Blurb? Will do!
I’m working late. Contracts, paying bills, rejecting, er considering, query letters. I’ve got to send out a manuscript for blurbs and I’m stumbling on the letter. Asking for blurbs is the worst part of the job. It’s usually in the editor’s purview to get the blurbs, but I usually help out when I know a writer. Did I ever tell you how I found a galley for a book I edited in a used bookstore and within the galley was my letter asking an author for a blurb. Agh.
Sorry, I don't give blurbs. It's a policy.
Once, I gave a blurb to a book I didn’t like that much because I’m a good egg, I guess. When the book came out, it had five other blurbs on the jacket from writers far more significant than I will ever be. I was flattered to be in such blurb company. Blurb company? Was the book better than I realized, or was the writer super connected. You can’t blow that many writers, or can you?
Filed under: Publishing, The End of the World as We Know It |
Betsy Lerner 
I’d totally blow for a blurb. Hell, I’d blurb for a blow.
Why didn’t I think of that? I’m making a list!
Hmmmm, getting a blurb has a direct relationship to the size platform an author enjoys, at least, that’s what my human believes. Or, in fewer words, “It’s who you know.” Now consider my difficulties. As a Golden Retriever, it’s limited to the front porch or the rear of my human’s pick-up. You can see I share your frustration.
http://www.sandysays1.wordpress.com
Well, at least you help put down a myth…or is it. I read someone – yeah, I can’t remember where, that most blurbs by big authors are done by the PR people and that the big authors giving the blurbs really don’t read. Please, tell me it ain’t true, Dolly. Tell me that Stephen King really reads ALL those books he blurbs. He writes fast, maybe he reads fast!
Thank you for the daily comic relief! Your candid posts are hilarious!
What were the chances that you of all people would find your own letter in a bookshop? Horror and relief in one go.
Good luck with the blurb letters; you have my sympathy. I can’t even sell any of my Unicef raffle tickets, because it feels so awkward to ask–now how would I ask for a blurb??
I used to be available for a blurb, any time, any where. But then the blurbing got out of control, and I had to join a twelve step program. Now I only blurb in secret.
THIS JUST IN: Chick-let has a new heroine: the girl who’s overweight and doesn’t care. I read it in Shelf Awareness today. So here’s our chance to get there first:
FAT VAMPIRES.
You can blow that many people…it just takes time and talent.
I just revised a dark mystery, Amy In Full Flush- about the best woman poker player in the world, and found out that it is a new genre – tart noir! not only a tart noir, but a dark comedy tart noir (is that redundant?)
My brother Verl and I had dinner one night with Curtis Sittenfeld. She later wrote Verl a letter from her apartment in Philadelphia. Maybe I could put in a good word for you Betsy.
Well, I don’t have a “day job” but I am taking care of my son who had an accident a couple of years ago. So I quit my day job, to take care of his needs, like food and shopping and around the house things, and with the rest of my time I write. This helps me because, when I wrote before, it was hard to find time to write; now that I have time, it is because my child needs me. So, guilt? You bet I have guilt. Guilt that I want to write so badly and it is only because of my son’s accident that I have time; guilt that I cannot make my son well.
The making for a perfect obsession!
Oh, yes, I had lunch a few years ago with Ernest Gaines,,,,we grew up in the same area….he on the black side of the tracks, me on the white. What a marvelous man! His advise to me: Write your heart, write it as hard as you can. And then I read a wonderful interview with James Lee Burke (he in New Iberia, La, me in Abbeville, La.) wherein he remarkded that his writing came from a higher power (I know, I know, he used to drink lots) and it is the act itself that is blessed.
All writers, we are the blessed; think that and it gets you through the day!
What is the saying? “Never blurb a book you’ve read, and never read a book you’ve blurbed.”