Blurb

Based on Wikipedia: Blurb

In 1855, Walt Whitman received a letter that would change book marketing forever. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most celebrated American intellectual of his era, had read Whitman's self-published poetry collection Leaves of Grass and was moved to write: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career." Whitman, never one to let an opportunity pass, had those golden words stamped in actual gold leaf on the spine of his next edition.

It was shameless. It was brilliant. And it invented an entire industry.

The Birth of a Word

The term for this practice wouldn't exist for another fifty years. In 1906, American humorist Gelett Burgess created a parody dust jacket for his book Are You a Bromide? at a publishing industry dinner. The custom at such events was to feature an attractive young woman on every book jacket—"languishing, heroic, or coquettish," as one publisher described the aesthetic requirements.

Burgess decided to mock the convention. He created a fictional woman named "Miss Belinda Blurb" and depicted her in the act of enthusiastically promoting the book. The jacket proclaimed: "YES, this is a 'BLURB'!"

The joke stuck. Within years, "blurb" had entered the publishing lexicon, and it has remained there ever since—a rare case of a word being deliberately invented and successfully adopted into everyday language.

The Anatomy of Praise

What exactly goes into a blurb? Almost anything that might convince you to buy a book. Publishers mix and match from a standard toolkit: quotes pulled from the text itself, biographical details about the author, plot summaries that reveal just enough to intrigue, and—most importantly—endorsements from other writers.

Those endorsements are where things get interesting.

In the 1980s, Spy magazine ran a recurring feature called "Logrolling in Our Time." The column did nothing but expose authors who wrote blurbs for each other's books—a literary form of mutual back-scratching that the magazine found endlessly amusing to document. Writer A praises Writer B's novel; months later, Writer B returns the favor. Round and round it goes.

The practice persists because it works. A quote from a famous author signals to potential readers that this book has been vetted by someone whose taste they trust. Whether that trust is warranted—whether the famous author actually read the book, or owed a favor, or is simply a generous person who says yes to everything—remains unknown to the consumer.

The Blurb Industrial Complex

For successful writers, blurb requests have become an occupational hazard. Imagine being asked, fifteen to twenty times per week, to read someone's unpublished manuscript and provide a quote that will help sell it. That's the reality for some prominent authors.

Different writers have developed different coping strategies.

Gary Shteyngart announced in The New Yorker that he would stop writing blurbs entirely, except for writers with whom he already had professional or personal relationships. It was a public declaration of surrender—a famous author admitting he simply couldn't keep up with demand.

Neil Gaiman takes a cyclical approach. "Every now and again, I stop doing blurbs," he has explained. "The hiatus lasts for a year or two, and then I feel guilty or someone asks me at the right time, and I relent." It's the literary equivalent of falling off the wagon.

Jacob M. Appel represents the opposite extreme. Receiving those fifteen to twenty requests weekly, he tackles "as many as I can"—a Sisyphean commitment to helping other writers that most of his peers have abandoned.

A System in Crisis

In 2025, Simon & Schuster made a remarkable announcement: the publishing giant would no longer expect its authors to solicit blurbs for their own books. The company's reasoning, as reported in The New York Times, was blunt: the practice "often rewards connections over talent" and consumes too much of authors' time.

This was a major publisher admitting that a century-old marketing tradition had become dysfunctional. The system had evolved to favor authors who knew the right people, who had gone to the right schools, who moved in the right literary circles. Meanwhile, talented writers without those connections were left at a disadvantage—their books arriving in the world without the endorsements that might have helped them find readers.

Whether other publishers will follow Simon & Schuster's lead remains to be seen. The blurb has survived every other challenge to its existence. It survived the transition from hardcover dust jackets to mass-market paperbacks (where blurbs now appear on both front and back covers). It survived the shift to online bookselling (where blurbs appear on product pages). It will likely adapt to whatever comes next.

Hollywood's Blurb Problem

If book blurbs occasionally stretch the truth, movie blurbs have turned truth-stretching into an art form.

The classic technique involves strategic editing. A critic writes "This movie is not good"—and the studio's advertisement quotes only the words "This movie is... good." Legal? Technically. Ethical? That's a different question.

The problem intensified as traditional newspaper film critics disappeared and studios began quoting internet bloggers and movie websites instead. The barriers to entry dropped. Anyone could become a quotable critic, and studios had more options for finding someone—anyone—willing to say something positive about even the worst films.

An entire ecosystem of watchdog sites emerged in response. EFilmCritic.com began tracking misleading blurbs. Gelf magazine published "The Blurbs," a regular column by Wall Street Journal writer Carl Bialik dedicated to exposing deceptive movie marketing. Review aggregator sites like Rotten Tomatoes gave consumers tools to cross-reference the enthusiastic quotes in advertisements against what critics actually thought.

The Motion Picture Association of America reviews movie advertisements before they run, but only for tone and content—not for accuracy. Whether a quote has been taken out of context falls outside their purview. Studios are technically supposed to run condensed quotes past the original critics "as a courtesy," but courtesy is not enforcement.

The Manufactured Quote

Perhaps the most cynical evolution in movie blurbing is the quote that comes directly from the film's own marketing team. Some studios have created fake critics, complete with fake publications and fake bylines, to generate the praise they couldn't obtain honestly. When exposed, these schemes generate brief scandals—and then the industry moves on.

The incentives are simply too powerful. A good blurb can mean millions of dollars in additional ticket sales. A bad opening weekend can doom a film's entire theatrical run. In that environment, the temptation to manufacture enthusiasm becomes nearly irresistible.

Why Blurbs Persist

Despite all the manipulation, despite the logrolling, despite the manufactured quotes and the strategic editing, blurbs continue to influence purchasing decisions. Why?

Part of the answer is information asymmetry. When you're considering whether to spend money and time on a book or movie, you know almost nothing about what you're getting. The blurb offers a signal—imperfect, potentially misleading, but still more information than you had before.

Another part is social proof. Humans are wired to care about what other humans think. When Stephen King says a novel kept him up all night, that means something to King's readers, even if they suspect the quote was provided as a favor to a friend.

And there's simple familiarity. We've had 170 years since Whitman stamped Emerson's praise on his book, and over a century since Miss Belinda Blurb gave the practice its name. The blurb is woven into how we market creative work. Removing it would require inventing something else to take its place.

The Honest Blurb

What would a truly honest blurb look like? Perhaps something like this: "I received this manuscript from my publisher, who also publishes the author. I read approximately forty pages before skimming the rest. The prose seemed competent. I owed someone a favor. Here is my quote."

No one would print that. No one would buy that book.

And so the blurb persists—a necessary fiction that everyone participates in, a promotional form that admits its own promotional nature while pretending not to. Miss Belinda Blurb, depicted more than a century ago "in the act of blurbing," would recognize the practice instantly. The technology has changed. The platforms have multiplied. But the fundamental transaction remains the same: someone with credibility lending it, however temporarily, to something seeking attention in a crowded marketplace.

Whether that attention is deserved is something only you can discover—after you've already paid.