The Challenge of Blurbs
Contributor
Written by
Roni Beth Tower
December 2016
Contributor
Written by
Roni Beth Tower
December 2016

A few weeks ago, I explained why She Writes Press is the perfect publisher for me.  That’s about as wide as a “big picture” question can get.  Today, I address the challenge of obtaining blurbs for my book, one of the details of bringing it to publication, a task that represented a milestone along my journey from “writer” to “memoir author”.  I faced it last spring.

In the post last month , I adapted Henry Murray’s famous observation to read “All authors are in some ways like all other authors, in some ways like some other authors,in some ways  like no other authors.”  Today I apply those same concepts to the task of obtaining blurbs. 

Like all other authors, I knew I needed to get blurbs.  (A few months after I faced  that awareness, Brooke Warner wrote an extremely helpful summary of details involved in obtaining and using blurbs.) At the time, however, I was relying on an article written by Garine Isassi.  Like many other authors, I identified with her feeling that I was asking for a favor.

The idea of asking for favors felt foreign and formidable to me.  Only when I was able to  recast the request into asking for “help” rather than a favor could I get beyond the resistance.  I had always been the one who did favors for other people, not the one who asked for them.  Help was another matter. From a long life, I knew that help was often necessary to preserve or enhance the integrity of a project.  Also, like most other authors, I understood that the responsibility fell to me and not to my publisher or my publicist.  And so, asking for help was where I decided to begin. 

At the same time, like many other debut authors, I wanted guidance.  I studied the Authors’ Manual.  I searched the internet.  I meditated on a higher, less commercial meaning to what I was about to do.  I listed characteristics of people whom I thought might like my book and pondered ways to reach them.  I made lists of possibilities.

 

I also wanted my endorsements to be meaningful and personally connected to me  as well as appealing to potential readers.  I wanted to be able to hear my endorsers’ voices like I hoped the readers of Miracle at Midlife:  A Transatlantic Romance would be able to hear mine and, through his faxes, David’s.  My book was a love story;  I wanted to feel that same connection with the quotations that would go on the back cover and the praise page. 

 

  • Making the list.  My first list was all over the place.  It read like a compendium of “who do I know whose name I would be happy to have on or in my book?”  and “Who would be a dream person to ask?”  But then I thought more about my book itself.  Instead of selecting  people as potential influencers for a hypothetical ideal reader, I thought about all the memoir’s major themes and wanted to find a person specifically suited to addressing each one.  Romance.  Parenting.  Spirituality. Mid-Life. Courage.  Psychology.  Passion for Paris.  Long-Distance love affairs.  Introspection.  And, of course, Writing.  I wanted someone credible who could say that the book was well written.  Brooke had suggested an ideal number of ten blurbs, perhaps three for the back cover, so my list provided perfect guidance.
  • Selecting the order.  I knew I had a tight window of time  to get the manuscript to possible endorsers, to allow them time to read it, and to obtain quotable words in response. I also knew that my book’s pre-ARC status would make it harder to read than it would be once it was properly formatted between two beautiful covers.  But I hoped to put some blurbs on the back cover of the ARC’s, and so I needed to ask for the extra effort, spend a small fortune in printing manuscript copies and mailing them, and hope it all worked out.
  • The outcome. Depending on my relationship to each potential endorser, I sent a very personal email or picked up the phone.  Nine of the original  twelve whom I asked responded within days and with enthusiasm.  The tenth and eleventh, both “dream” blurbers, also responded quickly. One was just too busy and the other – whom I had sent a passage that I thought would help her appreciate why I was writing to her specifically – wrote a beautiful “regrets” letter telling me that her primary employer forbade author-employees from writing endorsements.

Two more Endorsers came forward to offer their help.  One was a woman who would have been on my “Dream” list but, because her expertise was writing itself, I had been dragging my feet in asking her.  I needed reassurance beyond  that of my editor that the book was well-written. A mutual friend to whom I had given a manuscript copy because she was recovering from a serious illness had told her about the book, and she asked me to send her a copy.  Serendipity helped. Halfway through the book, she offered to provide a review.  Hugh sigh of relief. 

The final blurb was from a fellow SWP author.  I had read her book and written a lengthy and positive review of it and she offered to return the favor – and to speed it up so that her words could make it onto the Praise Page. 

If you have been doing the math, that leaves two people unaccounted for.  The first was facing and the recovering from major surgery.  The second was in many ways the greatest blessing of all.  A few weeks after she had received the book, she wrote me that she could not, after all, write an endorsement for it.  She explained, “I just don’t like memoirs.  I never read them   and I just can’t do this for you.”

With her words, she gave me one of the greatest gifts of this journey – a new perspective.  Of course not everyone would like my book!  Some people do not like memoirs as a genre.  They are too personal.  Too filled with exposure.  Too emotional.  Or emotionally wrenching.  The genre could violate the norms of the society or the culture in which they had been raised, one which heralded discretion or putting on a positive public face above all else.  I understood these people; as a therapist, my consulting room had welcomed so many of them across the years.  They might be suffering heirs to a puritanical perspective, those who were genuinely alexythymic, people who found their own inner worlds too frightening to confront, or those who read books to escape inner truths they yearn to block.  My book was not for them.  Thus  rescinding her initial offer to write an endorsement,  my friend granted me the comfort of understanding all the future readers who were not going to buy, or want to read, or enjoy  reading my book. I am profoundly grateful to have a dear friend whose world-view differs from mine, and who was able to express herself directly. 

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Comments
  • Roni Beth Tower

    Thank you, Bella and Suzy and Paula.  Helpful input, reassurance that this challenge is far from the hardest.  And another reason why rejections can be useful!

  • Paula Tarnapol Whitacre

    Great post, and glad for such positive results.

    I just went through this process as well. Started with a list of about 15. Three very "long shots" did not respond. (I had to go through their agents, as I could not find personal contacts.) The rest either agreed or explained with nice notes why they could not (similar reasons as above--employer prohibition, not enough time, etc.).

    I gave a deadline that was 1 week before the publisher's deadline. This worked out because three people (who had agreed earlier) had not responded. What to do? Along with the "gentle reminder," after some consideration, I decided to send a draft blurb, tailored to their point of view, with a note that "sometimes it is easier to revise something already written than start from scratch." They did respond, with their own blurbs, so unlike a few of you, I lucked out for those three.

    A few other things I found helpful:

    1. I wrote very tailored email requests to the potential blurbers. I knew their work, why they would be interested in my subject (a biography of abolitionist Julia Wilbur, who spent the Civil War in Alexandria, VA), etc.

    2. When asked by one blurber for some guidance about what to focus on (the publisher had me send a PDF of the MS), I sent him a bulleted list with key points and page numbers--by the end of the day that he sent his request. 

    3. I agree that it is very hard to ask people for this--but I got myself in the frame of mind that I wasn't asking for me, I was asking for my subject. That helped.

    4. Another thing that helped is to realize that this is a standard practice, and I was not doing anything out of the ordinary. Also, the emails that did not result in blurbs served a purpose--to let very relevant people know about the book.

  • Suzy Soro

    You were lucky you got an email from someone telling you why they couldn't blurb your book. Classy people. For my first book, someone from the WSJ was supposed to blurb it and never did. Just left me hanging. Same thing happened on my second, by another person who was also HAPPY to blurb it. And on my second book, someone turned in an unsatisfactory blurb, practically derailing one of the points of the book. I wrote them and told them my purpose was to SELL books, not scare people off them. They promised to send another review in a week and never did. I did not include them in the other blurbs I got. I can't stress this enough, if you don't agree with the blurb, give them another chance and if they don't take it, drop them. 

  • Bella Mahaya Carter

    Wow, Roni Beth, your attitude reflects altitude! Good for you. This is an important lesson: not everyone will like our books. 

  • Roni Beth Tower

    Thank you, Michelle.  That was indeed such a valuable lesson - and so liberating - that is is the reason I wanted to wrie about blurbs in the first place!

  • Michelle Cox

    Nice post, Roni!  Great tips about getting endorsements, but I really appreciated your revelation that not everyone is going to like our books, depending on the genre.  So true!  And, as you said, it's understandable and predictable.  Though it might sting at first, it helps to embrace it and be okay with it.  Best of luck!