Blurbs, those auditory bits of promotional text on the back of books have come under fire, pushing the publishers into a tizzy. In separate articles in The Atlantic and Esquire this fall, the industry’s reliance on high-profile authors’ blurs as “a rigged system long overdue for a change.” For me personally, if I see Lee Child’s burst of words slither across the back of a book, I refuse to buy it. It seems that blurb words are the only words he’s writing these days.
Perhaps it’s fitting that the word, blurb, was created in a shameless act of literary promotion. We owe the ubiquitous word to the American humorist Gelett Burgess who coined nonsensical words like his peer, Lewis Carroll, the man who gave us Alice in her wonderland of weird characters and their shenanigans. Mr. Burgess even published his own compendium of nonsense, among others. Of course, there was a blurb on the back, featuring a photo of a woman shouting with her hand cupped around her mouth. The woman, of course, was named Miss Belinda Blurb, who was purportedly in the act of blurbing.
(Does blurb sound like a blend of burp and urp to you, too?)
In 1914, Burgess clarified the meaning of blurb: “a flamboyant advertisement; an inspired testimonial, or fulsome praise…a sound like a publisher.” The use of the word as a noun quickly expanded into its use as a verb. The word blurb isn’t nonsense now. It’s a true success story in our lexicon.
As for me, I’m proud of the blurbs I was able to amass for my several books They are validations of my writing worth and, according to Jane Friedman, are key to marketing one’s books. I scored six on my book, The Winner’s Circle – yahoo!
Here’s my favorite: “Motivated by faith, lust, and lotto money, three kick-ass church ladies from the land of Hellman’s and Velvet head ‘Down Under’ for a high-octane pursuit of life, liberty, and pursuit of the American Dream. In The Winner’s Circle, PJ Colando combines her Midwestern roots with her keen wit for a heady cocktail of hilarity, sin, and redemption.”
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