Are you sitting down? In what the trade publication Publisher’s Weekly reported as a “stunning” or “tour-de-force” development, the publisher of Simon & Schuster’s flagship imprint has announced that it will no longer require authors to provide promotional blurbs for their books.
If you’re still standing and breathing normally, chances are you’re not an author. Be grateful! All these years, you have been spared the indignity of going on bended knee, begging people — generally more eminent than yourself — to sprinkle holy water on your manuscript.
If you are an author — a blurbee, as it were — you’re probably uttering hosannas of thanks to S&S publisher Sean Manning for this benison. And if you’re a blurber, that is, on the receiving end of requests for unction, your hosannas may even be more fervent.
Asking for praise is an undignified business. It is inherently awkward, especially if the person you’re asking is an acquaintance, friend, or worse yet, someone who sells more books than you do. (In my case, roughly 98 percent of the author-sphere.)
I know this from experience. After six books and almost two decades of mendicancy, my knees had to be surgically unbent. They weren’t the only damaged part of me. My self-esteem was so low, my self-loathing so high that I avoided mirrors.
Dear Mr. Updike, I know you must hate getting letters like this, but I was wondering if you’d drop whatever you’re doing and spend the next two days reading my new book.
Eminent authors do, indeed, “hate getting letters like this.” To make Mr. Updike’s happiness complete, many such requests end with a sheepish PS: Sorry to ask, but would it be possible to let me have your praise by next Thursday? My publisher — who, by the way, is your No. 2 fan, next to me — says that’s the latest he can hold the presses.
After six books, I told my editor (who is now publisher, president and C.E.O. of S&S): “No more blurbs for this camper.” He wasn’t thrilled, but good man that he is, he acceded. We have gone on to do 14 more books together, all of them blurbless, leaving Mr. Updike and the other gods of Olympus in unmolested peace.
On the higher slopes of Mount Olympus, blurbs are a way by which the gods speak to each other in code, with the whole world watching. One of the delights of the late, great Spy magazine was its feature, “Logrolling in Our Time,” which mortified many reciprocal blurbers and blurbees. To pick just one … oh dear …
“Cheever continues to do what the best fiction has always done: give us back our humanity, enhanced.” (John Updike on John Cheever’s “Falconer.”)
“Superb — the most important American novel I’ve read in years.” (Cheever on Updike’s “Rabbit Is Rich.”)
In 2000, Christopher Hitchens brought out a book garlanded with praise from Christopher’s beau idéal, Gore Vidal. Its tone of hauteur perfectly matched Mr. Vidal’s residence in Ravello, Italy, an aerie perched on a cliff high above the Tyrrhenian Sea:
“I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, an inheritor, a dauphin or Delfino. I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens.”
Their mutual admiration society came to grief following 9/11, which Vidal viewed as just deserts, and Christopher viewed rather differently. By this point, Vidal had become verbally incontinent, referring to Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber as a “noble boy.” Christopher denounced Vidal’s “crackpot strain” in the pages of Vanity Fair.
This lèse-majesté resulted in defenestration from Ravello. He surrendered his Delfino coronet with typical panache. The back cover of his 2010 memoir, “Hitch-22,” carries what might be the first instance of de-blurbing:
“I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, an inheritor, a dauphin or Delfino. I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens.” This text ran with a giant “X’ across it.
My father, William F. Buckley, Jr., was capable of similar sleight-of-hand in blurbmanship.
He and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. were lifelong ideological opponents who frequently found themselves clashing on numerous public platforms. At one debate in the early Sixties, Schlesinger said in his opening remarks, “Mr. Buckley has a facility for rhetoric which I envy, as well as a wit which I seek clumsily and vainly to emulate.” Rather nice, but a low-hanging fruit. Dear old Dad couldn’t resist. As he recounted in his book “Cruising Speed”:
“A year or so later, I scooped them [Schlesinger’s kind words] up, and stuck them, unadorned, on the jacket of my new book, and waited for all hell to break loose; which it did, telephone calls, telegrams, threats of a lawsuit. I saw Arthur at a party the next year and told him that the deadline for the blurb for my next book was April 15, but that if he didn’t have time to compose a fresh one, I’d use the old one, which was after all hard to improve upon.”
Both these giants have left the building. If they were still with us, W.F.B. would doubtless be sending Mr. Schlesinger a link to the Publishers Weekly story, with a note saying that the exemption doesn’t apply in their case, and that the deadline for a new blurb is next Thursday.
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