In a decision some in the book business might call “stunning” or a “tour-de-force,” Simon & Schuster publisher Sean Manning, who succeeded Jonathan Karp last year at the top of S&S’s flagship imprint last year, has decided to no longer require authors to obtain blurbs for their books. In this essay, he explains why.
Since becoming publisher of the Simon & Schuster flagship imprint a few months ago, I’ve been spending a lot of time researching old titles we’ve published to get a better sense of our history. There have been many surprises: a 1925 poker handbook that came with chips hidden in an ingenious rear-binding compartment; fourteen-year-old actress Elizabeth Taylor’s memoir about her pet chipmunk Nibbles; 1960s anonymous tell-alls about alcoholism and going bust in the stock market; Eileen Ford’s A More Beautiful You in 21 Days (Day 7: eat artichoke bottoms with crabmeat and hop on one foot ten times); a spiral-bound guide to pruning; a 1980 guide to home computers by Dune author Frank Herbert; Cher’s first memoir (Part Zero?); and, sadly no longer in print, Sex and Magic: How to Use the Spells, Potions and Ancient Knowledge of Magic to Improve and Enhance Your Sexual Life by David Farren. If that title doesn’t scream 1975, check out the author bio: “An ex-Jesuit seminarian, he is now a college professor. He married one of his students—a witch—and became personally involved in the ancient arts of sex and magic.”
Most surprising of all, though, has been discovering how many of the biggest-selling, prize-winning and most artistically revered titles in the flagship’s history did not use blurbs for their first printings: Psycho, Catch-22, All the President’s Men, Looking for Mr. Goodbar (also published in 1975…the flagship certainly embraced the sexual revolution!), Where Are the Children?, Norwood, The White Album, Lonesome Dove, No Ordinary Time, Parting the Waters, John Adams, and Steve Jobs, to name just a few.
This got me thinking about the practice of blurbs. While there has never been a formal mandatory policy in the eight years I’ve been with the Simon & Schuster imprint, it has been tacitly expected that authors—with the help of their agents and editors—do everything in their power to obtain blurbs to use on their book cover and in promotional material. I have always found this so weird.
In no other artistic industry is this common. How often does a blurb from a filmmaker appear on another filmmaker’s movie poster? A blurb from a musician on another musician’s album cover? A blurb from a game designer on another designer’s game box? The argument has always been that this is what makes the book business so special: the collegiality of authors and their willingness to support one another. I disagree. I believe the insistence on blurbs has become incredibly damaging to what should be our industry’s ultimate goal: producing books of the highest possible quality.
It takes a lot of time to produce great books, and trying to get blurbs is not a good use of anyone’s time. Instead, authors who are soliciting them could be writing their next book; agents could be trying to find new books; editors could be improving books through revisions; and the solicited authors could be reading books they actually want to read that will benefit their work—rather than reading books they feel they have to read as a courtesy to their editor, their agent, a writer friend or a former student. What’s worse, this kind of favor trading creates an incestuous and unmeritocratic literary ecosystem that often rewards connections over talent.
I get the feeling most authors agree. In the near-decade I’ve worked at the flagship, more and more have politely declined my blurb queries, apologetically saying they are “taking an indefinite blurb hiatus” or are “on a blurb moratorium.” I am always relieved to receive these replies. I don’t want my favorite writers writing blurbs—I want them writing more books so I can read them! Though I do wish they would be more direct. Book people really are so collegial, even in their brush-offs. No one would dare say plainly, “Enough with these stupid blurbs already!”
So I’m doing it. I’ve decided that beginning in 2025, the Simon & Schuster flagship imprint will no longer require authors to obtain blurbs for their books. This only applies to Simon & Schuster’s flagship imprint, and this isn’t to say that we will outright refuse to include blurbs on our book covers and in promotional materials. If a writer reads a book because they want to (not because they feel beholden) and comes away so moved by it that they can’t resist offering an endorsement, we will be all too happy to put it to use. Such as we’re doing for two of our most anticipated novels this year: Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall (blurbs by Delia Owens, Miranda Cowley Heller and Mary Beth Keane) and Heartwood by Amity Gaige (blurbs by Jennifer Egan, Elin Hildenbrand and Catherine Newman).
But there will no longer be an excessive amount of time spent on blurb outreach. There will no longer be the fear that if we don’t secure the right blurbs or enough blurbs or even any blurbs, it will jeopardize a book’s chances for commercial and critical success. In fact, several of our recent bestsellers have been blurb-less—Down the Drain, Sociopath, Dinner for Vampires—proving that readers don’t need the shorthand of blurbs to find great books; they can be trusted to judge quality for themselves. I am eager to put more of our imprint’s time toward creating these books.
But first I need to track down the rights to Sex and Magic. That, too, had no blurbs. Instead, the back cover featured a drawing of a giant apple and promised “the astrological way to pick foods that are natural aphrodisiacs for those born under each sign of the zodiac.” What blurb could be more persuasive than that!