The dark side of blurbs.

[seanan_mcguire]

I read a book recently* that I should have adored. It had a great cover, an interesting premise, and blurbs by several authors that I idolized and trusted. If they were endorsing it, it should have been amazing.

It is currently at the head of my short list for "worst book I read in 2012." I want those hours of my life back.

It wasn't offensive; it didn't call me names or slap my hands or steal my shit. It wasn't poorly written, although it had some pacing issues; the words were in the right order and generally spelled correctly. I can't in all good conscience call it a bad book. But I hated it. Absolutely, empirically, and with very few caveats. It was not my cup of tea. It wasn't even in my cup of tea's time zone. So why did I pick it up?

The blurbs. They made me think this book and I would get along, thus projecting one of the Geek Fallacies onto an innocent piece of prose. Friendship is not transitive, and neither is readability.

This is the dark side of blurbs: this is why authors sometimes have to say "no," even if they like another author's work. Because when I put my name on the cover of a book, I am saying "I like this, and if you like the things I like, you will like it, too." But what happens when you don't? Suddenly everything else I like is questionable. What if Diet Dr Pepper, Monster High dolls, and carnage are all waiting to betray you, too? Where is the line?

We have to be careful. We are trading on your faith, and our reputations.

Have you ever read a book based on the blurbs, only to find your faith in the authors who provided them somewhat shaken? Not your faith in the author who wrote the book—presumably, if you bought it based on blurbs, you didn't have any—but your faith in the blurbers?

(*No, I will not name the book. Why? Well, one, I am not in the business of bad book reviews, unless it's a non-fiction book riddled with factual errors. Other people obviously enjoyed this book, otherwise the blurbs wouldn't have been there in the first place. Your mileage may vary, and all. And two, as an author, I wouldn't want to find someone ranting about one of my books like this. So since the book didn't murder my puppies, I will not name it.)

Comments

[nightfalltwen.livejournal.com]

I don't buy books based on the blurbs by authors I like. Though I will actively avoid books that have been blurbed and gushed over by authors that I can't stand.

I'm so double standard-y or something.

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but you get to set your own standards in this area.

[pointedulac.livejournal.com]

I know that I've picked up books despite their blurbs (a certain sparklepire author has blurbed a LOT of YA books) and liked them regardless. I don't tend to go based on a blurb, although I'm sure it does persuade me on an unconscious level.

I am overwhelming swayed by cover art and titles, which I realize is the point of cover art, but damn I'm a sucker for pretty cover. BTW, the DA cover is gorgeous and currently my computer desktop.

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

Yay!

[aliciaaudrey.livejournal.com]

Author blurbs, no. I won't pay attention to an author blurb unless I know enough about the author to know they won't blurb a book they didn't genuinely like (which means it's an author I like enough that I follow their personal online presence enough to have heard them talk about blurbing, or to have gathered enough about their general attitude that I can make an educated guess about it). I know it happens that authors do, for any number of reasons. So I am inherently very skeptical of them. I wish it was not so, but alas.

I have had this experience with booksellers whose opinions I otherwise trust. I had a book, an epic fantasy which was a Big Excited Thing and has since been largely forgotten (the final book in the trilogy didn't even get published, and not because the author didn't actually write it) which was hyped up to me as being Utterly Fantastic and Full Of All The Stuff I Loved In The Books I Have Been Buying from this bookseller.

Normally, this is what I love about independent booksellers. They get to know you. They get to know your taste. They will hold things aside for you, they will recommend things. It's fantastic.

I hated this book.

HATED. IT. And hated it in ways that made me sit and scratch my head and wonder what the hades the educated woman who otherwise knew my tastes, was a genre reader and thus not snobbish about it (and giving me the "here, this is crap! you like crap!" recommendation) was drinking when she read it.

It was trite.
It was poorly written.
It was sterotyped.
It was a badly written Mary Sue.
The main characters were both insufferable. I wanted to drown the triangulated Sort of Evil But Not Really love interest. I ended up rooting for the villain. This was sad, because he was stupid.

I'm really, really intolerant of dumb villains. They don't give me any kind of threat; if your hero is a shining bastion of uber-powered goodness and probably marshmallow filling, and a super genius, and whatever, and your villain is a bumbling, cackling caricature of evil that seems like he escaped from a Three Stoges film, then your book may get thrown across the room with great force. So you can imagine how much I hated the other characters if I was rooting for Larry the EEEEVIL and his henchmen.

To this day I am not sure why I finished that book. I don't know. I paid money for it; I didn't have a lot of money. And it was kind of like a train wreck. It was horrid and I couldn't turn my head away.

I ended up giving it to a friend. "I think you would REALLY, REALLY like this." I assured her. It was a "Here, you like crap! This is crap!" recommendation.

She LOVED it and so far as I know is still angry that the planned trilogy was never finished.

...

Sometimes I think I am a bad friend.

[pointedulac.livejournal.com]

I recommend books for people like my true calling is to be a librarian, and I tend to base those recs on the person. I have a few coworkers who love books I just don't get, but sometimes I'll read a book I don't care for and know it will be right up their alley, so I hand it over.

You're not a bad friend. You just recognize your tastes are different than your friend's.

[oneminutemonkey.livejournal.com]

And of course now I desperately wonder what book it was, and how it failed so badly. And if it's something I've read recently. Not that I've read anything horrible lately that I'm in a position to speak about. I've read some interesting stuff, some of which I need to get around to reviewing....

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

If you email me, I'll tell you, but I won't post it here.

[avram]

Not quite blurbs, but there's a very smiliar thing that happened to a lot of people with Steven Brust's Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille. The title and cover implied a sort of light-hearted zany space opera, while the actual book is a somber examination of identity, responsibility, and bigoted zealotry, with a heaping side order of Celtic music.

"Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille"

[maverick-weirdo.livejournal.com]

I actually liked it right up until the reveal at the end, which broke plausibility for me.

[mercwriter.livejournal.com]

I pay zero attention to blurbs. They are more like an afterthought, an observation, if I've read/am reading a book--"oh, I see SoAndSo liked it." Neutral observation for me--I bet a bunch of other people liked it, too.

When I pick up a book, the blurbs make no difference. I'll read a book because I WANT to read a book, not because someone (even if I respect their work) loves it and recommends it. Because I'm very, very particular on whose recommendations I go by.

I think I came to view blurbs rather like critical movie reviews--in the sense I grew up hating the critic reviews in the local paper, almost never agreeing with them, and I deeply resented the fact sometimes people I knew would take the critic's word at face value and not want to watch a movie with me 'because Critic says it's bad.' (So, well, I went to a lot of movies by myself.)

Which is not fair, I know, with blurbs being generally positive sort of endorsement. I just can't distance the association. (I do not like to be manipulated into reading/not reading (or viewing) something due to what one person says.) Plus, taste is very selective and individual, and I'm happier if I go by my sense of what I like and what interests me, vs blurb-recommendations.

(Longer, more analytic book reviews are slightly different, but it still comes down to: the book itself has to have something to interest me, no matter what anyone says about it.)

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

That makes a lot of sense. Normally, I ignore them, too. This one was just a perfect storm of "all these authors I trust implicitly love this thing, so I must love it." And I didn't.

nods

[maverick-weirdo.livejournal.com]

I put Dancing With Bears by Michael Swanwick, on my "buy it when I can afford it" list, because there was a blurb by you on the back.

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

I was just so honored to be asked to blurb a Swanwick book. And then it was good!

[calluna]

...it suddenly occurred to me that I have never once paid any attention to the blurbs on any of the books I own.

Huh.

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

Hey, cool.

[archangelbeth]

I think I have only once bought a book based on an author-rec on the cover (the book: Jumper; the rec: Bujold; the verdict: decent book). And even then, I recall that the rec was the tipping point, as I was already holding the thing. The backblurb/synopsis-teaser, the front page which should, in a fair and just world, contain an excerpt from the book itself (and not recommendations!)... Those I read. The rest is just visual noise and I don't even read author-rec blurbs 99% of the time. Unless I'm skimming desperately to see if there is anything about what the bloody book is about, of course.

(As you can guess, I am actively hostile to rec-blurbs when they take up space that could be better served by samples from the book itself, teaser/backmatter, or even nice art. I'm too used to making my own decisions because my own tastes are out of kilter with... well, everyone. Venn diagram with some overlaps, at best; I grew up both reading Dray Prescot and Belgariad books in tandem with my mom (reading the funny parts out loud), but she also adores Regencies, and it's only lately that I was actually terribly interested in any of them that didn't also have psionics or magic. And even then, I have to be in the right mood.)

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm with you; I'd rather have info about the book than a page of people telling me THEY think the book is awesome.

[missingvolume.livejournal.com]

Over the years I have come to realize that certain writers blurb too much and put too much "love" into it when they do. This causes me to ignore the blurbs. The same way I snicker when I see a publisher use a certain reviewer's blurb.

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

I totally get that. There's also the matter of learning how to write your blurbs so they can't be edited to sound even more positive than you intended (I've been burned by this once, on a blurb I wrote).

[cahill42.livejournal.com]

I'm actually not a really big fan of blurbs. Some publishers will plaster them all over a book but fail to put a description on the damn back cover. I don't want to have to fire up the computer so I can know what the freakin book's about.

Blurbs are subjective and don't really tell me much about the book. Give me a summary/abstract/good ol' description any day. :)

[kyrielle]

This. But at the same time, please don't summarize it through chapter END-minus-three. The idea is to tease me into it, not to provide Cliff Notes and spoiler it. (Which I say only because some back covers do. When it gives away a plot twist 2/3 the way through the book....Gah!)

[calico-reaction.livejournal.com]

This is the dark side of blurbs: this is why authors sometimes have to say "no," even if they like another author's work. Because when I put my name on the cover of a book, I am saying "I like this, and if you like the things I like, you will like it, too." But what happens when you don't? Suddenly everything else I like is questionable. What if Diet Dr Pepper, Monster High dolls, and carnage are all waiting to betray you, too? Where is the line?

This is why ignore blurbs, and why I usually (but don't always) ignore blogs of favorite authors. Because the reverse is true: when I love something, but a favorite author doesn't, it does really weird things to skew my perceptive of what I love. I first worry that something is wrong with me for loving it in the first place, but then, inevitably, I take into account the author's nitpicks and when I read that author's work again, well, my brain isn't in such a favorable place. :)

Fortunately, that has not happened here with YOU in your blog. :) But it's happened at a few others. Once, I wanted to tell the author to put her money where her mouth was, and actually write the kind of story she'd wished some movie had been. I didn't, but I wanted to. :-/

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

It's part of why I try to only get really critical when it's genuinely important to me, like my issues with people slaughtering female characters left and right in genre shows. You know what? I kill lots of female characters, because my gender balance is 50/50 most of the time, if not skewed in favor of females. So I have more girls in the line of fire.

I always feel a little weird and uncomfortable when someone I respect as a creator hates something I love, or loves something I hate. It's like...is there something wrong with me? (It's different with friends. Which is good, since Cat and I overlap like, 40% of the time at best in what media we enjoy.)

[catalana.livejournal.com]

Have you ever read a book based on the blurbs, only to find your faith in the authors who provided them somewhat shaken? Not your faith in the author who wrote the book—presumably, if you bought it based on blurbs, you didn't have any—but your faith in the blurbers?

Nope.

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

Cool.

[wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com]

Diet Dr. Pepper will never betray you. Unless it's in a plastic bottle, in which case it tastes weird.

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

And see, that's how I prefer it!

[meggins.livejournal.com]

It's lovely that you're conscientious. We know darn well that not all who write blurbs are. However, I don't think you need to worry overmuch. I think most readers, of the type you're likely to attract, are savvy enough to take blurbs at face value. (Judging by some of the comments you've gotten so far, perhaps at considerably less.) I don't think I have ever picked up a book solely because of a blurb. I tend to go by author's track record--did I like someting he or she wrote before--or, when author is new or unknown to me, by reviews. (One bad review won't necessarily put me off, either, though a whole bunch will.)

Heck, sometimes, although I can usually trust them, friends' recommendations don't pan out. Tastes are highly personal and subjective. Friends may jive 99% of the time, but, oh, that 1%. You hate it. She loves it. That's just the way it is and neither of you is necessarily wrong.

(FWIW, I can't stand Diet Dr. Pepper. At least, I assume I can't. Could never drink regular Dr. Pepper so never have tried the diet version.)

[paksenarrion2.livejournal.com]

You could be me-at least as far as going by an author's track record or by a new author's reviews.

And if a friend recommends a book, it depends on the friend. Some of them I would probably seek out reviews on line to see what others said first, based on what I know of the friend's taste. Others I would pick up immediately.

And I am with you on the Dr. Pepper. Just don't care for it and I am sure I would feel the same about Diet Dr. Pepper. But at least I know now who I could send some if ever I received it as a present :D

[kyrielle]

Yes and no. It shakes my faith in their blurbs, but not their books. An author who writes stuff I love may have wider or different tastes than I do, and may blurb or recommend something I won't enjoy. (There may also be cues in what they say that we're in the disconnect zone on a particular item.)

Nor do I have to like everything by an author to be very willing to grab their stuff. There's a very well-known series by a fairly well-known genre author that I *loathe*. There's a nearly-as-well-known series by that same author that I *adore*. If he were to put out a new series I would check what type of series it was, and then probably read the first book and see if we clicked. (The problem with the series I loathe isn't the writing, setting, or premise. It's the main character of the series, whom I want to bludgeon to death instead of read about....)

You're actually *in* that category: I am cautious when you recommend things because I know that you have a far broader set of tastes than I do - although most of the risk of that would likely be under Mira's name (I am not as fond of most horror). But it doesn't make me less likely to read you, and it doesn't make your blurbs valueless. It means that I remember that a blurb from you makes it *more* likely I may enjoy something, but it isn't a guarantee, and that this is especially true if it's a horror book (and if it were blurbed by Mira, especially so).

Now, if an author I like blurbed a book where I truly couldn't understand how it came to be published because it was awful on every axis, and especially quality? Not just something I disliked, but something I believed was objectively badly written, from plot to characterization to pacing and use of English, inclusively? Then I would probably be inclined to discard all blurbs from them in the future. That's actually not something I have run into, though.

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

It's why I always try to make sure my recommendations have context, and why Seanan would never blurb some things Mira would. It gives that extra layer of differentiation.

[scarybaldguy.livejournal.com]

I don't read blurbs. I tend to see the same ones repeatedly (like the one on Sir Pterry's books in which the reviewer says "Pratchett's humour is [adjective adjective adjective] and, above all, funny." Humour is funny? My gods, what a revelation!) and only after I've already bought the book. My fault for having a few favoured authors and a collection of weighty Russian tomes that don't, as a rule, feature blurbs.

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

Humor is funny?!

What is this world coming to...

[alicetheowl.livejournal.com]

Diet Dr. Pepper has already betrayed me, by its very nature of being diet. Fake sugar tastes like powdered tin to us supertasters. But then, I already know not to go by food recommendations. I had to politely explain to my father-in-law that, while I'm sure his wife is a wonderful cook and knows the right amount of fake sugar to use in her recipes, I will still taste it, the same way the slightest little bit of cilantro in a recipe will make it taste like the dishes weren't properly rinsed after they were washed. (Most disconcerting, when I didn't know why that kept happening.)

Anyway. I've learned to see that people have different tastes. The fact that a lot of the books you've put on your favorites lists have made me step back and acknowledge I can see the influence, rather than that I agree with your assessment, didn't stop me from picking up Spellbound when I saw you'd blurbed Switchblade Goddess. Because I am always looking for new things to read, and something has to be pretty awful for me to feel angry for having read it. (I haven't gotten around to reading it, yet. February turned into a busy reading month, somehow.)

I also look at what people compare things to. Had I read the reviews for one particular monstrosity, I would've seen it was compared to two books I wouldn't have read the first chapter of if you'd paid me, and never picked it up.

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

The "compare to" sometimes burns me worse, because then I go in expecting something like X, when really they're just saying it met X in a dark alley once and they didn't get along. But I think you have a very solid and balanced approach going here.

[romsfuulynn.livejournal.com]

Oh yes! It also depends on the author. I discovered very early in my reading life that while I loved Roger Zelazny, anything he recommended was to be approached with extreme caution.

Bujold is usually a solid recommend, when she does one. But mostly recommends are a minor factor. There are people whose tastes are really congruent with mine though.

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

That makes sense.

[tsgeisel.livejournal.com]

I occasionally read the blurbs, but I never pay attention to them. I also try to avoid the plot summary on the back/dust flap of the book.

All I want to know going in is who wrote it, roughly what genre it is, is it part of a series and/or does it use a continuing cast of characters[1]. Everything beyond that gets into spoiler territory for me.

[1] There's a distinct difference between the two. The Toby books are part of a series - there's a beginning, middle, and most especially, an end. The books are meant to be read in order, and what happens in earlier books touches on what happens in later books. Meanwhile, the Discworld books have a continuing cast of characters, but the plots (beyond The Color of Magic/The Light Fantastic) are all independent. When the end of the book happens, all loose ends are tied up, neatly and cleanly. Both have their place, but it's good to know which one you're in for when you get started.

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's a totally reasonable division. Although even with Discworld, I think you should read each cast of characters in order if you possibly can.

[marlowe1.livejournal.com]

I do find it odd that authors think that they have to be nice to other authors. Yes, we are all in the same business and we are trying to make a living. In fact, we very well could run into each other. The problem is that when we give glowing blurbs to terrible books or refrain from saying what we DON'T like about a book (or even failing to give the title of the book that we find so terrible), we are losing our respectability and our ability to be honest with ourselves.

I think the 20s authors were going too far when they made it a point of pride in calling out their friends and giving them bad reviews as a source of pride, but I think that for an author to be taken seriously as someone who blurbs or recommends books that author must also be willing to take the piss out of the occasional book. For example, no one is going to care if you or I hate The Historian (I despise that boring book and I barely made it to the requisite 50 pages before putting it aside - especially after I realized that it was pushed so hard because it was The Da Vinci Code meets Twilight) but being on record as hating that book means that people take us more seriously if we push the works of Catherynne Valente for example (and I usually literally do that since I like to shove her books in people's hands as soon as I am done with them and go "HERE! Read this!! Now!"

Hopefully she's already looked at this comment thread and doesn't see that. Not that I mind but it is a little embarrassing.

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

I don't feel like authors have to be nice to other authors, and I would never blurb a book I didn't like, or give a positive review to a book, even by a friend, if I didn't care for it. But the author of this particular book doesn't deserve to find a scathing indictment of her book by someone who says "I am not a reviewer," and who should never have picked it up in the first place.

I mean, it's sort of the "this was not for me" absence again. Some things are, by my standards, bad, and I will review them negatively. Others, I should never have encountered, and my negative review will be not just unbalanced, it will be unfair.

[marlowe1.livejournal.com]

I do find it odd that authors think that they have to be nice to other authors. Yes, we are all in the same business and we are trying to make a living. In fact, we very well could run into each other. The problem is that when we give glowing blurbs to terrible books or refrain from saying what we DON'T like about a book (or even failing to give the title of the book that we find so terrible), we are losing our respectability and our ability to be honest with ourselves.

I think the 20s authors were going too far when they made it a point of pride in calling out their friends and giving them bad reviews as a source of pride, but I think that for an author to be taken seriously as someone who blurbs or recommends books that author must also be willing to take the piss out of the occasional book. For example, no one is going to care if you or I hate The Historian (I despise that boring book and I barely made it to the requisite 50 pages before putting it aside - especially after I realized that it was pushed so hard because it was The Da Vinci Code meets Twilight) but being on record as hating that book means that people take us more seriously if we push the works of Catherynne Valente for example (and I usually literally do that since I like to shove her books in people's hands as soon as I am done with them and go "HERE! Read this!! Now!"

Hopefully she's already looked at this comment thread and doesn't see that. Not that I mind but it is a little embarrassing.

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

I don't give, can't give, won't give dishonest reviews or blurbs. But this post isn't about what was wrong with that book; it's about what was wrong with the blurbs on the cover, at least for me. I am brutally honest with my friends. I am also not a book reviewer. It's not my job, it's not my place. I'd rather be positive when I take the time to say anything at all.

It doesn't help that I enjoy a lot more than I dislike, which was eventually what caused me to stop doing positive reviews, too. I just don't have time.

[adelheid-p.livejournal.com]

I think I first look at the type of book, read the brief, inside front cover excerpt and possibly a bit of the first chapter which gives me an idea of whether or not the book fits my reading preferences. Then I may look at who has been selected to write a blurb to see if they are authors I've heard of and read and liked. I am more likely to buy a book based on the excerpt rather than the author blurbs. I realize that my personal tastes may differ from the authors who have written the blurbs.

I once bought a book by an author whose blog I read and then later realized that, while it was well written with an interesting story, there were elements that made the book difficult for me to read. (And truthfully, I'm still interested in the main story but it may take me a long time to finish the book.) I have since read two books in another series by this author and loved them both.

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

That makes a lot of sense.

[airawyn.livejournal.com]

If I just didn't like the book, I wouldn't put any blame on the blurb author. Tastes just differ sometimes. But if I found the book offensive, say, if it encouraged young women to pursue "true love" even with a controlling, dangerous, stalker boyfriend, then I might lower my opinion of the blurb author a bit.

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

Heh.

[cirakaite.livejournal.com]

I'm very conscious that my tastes match up with other people's tastes in a Venn diagram - some things overlap, some don't. So when I do read blurbs (mostly when I'm stuck on choice of books) they might influence my decision, but only in a sense that I might like something this person liked, and it might be similar to something they've written. Or not. The final decision still comes down to the back cover and a few pages inside the book.

[seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com]

That's a good approach.