I don't know if you can become a writer without buddies
on blurbs and leverage
At 1:26 p.m. on Monday, July 27, 2015, I received this email from my book editor:
Hey Leigh,
Hate to spring this upon you so quickly, but [my boss] is wondering if you could get us a blurb or word of praise from someone by this Thursday (when we launch). I understand if it's not doable, but I think it would be a nice way to launch the book. Wondering...
Have you ever been asked to get a blurb in 72 hours? Are your palms sweating yet?
I replied:
Yikes...that doesn't put me in a very good position, begging for such a last-minute favor, when the book isn't even finished yet. I'll see what I can do. Is [your boss] aware of all the other praise my first two books have gotten? It's not like I'm a new author. You can find lots of great press quotes on the Melville House pages for my books
I had forgotten this part of the story—that I hadn’t even finished writing the memoir—until I revisited these old emails. My response to him is so cocksure! Is your boss aware of all my other praise? Ah, to be so young and not yet humbled by professional failure!
My editor said he totally understood and he’d look for other quotes. Instead of saying “cool thanks” like a normal person, I rose to the challenge of accomplishing the impossible and told him I would find “a few” blurbs. When was my hard deadline?
Thursday at noon.
At the time, I was the Executive Director of Out of the Binders/BinderCon. On Facebook, I led an online community of 40,000 writers, and there were 200 subgroups (not moderated by yours truly) dedicated to various identity groups and genres (novelists, short story writers, etc.) I went to the Binder for memoirists and begged for help.
Domenica Ruta, author of the bestselling memoir With or Without You, said she could help. I emailed my manuscript to her on Tuesday morning.
She replied, “I'm single-mothering a 2 month old who REFUSES to take a decent nap so I'm limited in how much I can read but I'll try to get as far as I can and get you a blurb by Thursday that does not use the word luminous because enough already.”
Unbelievably, 24 hours later, she sent me this:
In Land of Enchantment, Leigh Stein examines every cruelty and humiliation of her obsessive first love with bold intelligence and uncommon grace. A riveting, fiercely honest story about how a smart girl from a good family can fall into darkness this deep.
It was one of the most generous things another writer has ever done for me. Domenica didn’t owe me anything. We’d never met each other. She wasn’t writing me a blurb so that I would do something for her in return. She was single parenting a two-month-old and she donated hours of her time to solving my professional emergency.
By now, you’ve heard the news that Sean Manning is no longer going to “require” blurbs at Simon & Schuster. Many have heralded this as a welcome bit of good news: in “Yes, Free Us from the the Blurb Industry Complex,”
has written a wild and raucous list of alternative uses of back cover real estate; has weighed in from a publicist’s perspective on why blurbs don’t matter.As one of my colleagues pointed out to me, “I bet the no blurbs necessary approach will work out fine for S&S—it’s a pretty commercial list.” Here are a few books that Sean Manning has acquired: Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died, Anna Marie Tendler’s Men Have Called her Crazy, and Lee Tilghman’s forthcoming If You Don’t Like This I Will Die.
Jennette McCurdy fans are gonna buy Jennette’s memoir, regardless of blurbs. There’s a built-in fandom. So it’s as if Sean is telling us, “I’m freeing my celebrities from the burden of asking other celebrities to hype them!”
I don’t celebrate an end to blurbs for two reasons. First, book publishing is a business built on relationships and I think it sends the message to writers that they can have a career without building a network or growing an audience, which I don’t believe is true.
Second, I think endorsements (and pre-endorsements, which I’ll discuss further below) can be a form of leverage for writers who don’t come from affluent, well-connected families, or have Ivy League credentials.
I was re-reading Margo’s Got Money Troubles for my plot structure class and I came across this scene where Margo asks her dad, a retired wrestling manager, for advice on starting from scratch. How does a wrestler get his first-ever job?
“…if you’re not from some dynasty or special background, I think you just make a tape.”
“A tape of you wrestling?”
“Yeah. With your buddies or whatever in the backyard.”
“What if you don’t have any buddies?”
“Gosh, I don’t know if you can become a wrestler without buddies.”
If you are new here and don’t know my backstory, I dropped out of high school junior year. I have a GED. I went to community college. At 22, I moved to Albuqerque with an abusive boyfriend and wrote my first novel while waiting tables at the Owl Cafe for $2.17 an hour. I published my first two books before I finished my bachelors degree, as a working adult student, at Brooklyn College. I do not have an MFA. I owe my writing career to the internet. That’s where I met my buddies.
Book publishing is a competitive business. At every stage of the publishing process, you’re competing for attention and resources. If you have an MFA from Iowa, that’s your unique advantage. If you have 100,000 TikTok followers or 30,000 Substack subscribers, that’s your unique advantage. If you have an agent whose emails trigger editors to stop everything they’re doing, that’s your unique advantage. (Come to my Chat Room with Alia on Monday!)
If you have a friend or a colleague or a mentor who is influential and willing to say a few words of praise about the book you’ve been writing for six years, why wouldn’t you leverage that?
The day before Manning wrote that S&S would no longer require blurbs, I hosted a Chat Room conversation with the literary agent Kara Rota, who was formerly an editor at Flatiron and St. Martin’s Press. When she brought up pre-endorsements, I got excited, because this is a subject I’ve been wanting to cover.
For those who don’t know, a pre-endorsement is a blurb you get before your book has even been acquired. You might include it in your query letter or on your book proposal, or your agent might include it in her submission letter (or add it to your proposal before going out on submission).
Here’s what Kara said (quoted with her permission):
I know this is kind of controversial, but having endorsements on the proposal can be great. Some authors, understandably, do not like to be asked to blurb a book that has not yet been written, so it's not the place to burn your third-degree connection to someone. But if you have friends that are published, that you know would do anything to support you, it certainly doesn't hurt to get blurbs on the proposal. As an editor when something came in with blurbs, I was so grateful because it really helped me sell it in. The blurb that you get on the proposal also doesn't have to be the blurb that you put on the book at the end. It can really be an endorsement about you and your work. It doesn't have to be about the book that isn't written yet, but having something that's a placeholder (and then you know that author is going to give a real blurb) can make a difference.
Blurbs are one way you can prove engagement. It’s showing instead of telling.
This week, I surveyed several different people about pre-endorsements, to see if they feel similarly to Kara about whether pre-endorsements make a difference in a book acquisition. You may be happy to learn that not everyone agrees with Kara!
, president of Neon Literary and creator of the Substack, told me that she will occasionally quote “something nice someone prominent has already said about my client” (e.g., on social media) in a submission letter or proposal, but that she would “rather bathe in carbolic acid than solicit a special blurb just for this purpose.”(Hidden inside that joke is a pro tip: save any compliments you get in public from other prominent writers/thinkers! If Margaret Atwood retweets your essay and says “Luminous,” babe, you’ve got a pre-endorsement!)
I also asked Anna if pre-endorsements in a query letter make any difference to her and here’s what she told me:
, VP at The Gernert Company and creator of the Substack, is in harmony with Anna:I've received a huge number of these, including dozens from just a couple of famous literary authors who seem to pre-blurb tons and tons of up-and-comers' projects. It's a generous thing for them to do, but the couple I'm thinking of have done it so many times that I'm no longer even mildly intrigued seeing their name.
Mind you: pre-blurbs from these people (or anyone!) never prejudice me against a submission. They just don't make a difference beyond maybe .5 seconds of passing intrigue for a name I don't see often. I read pre-blurbed submissions with the same pace and interest level I read all submissions—and I pass on most, because I have to pass on most submissions in general.
Here's the hard truth: blurbs do not really sell books per se, so a pre-blurb is not in itself evidence that I can sell a book to editors, either. Plus, it evinces more of a lack of closeness between querent and blurber than the opposite. If that big-name author were really the querent's ride-or-die, after all, they'd be emailing me directly (or referring them to their own agent).
That said: I'm 100% not thinking those catty thoughts when I'm reviewing an individual submission. I'm just not really thinking about any blurbs. I'm thinking about the writing, the audience, current patterns in acquisition, and—if it's nonfiction—a bunch of much more important platform concerns.
, formerly an acquiring editor at Soft Skull Press and currently a freelance editor and creator of told me, “It never swayed me one way or the other if a book came in with pre-endorsements. A pre-endorsement might signal that a writer is well-connected to writers with name recognition who are willing to do this writer favors. But sometimes these endorsements were from writers I'd never heard of. Either way, no endorsement in the world would have made me move forward on a book I didn't already feel excited about from the actual pages.”Generally speaking, I don't think pre-endorsements are necessary or even helpful. In most cases, they simply indicate that an author is already well-connected and/or went to an elite MFA program. This can be useful information for a publisher, but it's not determinative of an offer and I don't think they take these super early blurbs all that seriously for precisely these reasons. Besides, it's easy enough for me to signal to a publisher if an author's book will be supported by their literary community in other ways. As an agent, I try to make the submission process as low-anxiety for my authors as possible, and I wouldn't want to add to their considerable stress by sending them prematurely on a blurb-hunting mission. Above all, I really do see it as my job as an agent to run lead in positioning and marketing a book when we are at the submission stage.
But my friend Mackenzie Brady Watson at the Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency tends to agree with me that “blurbs are a lever that authors and agents can use to help get attention for a submission or help the book to gather momentum in house. Publicists can also use them later to get attention from media, too.”
Mackenzie has included blurbs at the proposal stage, “if the praise is coming from an author of particular renown and will have an impact on the publisher’s evaluation of the project, and if the blurb is relatively easy to secure.” But she also recognizes that securing blurbs is “often an arduous and labor intensive process for all involved, especially for authors sending and receiving requests” and is bothered that “the blurb game rewards the most connected people, not necessarily the most quality material.”
With her nonfiction book Poe for Your Problems,
went on two rounds of submissions, with two different agents, and collected over twenty rejections. “Then,” she told me, “after adding pre-pub blurbs (along with some other revisions), the book sold at auction. The support from the four writers who blurbed me wasn’t just professionally meaningful—it was an act of generosity, true-friend stuff. One of those blurbs ended up on the cover.”That cover blurb is from bestselling author Ryan Holliday.
Cat, who now writes the newsletter
, told me:The irony, of course, is that my book’s subject, Edgar Allan Poe, famously hated blurbs. He railed against the whole system, but here we are, hundreds of years later, still using them. And in today’s publishing landscape—with shrinking review space and few non-paid promotional opportunities—blurbs are arguably more important aspects of publicity and marketing than ever. The idea that eliminating them will reduce author anxiety feels naïve to me. Author anxiety finds its level. If not blurbs, it will fixate on something else. And while the system isn’t perfect (what human system is?), I can say that now that I’m in a position to pass the favor along, I do it with real joy—especially since placing traditional book reviews has never been harder.
Call me crazy, but I simply do not believe in a magical meritocracy where readers just “find” books. We’re all trying to be heard in an impossibly crowded attention economy, and blurbs remain one of the few levers authors can pull to give their work a competitive edge. Why take that away?
A literary agent who asked to remain anonymous told me on Friday that one of their clients is currently in the process of soliciting blurbs for a forthcoming book. When they asked another author for an endorsement, the author declined, citing Manning’s essay as a get out of blurb jail free card. The book’s editor told the agent, “that’s not the first time I’ve heard that response this week.”
Will more authors follow suit?
In August of last year, Domenica Ruta sent me an email (subject line: Blurb is the worst word), asking me to blurb her new novel All the Mothers. Here was my opportunity to finally repay her generosity from years ago.
I wrote this: “All the Mothers is a wickedly funny, wildly entertaining, and deeply felt novel about motherhood, money, and making a happy home beyond the borders of convention. You won’t be able to put this one down.”
The thing about blurbs is that they’re a gift of time and attention and devotion. You can’t pay me $10,000 to blurb your book. They are a kind of interpersonal currency—yes, sometimes those relationships were formed at boarding school or at an Ivy, but other times those relationships were cultivated in online communities you scrolled while nursing a baby in the middle of the night.
When I told her I was writing a post about this, Domenica emailed me, “I was feeling really shitty about my book as it didn’t fetch a high advance [compared to my previous two books] but getting your blurb and others made me see it differently, in a more flattering light.”
I completely understand why bestselling authors like Rebecca Makkai must set boundaries around their time and decline blurb requests. But I think removing endorsements from the pitching, publishing, and marketing process will make it harder, not easier, for outsider writers to break in. As Cat Baab-Muguira put it to me, “It could well be the case that blurbs become more difficult to get and more coveted and status-y from here, not less.”
I’m reading in Brooklyn
On Saturday, February 22, I’m reading poetry at an event in Downtown Brooklyn to celebrate the launch of
’s debut poetry collection. Sarah says “Hats, crowns and masquerade masks are encouraged!” I have a special surprise planned from the Leigh Stein archive. Register here.My Next Chat Room
Tomorrow, February 10, I’ll be in conversation with Alia Hanna Habib, who was included in a 2023 Vulture roundup of cultural power brokers. Alia represents nonfiction authors including Merve Emre, Clint Smith, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Judy Batalion (The Light of Days), and has sold literary novels by Lauren Oyler and Dan Kois. I’ll be asking her about selling “project books,” what she’s looking for in literary fiction, and how to turn a Substack newsletter into a nonfiction book.
Really appreciate you saying what hasn’t felt sayable, Leigh: Getting rid of blurbs won’t hurt people who don’t need blurbs. It does have the potential to hurt those who need them or might need them.
I stand by my statement that Leigh’s memoir is so good! How do we get it into reprints?!?