Entertainment

RIGHT BLURB CAN MAKE BOOK SALES SUPERB

CONTRARY to popular opinion, book blurbing is not simply an insider’s game of back scratching and industry favors.

What gives me the right to say so? Well, I’ve been sucked into this world of bite-size praise, and there’s no going back now.

Come July, a new book will come out called “Up for Renewal,” about bettering life through magazines.

On the back of it will include the following quote: “You know that warm, relaxed, pleasurable feeling you get when cracking open the latest issue of your favorite magazine? That’s what reading Cathy Alter’s ‘Up for Renewal’ is like. Prepare to . . . get truly inspired.”

And I meant every hyperbolic word of it. See, sometimes you can judge a book by its blurber.

“I have no idea at this point how many books I’ve blurbed,” says humorist Jonathan Ames, who is approached frequently to dish out book-jacket praise.

“It may be about 50. It might make some long, strange poem if I was to collect them all.”

In fact, one of his blurbs was even declared “best blurb” by New York magazine for “The Only Bush I Trust Is My Own,” which Ames notes, “on the title alone, deserved a great blurb.”

While he tries to blurb honestly, he does admit, “Once I promised someone that I would blurb their book, and then I read it and didn’t feel so strongly about it. This was years ago. But I blurbed it anyway, and then a fan e-mailed me and said they bought the book because of my blurb and were sorely disappointed. I felt bad about this. But I guess it shows that blurbs actually do work once in a while.”

Oh, they totally work. Even if it’s just to generate an article about blurbing.

Publicist – and now best-selling author – Sloane Crosley (who, yes, has a blurb from Ames) has seen press from Radar to New York magazine about her bevy of notable blurbs as a first-time author, the question being whether she “cheated” by using her publishing clout to secure out-of-sight blurbs.

An answer, however, is contained within her book of comedic essays, “I Was Told There’d Be Cake.”

The writing is good. Spending weeks and weeks on the New York Times best-seller list good.

Crosley says she thinks it’s a “very insider baseball perception that blurbing is a sneaky business.” She adds, “The clues are generally there all along, ‘lurking’ in plain sight via the acknowledgements page.”

Christopher Tennant’s “The Official Filthy Rich Handbook” scored blurbs from everyone from Tom Wolfe to P.J. O’Rourke.

“Good blurbs set an expectation, and if people read the book and think that it sucks, then you’re just back where you started,” he says. “You’re only as good as your book.” And more often than skeptics think – your blurb, too.