- Blurb your Enthusiasm: An A -Z of Literary Persuasion, by Louise Willder. Oneworld, $29.99.
A British publisher recently said, in terms of selling a new book, that the cover, the blurb and social media marketing were actually more important than the actual words in the book.
Louise Willder, copywriting manager at Penguin Books, has written over 5000 blurbs for Penguin in a 25-year publishing career. Willder reflects that in blurbs, "you're trying to offer the reader clues and little triggers . . ., you're always thinking about your audience and you try and imagine the reader in your head". Willder endorses the words of Italian writer Roberto Calasso, who called a blurb "a letter to a stranger", while Iris Murdoch believed "blurb writing is a mini art form".
Blurb your Enthusiasm is an enjoyable and comprehensive, nearly-350-page survey of the blurb. I was about to add that it's extremely readable, but "readable" is one of Willder's bête noir descriptors, emphasising, after all, that "it's a book".
There are now more books published than ever before in a variety of formats, but until dust jackets became the norm in the late 19th century, the blurb did not really take off. The word "blurb" was coined by American humourist Frank Gelett Burgess, whose 1907 book cover Are You a Bromide? featured "Miss Belinda Blurb".
Some authors, like JD Salinger, shun publicity. The Catcher in the Rye sold 65 million copies globally with only Salinger's name and title.
Willder, in her chapter "Step Away From the Bonnet", reviews the blurbs of Jane Austen novels over the decades and identifies the worst attached to an edition of Pride & Prejudice: "Mom's fishing for husbands - but the girls are hunting for love".
Austen couldn't do anything about that one, but Jeanette Winterson was so infuriated in 2021 with the cosy, domestic blurbs on new editions of her Penguin paperbacks that she publicly set fire to them. "Turned me into wimmins fiction of the worst kind! Nothing playful or strange or the ahead of time stuff that's in there. So I set them on fire."
Needless to say the ensuing publicity saw the Penguin covers changed. Willder asserts she was not involved in Winterson's transgressions.
Willder has a chapter on puns in which she cites Purls of Wisdom, a book about knitting, and elsewhere gives high praise to the publicity line in Shirley Conran's Lace: "Which one of you bitches is my mother?"
Willder doesn't believe human copywriters will be replaced by AI, as the blurb writer has to empathise with "the reader and the effect that words will have on them".
In Blurb your Enthusiasm, Willder superbly tells the inside story of the outside of books.
