What Are Blurbs For, When No One Listens Anymore?

I’m catching up with all the emails that piled up while I was on the road, and I found a pointer to a Freakonomics post where NYT columnist Rob Walker questioned the utility of blurbs, noting that they aren’t so much for ordinary consumers as bookstore buyers, who look for the endorsement of established authors before gambling on the unproven debuts. “Whether it makes any more sense for those people to pay attention to blurbs than it does for a consumer to pay attention I cannot say,” Walker remarks, to which the most obvious response is that it might not make sense, but if it’s true, of course it’s important to cultivate the people who are responsible for putting the books in front of the people who’ll buy them. That’s Publishing 101, or should be.

Even less surprising: Walker’s supposition that “some blurbers seem to use the process simply as self-marketing,” backed up by his own experience of having people who haven’t read his upcoming book offer to blurb it. Although, as Stephen J. Dubner comments afterwards, “I’ve never had some writer hunt me down and offer to blurb my books—so Rob must be doing something right.”

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