on your way to the till with a copy, praise from someone you really admire. Maybe you’d be more like them if you read the books they read. Maybe then you wouldn’t be such a loser.

The blurb part of publishing is small and kind of irrelevant but also, hyped like it might be the most important thing that will ever happen in your life. Technology can solve many things, your publisher can handle almost everything else but blurbs? That’s on you, the author. Let me tell you how it works without getting a stress nosebleed and seeing shimmering lights around my peripheral vision. At some point, you’re going to be asked for a list of names to send early copies of the book to in the hopes that one of them will take pity on you and post about it AND OR give you a nice quote you can put on the cover. In order to do this, you have to message people you greatly admire but perhaps don’t know that well and ask for their home addresses. If they don’t trust you, there’s a mortifying moment where you offer to send a copy to an agent, a PO Box, to drop it off blindfolded, ferried through the streets in the boot of an anonymous cab. If they give you their home address, you will inevitably sense they’re being polite and will take receipt of your book only to dump it on a pile of other irrelevant mail in the hall that they don’t know how to deal with right now. That’s the first terrible part. 

Shortly this particular social horror will fade, shrinking down to a small bruise. At this very moment, your publicist texts you some version of this: “Hey hon, had any reaction to proofs? Be great to get some quotes by the end of the week - turns out Harry Styles has blurbed (insert the name of your literary nemesis here) new book! Xx.” Now you’re feeling sick with the shame of it all but there’s an added sense of angry desperation. How could (insert the name of your literary nemesis here) get such an endorsement, they must be best friends with him, he’s probably not even read it. You will message everyone you sent your book to, trying to sound jokey and unbothered. “Hey babe, you’ve probably had no time to read but I’ve just got to ask, publisher is on my case lol xx.” Unfortunately you’ve had two glasses of wine and sent it at 11:59pm, blowing your attempted insouciance out of the water. You are left on read by 85% of recipients. 

There are teenaged sexual fumblings which used to leave me in a cold sweat if I ever thought about them. I’ve gotten through that embarrassment, I’ve done the work. But I’m never going to get over emailing a person whose writing I admired more than anything, asking if they’d read my book. It started off well. Yes, they said eagerly, here’s my address (their real address, unprompted!). Then silence, well that’s to be expected. Busy busy busy! I emailed six weeks later, concealing my desperation by making sure I did it at 2pm on a weekday. “No time, so sorry! Will take it on holiday in two weeks but maybe that’s too late?” NO WAY! I wrote back, sweat pouring down my neck, ANYTIME IS TOTALLY FINE. I then held off until I knew the holiday was definitely over and had mere days before the print deadline for my book before I emailed again. I displayed this admirable restraint by throwing my laptop into a sewer and downloading an app which gave me a severe electric shock if I even stared at the email icon for too long. On the fifth day using it, I had to go to hospital after I passed out and hit my head on the edge of the pitchfork I’d bought in an attempt to retrieve my laptop from the sewer. I was ok! 

Anyway, this person didn’t reply to my final email. And I’ve never heard from them again but I watch their career and see that they’ve only become more popular (if that’s possible!) so that’s nice. One day I know I will see them at some event and they will be incredibly nice and polite and will not think about my book once in their whole life again. I will always be thinking oh my god you read my book on holiday and hated it so much you couldn’t even reply to my email. You joked about it with your friends, it became known as the holiday of that awful book. Every year for the rest of your life you will go back to that villa with your friends and your kids and it’ll be called the bad book holiday and when you die, your kids will still call it that and one day your descendants will go on that same holiday and call it the bad book holiday without even knowing why. 

If you’re lucky, you will get someone to blurb your book (and when nice people have given me blurbs, I’ve loved them so much I’ve wanted to stroke their face while looking directly into their eyes) but you might have to be ruthless. That nice Richard Osman (he of all the books in the world) once walked past my husband and they stopped to say hello in that way celebrities of various levels will do (my husband could simply not do this with George Clooney, there are legally designated tiers, decided by ITV bosses I think). “I liked your wife’s book,” RS said, very politely. My husband messaged me, knowing it would make my day. In turn, I messaged my editor, who yelped and messaged my publicist who yelped and emailed Richard Osman’s publicist (who must field 15,000 blurb requests per day and have a very mentally healthy brain since they don’t reply to all of them with a big flashing NO! gif) to ask if we could use this on the book cover. How could they say no? We’d backed them into a corner with our desperation. Well, it’s on the cover and I’m legally obligated to never contact Richard Osman or any of his associates ever again. Worth it! 

Or was it? Maybe me and Richard would be bffs now and enjoy a long and rich relationship if I’d not forced him to blurb my book. How often are you really buying a book because of the endorsement anyway? Some publishers are dropping the whole hideous process, and presumably freeing their authors from that repetitive stress dream where Richard Osman takes them to court for trying to hide in his attic so that they can artfully position copies of their book around his home. Maybe we should all just do what one former Trump staffer did (and I’ve spent the best part of an hour looking for his name and failing, did he delete any record of it out of shame?) and blurb his own book. Here’s my effort “please buy this book so that my literary nemesis (insert name here) doesn’t beat me in the charts, thereby ensuring an ego death so painful I end up bed bound for an entire decade.” 

Great doors, beautiful doors -

Once again I am breaking my own rule and showing you a window but what a window! Some hopeful and brave soul has thumbed their nose at the centuries old window tax and reinstated a window! Why is it smaller? We don’t know. We’re not here to question such a singular and brave person. 

Recommendations - 

Hard to kick off with the bleakest piece I’ve read all week but here we are. Reads like a thriller, your heart will be in your stomach. Parents, exercise caution. ‘This is how a child dies of measles.’

A great podcast episode about how to be part of a community. 

I bought an acupressure mat because…I mean why does anyone buy a mat with sharp needles in it? To feel something? To stop feeling something? Anyway I won’t link to the one I got because you are your own person with free will but I’m not hating it. 

Hey! North & South, the 2004 adaptation featuring the smouldering look and unforgettable command “look back at me” is streaming on channel U, which sounds like it might be a smutty channel but isn’t. It’s been lost from streaming for what seems like forever so please go and watch it so that it never leaves me again. 

*Legally I think I have to say he didn’t write this endorsement.

If you enjoyed this article, please subscribe. It’s £4 a month and lets me write without having to beg for Angela Rippon for an endorsement.