The Blurbing Business

We’ve all seen movie ads featuring reviewers’ nibblets that go something like this: “A rare and brilliant example of fearless cinema.” Sounds like a winner. Except that the original copy may actually have slammed the picture as an “example of fearless cinema gone tragically astray.” Whoops.

While it isn’t the norm, this kind of deception does indeed happen. (Tip: The smaller the font identifying the source, the greater the likelihood it’s a teen blogger in Eastern Europe.) My point is that promotional blurbs, while unavoidable, are oftentimes hinky. Beware.

Let’s focus on the basics. Blurbs come in two varieties: One is simply a short, albeit sometimes misleading, excerpt from a review. The other is a rave that was explicitly sought by the marketing team at a movie, TV, or record company or, most commonly, a book publisher. Remember when blurbs ran on the back of book covers? These days they are frequently featured on the front. That tells you a lot.

Or does it? The consensus in publishing is that no one actually knows whether blurbs help move books. What’s more, the begging that is required in order to tease a blurb out of a superstar author can be energy-draining at best, humiliating at worst.

And yet the blurbosphere remains hyper-active, even after Simon & Schuster’s top publishing exec stunned the book community this year by announcing that his company would henceforth stop prioritizing the practice. They “have become incredibly damaging to what should be our industry’s ultimate goal,” he said, by which he meant releasing titles that stand on their own. His directive has been much brooded over ever since.

The fact of the matter is that some bestselling authors devote so much time to the art of blurbiage — mainly as favors for friends and industry bigwigs — that it adversely affects their own productivity. The writers who willingly participate in the ego-stroking ritual have their reasons, of course. For instance, Gary Shteyngart, a respected novelist and prolific blurber, once told NPR that “I’ve compared people to Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or whatever. I’ll do anything” to draw attention to new books. Shameless? Perhaps. But forgivable in a culture where too few people read quality fiction.

It’s widely understood that many authors (and directors and screenwriters and actors and so on) are only minimally familiar with the work they’ve scribbled a mash-y remark about. Worse, overextended VIPs will sometimes ask a marketing staffer to “go ahead and write me a blurb and I’ll sign off on it.” Alas.

And once someone delivers that string of superlatives, it’s out there for eternity. When Michael Levine, the author of 19 books, was working on the revised edition of his bestselling Broken Windows, a business guide, he urged his publisher to reprise a blurb that had appeared on the back of the first printing 15 years earlier. It was from Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which was a blockbuster. This time, Levine badly wanted it on the cover.

“I’d never even spoken to Dr. Covey,” Levine told me. “And by now, he was dead. But the publisher and I agreed that his comments helped give my book gravitas, and we think it helped with sales” of the updated version.

And so there you have it — a short magazine piece that is “notable,” I immodestly suggest, “for its usefulness, clarity, and wisdom.” Feel free to quote me on that.

In the previous issue, Cable Neuhaus wrote about the current state of magazine cover images.

This article is featured in the July/August 2025 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.