Do Not Break The Blurb Laws Or You’ll Be In Blurb Jail

Said again and again, blurbs are weird. It’s a weird word (like blog), sometimes used to describe the marketing quote an author gives another author to go on or in their book, and other times used to describe the book itself (as in, flap copy or cover copy). And it’s a process too that seems to come shrouded in conspiracy, as if we’re all getting paid to blurb books — or as if it’s some know-who-you-know kinda backscratchy thing. Or that nobody actually reads the books at all and blurbs are instead just auto-generated by agents or editors or rogue artbarf AIs.

I’ve always considered a BLURB REQUEST to be an honor — I mean, the fact that anyone would consider my name and my dumb thoughts to be an asset in favor of a book and that book’s writer? Well, that’s too nice. And I genuinely consider it a privilege to be able to get a book in advance of publication in the hopes of supporting that book and that author. Free books? By cool authors?? That haven’t been released to gen-pop yet??? My heart, it is a-flutter.

Still! Still. A problem: this summer has seen my blurb requests go up up up to as-yet-unseen levels. I was getting multiple book requests a week. Now, this is a nice problem to have! Again: an honor. One deeper problem was that a lot of these requests had very tight deadlines — often it was, “We need a quote in a month,” and that was without understanding that I had piles of requests already ahead of them.

Now, I don’t read everything I get. It’s impossible. I don’t read them in order, necessarily, either, but obviously I try to surf through the stuff that needs to be read sooner. And I certainly don’t blurb everything that comes across my desk. Not because of quality issues — to be frank, I am of the opinion that traditional publishing has the highest quality levels of most of the, erm, storytelling media formats. If something hits my inbox, it’s probably good to great. It passed enough muster and rigor to be something solid. It may not be for me, which is where I try to find the books that tickle my heartparts.

At this point, though, it’s getting difficult to manage the sheer amount of books coming in for requests. It means I have to read them fast, which I don’t like, because I am an increasingly slow reader. And it also means I’m not reading all the books I own that I bought. Which, lemme tell ya, ain’t a small number. I buy books constantly. And I read the books I buy almost never. My TBR pile is its own wall at this point. As in, I could get some mortar and use the books as bricks.

As such, my new policy for blurbs is this:

They all have to go through my agent.

Doesn’t matter who you are, if we’ve never met or you’re my twin brother, Chnurk Mandog. They all go to my agent and my agent will help manage that process, because honestly it’s been a lot here at the Wendighaus and the blurb list actually got kinda stressful? Which is not ideal.

So, if you want a book blurbed by me — my agent is Stacia Decker at DCL. She will handle all blurb requests going forward.

OKAY THANK YOU BYE