A Bookworm Bonus

The novelist Alex Pugsley discovers a good blurb is hard to find

Blurb Your Enthusiasm

There are three reasons to read Balzac. First of all, it sounds cool to tell people you’re reading Balzac. Secondly, if you want a detailed panorama of life in nineteenth-century France, you will get a detailed panorama of life in nineteenth-century France. Thirdly, you can collect clever tidbits about the creative pursuit. Here are two: “It is extremely rare for a book to be bought simply because it is good,” and “The hardest thing for an artist is to get himself noticed.”

I tend to agree with these aperçus—that happens when you read Balzac—and those sentiments feel truer now than when they were published two centuries ago. So, in a world glutted with half a million new books every year, how does a writer get noticed? One strategy you can pursue is to collect endorsements from other authors. In a word: blurbs. But where do they come from and who makes them happen?

Reader, it’s often the writers themselves. It’s the writer who has to ferret out a phone number, cold-call a celebrity, hunt down an email address, or send a grovelling note to the friend of a friend. “This is the worst part of writing,” Marina Endicott said in an email, “having to ask people for blurbs.”

Over the years, I have found that the process is, like online dating, a numbers game. For every Yes there will be several Nos. Rejections pile up from the authors: “I’m really sorry to say no this time.” “I’m sorry but am not blurbing these days!” “Good luck with the book!” And they pile up from their agents: “He does apologize, but he is slammed for time and can’t carve anything out in the short-term. Can’t wait to read the book!” “Alex, hi! Thanks for writing, but she isn’t blurbing.” “Thank you so much for being in touch! Unfortunately, we’re not open to blurbs at the moment, but we appreciate your interest!”

Many superstar novelists have a standard boilerplate reply, and I was rather delighted to receive from Margaret Atwood’s director of operations a poem in eight quatrains:

In my youth, I blurbed with the best;

I practically worked with a stencil!

I strewed quotes about with the greatest largesse,

And the phrases flowed swift from my pencil.

Infinitely more preferable than a ghosting non-reply.

In the blurb game, one should—to employ a phrase I learned recently—“lean into the suck.” That is, you have to know what you are getting into, own your failures, and keep moving.

Good things can happen, though, and useful diligence will at last prevail. Let me share with you the travails and experiences of two writers with novels that came out this spring. Heidi von Palleske recently published The Lost Queen, the second in a planned trilogy, which carries recommendations from Jeremy Irons and John Irving. How did that happen?

Von Palleske has had a storied career in film and starred alongside Irons in Dead Ringers in 1988. About six months ago, when Dundurn Press issued advanced reader copies, she sent one to the English actor. “A really, really good book,” he responded, “a real page turner. I loved it!” But John Irving was not a former colleague. Von Palleske had originally asked a screenwriter and producer for a blurb. He told her to try Michael Ondaatje or John Irving, and to send the manuscript not to their agents but directly to their home addresses. Through mysterious means, she located Irving’s whereabouts.

“I looked at that address a long while before I found the courage to take any action,” she said. “I wrote a very charming letter, apologizing for being so direct, and sent it off with my ARC, expecting absolutely nothing back. On New Year’s Day, I received an email from him with a generous and most wonderful blurb. I think I screamed in delight!” That his support would bring attention to her work, she had no doubt. But it had other consequences, too: “To have someone who was then a stranger, someone I so highly admired, write me a letter about my book as well as write me that blurb did more than promote the book. It gave me the confidence to continue as a writer.”

Liz Johnston, whose debut novel, The Fall-Down Effect, dropped last month from Book*hug Press, has long held that endorsements have an impact. “I know some writers would, understandably, like to move away from the expectation of blurbs,” she said in an email, “but I don’t know how the marketing forces will ever allow it when blurbs do sell books.”

Reaching out to established authors—and Johnston has met many as an editor at Brick magazine—was still fraught. “I found sending these emails incredibly stressful,” she explained. “And I think the stress came less from wondering if they’d say yes or no than from just asking such a big favour in the first place.” She elaborated: “It’s no small thing to say, ‘Hey, could you read this whole novel and then write some words in praise of it?’”

But it was a risk worth taking. The Fall-Down Effect has received commendations from two award-winning authors. “From what I’ve gleaned on social media,” Johnston continued, “it seems some readers are excited about my book more because of the blurbs from Madeleine Thien and Alissa York than catalogue copy or anything else.”

I should let you know—and this aside would be best placed in a post-postmodernist footnote if I did that sort of thing—that there has been a whirling hellstorm of think pieces about such promotion. Most notable among them are “‘A Plague on the Industry’: Book Publishing’s Broken Blurb System,” by Sophie Vershbow in Esquire; “The Blurb Problem Keeps Getting Worse,” by Helen Lewis in The Atlantic; “Blurbs: Some Complaints & a Proposal,” on Catherine Lacey’s Substack; and “The Literary Favor Economy: In Praise of the Oft-Maligned Book Blurb,” by Ada Calhoun on Lit Hub.

Should you venture into these articles, you will learn about ghostblurbing and blurblejerks, but you will also encounter some salient remarks about the state of the industry.

Helen Lewis interviewed the indie publisher Mark Richards, who likened the gathering of testimonials to an arms race. “People figured out that they helped,” he told her, “so more effort was put into getting them, until a point was reached where they didn’t necessarily make any positive difference; it’s just that not having them would likely ruin a book’s chances.”

While I’m not entirely certain about such ruination, I feel that Lewis’s subsequent explanation for the arms race is bang on. She points to “the switch across the arts from a traditional critical culture to an internet-centred one driven by influencers and reliant on user reviews.”

True. There are more and more books and fewer and fewer proper reviews. For some authors, a blurb and a Goodreads takedown may be all you get. Responsible reviewing and criticism are diminished and diminishing. Although I suspect that none of this would have fazed Balzac. “As rare as a serious critic in the world of literature” runs one of his epigrams.

So, we have returned to Honoré. What advice can I impart to the young writers of today? Gather ye blurbs while ye may. Yes, sure, go after them. They will help position your work with readers and booksellers. But I do not think they are the difference between success and failure. You are not obliged to assemble publicity. Your energy may be better spent on the manuscript. As Balzac would say… Well, as Balzac did say, “The only duty genius has is to itself.”

—Alex Pugsley is a writer and filmmaker in Toronto. His latest book, Silver Lake, the third instalment in the Aubrey McKee novels, is out this week.

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From the Archives: Aubrey McKee

Before digging into Silver Lake, get caught up with the first two Aubrey McKee books with this review from our June 2024 issue. “Bold and dynamic, Pugsley’s novels are lively and vivid, filled with individuals who are benevolent and cruel and with scenes that are captivating and terrifying,” Liam Rockall observed. “Aubrey McKee and The Education of Aubrey McKee are the first two acts of a sweeping personal drama, and any remaining volumes cannot come fast enough.”