The Blurb Bubble

‘We don’t have a critical culture in English...we rely on celebrity endorsements to assess a piece of writing.’ 
-Pankaj Mishra

‘It’s dishonest...you’re not judging a book by its merits but to please your friends. I do it because I can’t say no.’ -Khushwant Singh

‘A blurb might bring a reader to a book, but then the book itself has to do the rest of the work.’
  -Sonny Mehta

‘It’s a sign of the growing insecurities...authors expect it as their right. A book can no longer speak for itself.’ -Sunil Khilnani

nd we thought writers were into back-stabbing. That may well be, but it's the new rage of back-slapping that's worrying a small band of celeb writers. They are being aggressively wooed by publishers and first-time writers to provide jacket blurbs for books they have neither the time nor enthusiasm to read. Blurbs—or pre-pub quotes, as they are called in the trade—are the advertorial endorsements of one or two lines of gush that now increasingly adorn the front and back jackets of books readers have never heard of. "This whole pre-pub quote business is a very depressing sign of what is happening in the publishing world," says author Sunil Khilnani, one of the most sought-after celebs for the same. This, despite—or perhaps because of—his repeated refusal to endorse the works of unknown writers. The battle for blurbs, says Khilnani, is a "sign of the growing insecurities, as well as of what authors expect as their right. A book can no longer speak for itself. I think blurbs are a bad idea, and render the critical language of praise or dispraise innocuous."

Agrees Pankaj Mishra, another besieged writer. "We Indians don't have a good critical culture in English...and have to rely on things like advances, celebrity endorsements, five-star launches etc to assess a piece of writing." Mishra says he himself has never solicited other celebs for a blurb, not even for his first book, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana. "It was a different climate then. I was happy just to be published."

Just how drastically the current has changed in the last few years—with publishers being prodded out of their textbook-induced lethargy by increasingly ambitious first-time writers—is evident from the number of manuscripts celeb writers receive every month. For example, William Dalrymple, who has gained for himself the deserved distinction of "most promiscuous blurber" for providing craftily worded lines of praise for books ranging from Suketu Mehta's Maximum City, Edward Luce's In Spite of the Gods and most recently Malvika Singh's Freeing the Spirit—The Iconic Women of Modern India, gets 4-5 manuscripts a month from either first-time authors or their publishers. Some of the established authors succumb to the inevitable, either out of a sense of duty to promote younger colleagues or from the more powerful urge to turn their name into a brand. But most manage to wriggle out of the "unpaid chore" of reading the manuscript and coming up with enthusiastic enough lines by citing a plausible excuse: lack of time.

Not all celeb authors, however, are good at turning down the requests now flooding their mailboxes. Khushwant Singh, regarded as something of a pioneer celeb blurber—he provided a blurb for Amitav Ghosh's The Circle of Reason years ago when blurbs were still a curiosity on Indian book jackets—and is still at it, confesses he can't say no to a practice that makes him frankly uneasy. "It's somewhat dishonest," he admits with disarming honesty. "You are judging a book not on its merits but doing it to please your friends. I do it because I can't say no." Last month, for instance, an MP who prides himself as a Punjabi writer approached Khushwant with an English translation of his short stories. "I like the fellow, so I gave in," he says, but even Khushwant's legendary patience was exhausted when the author demanded he read the whole book. "He kept ticking off more and more stories for me to read until I had to tell him: 'For god's sake, don't make me read the whole lot'."

"Most celeb writers give the blurb without bothering to read the book," explains Khushwant, "most of them don't have the time. They applaud a work just because it is by someone who is a friend or whom they like. A classic example is V.S. Naipaul who rarely has anything nice to say but will go out of his way to say nice things about me just because I am a friend. "

A recent example of how Naipaul went out of his way to help a friend was the blurb he provided for Tarun Tejpal's debut novel, The Alchemy of Desire. The blurb, "At last—a new and brilliantly original novel from India", was according to many critics so "over the top" that it ended up attracting more attention than the book itself. Tejpal's then publisher, Ashok Chopra, admits the much-talked-about blurb would not have happened if Tejpal was not so "close to Naipaul; he rarely does it for anyone...Tarun was different".

Says Knopf's Sonny Mehta, whose legendary reputation as a publisher ensures that he gets glowing blurbs from top-notch authors around the world to promote any of his debut books: "Not all new books carry endorsements, and I wouldn't say that blurbs are indispensable for marketing. At Knopf, we look at each book on a case-by-case basis...in some cases we think a writer might get a boost from an endorsement by a fellow writer, but in other cases a new book will be better served by other means, such as publicity and reviews." Rushdie's endorsement of Zadie Smith's White Teeth, points out Sonny, "helped launch that novel and contribute to its success, but of course it wouldn't have worked if White Teeth hadn't been an accomplished book to begin with. A blurb might bring a reader to a book, but then the book itself has to do the rest of the work."

But in India, where a culture of name-dropping and string-pulling is rampant, it's a different ball game. Increasingly, authors are taking control of the blurb-hunt into their own hands, relying on networking skills for celeb endorsements. A recent example, says Chopra, was Kiran Nagarkar, who insisted on a list of blurbs from celebs including Salman Rushdie for his God's Little Soldier. But Rushdie, perhaps without a Sonny Mehta to goad him, did not oblige.

So, do readers really get taken in by blurbs? Most think not. "Readers aren't stupid, they realise by now that these are writers promoting their friends and colleagues," says author Patrick French. Khushwant adds: "We have a saying in Punjabi—If you are going to give someone goat's milk, you don't have to put its droppings in it—meaning, when you praise someone, don't spoil it with criticism. But I still keep hoping that if I blurb often enough, readers will learn to take the praise with a pinch of salt." Agrees Upamanyu Chatterjee who, unlike Khushwant, prefers to keep his hands clean: "Readers are much dumber than I thought if they get taken in by celebrity blurbs. Everyone knows, for instance, that Naipaul dines with Tejpal when he is in India." But do they? "What about readers who are not into the incestuous circle of the books' world?" wonders Anuradha Roy, co-publisher of Permanent Black. "They are very likely to be taken in." Or, as Sonny Mehta says insouciantly, "they probably learn by trial and error".

Sometimes it's not just readers who get taken in; even publishers/distributors get swayed by blurbs, as debut writer Edward Luce discovered recently. Luce says he didn't realise how crucial blurbs were for sales here until his own book was launched. When his distributors in India—Penguin—discovered that the jacket of In Spite of the Gods carried blurbs by two heavyweights, Dalrymple and Amartya Sen, they doubled the order from 5,000 copies to 10,000, Luce claims. Penguin's chief editor Ravi Singh, though, denied Luce's interpretation, even going so far to call it "complete nonsense". According to him, Penguin did indeed double the order but not because of the blurbs; it was the favourable reviews that swung their decision.

Some would argue it's the same thing. As French points out, the objective of planting these blurbs on book jackets is not so much to influence readers as to intimidate critics into giving favourable reviews. In any case, he adds, "There's far too much blurbing even in reviews. It's prolonged flattery instead of a critical assessment of the book."

The real mystery about blurbing is not why everyone's doing it these days but why it's taken so long for us to catch up with a worldwide trend. Blurbs, as Sonny Mehta points out, "have become standard practice in publishing over the last decade as bookshops display an increasing number of titles, many of which are by first-time writers. There is such a very large quantity of books clamouring for a buyer's attention that publishers have relied more and more on support such as blurbs as a way of getting an independent recommendation from a familiar name, much in the same way that Amazon.com will send an e-mail recommending Book A to a customer who's already purchased Book B." In fact, the word blurb is usually traced back to American humorist Gelett Burgess who presented his new book at the American Booksellers Association in 1907 with a dust jacket featuring the mandatory beautiful damsel. But this damsel, 'Miss Belinda Blurb', was shown calling out, "Yes, this is a blurb". Somewhere along the next century, the blurb changed from meaning any hyperbolic jacket copy to "effusive quotations from somebody about the book".

So why did it take this long? It's certainly not, as Dalrymple alleges, because of "lazy publishing". Publishers were always aware, as Penguin's former CEO David Davidar points out, that "celebrity endorsements are a good way of piquing customer interest". It's just that the pool of big writers was too small to fish in. Even now, as his successor at Penguin Ravi Singh points out, "we feel diffident approaching an Arundhati Roy or Khushwant Singh unless the book is big enough to deserve their notice."

But if publishers are diffident, authors don't hesitate to extort blurbs out of them by any means necessary. Ruskin Bond, yet another veteran blurber, recalls a TV journalist recently confronting him with his blurb on the jacket of a book he could not recall ever reading. "I'm a sucker and can't say no. But I hope this business of blurbs stops. It's an unhealthy trend." Fat chance, considering that even here books are now competing for shrinking windowspace. "It used to be," as Khilnani says, "don't judge a book by its cover. Now it is: don't judge a book by its blurbs."