Blurb, Anyone?

Remember those 1 liners or phrases that you see on pretty much every book that praises it to the skies? “Terrific book…witty and thought provoking”. “Combines readability with meatiness”. The publishing industry calls them blurbs.

I used to wonder how the first edition of a book could have any blurbs? How had anyone managed to read it before it was published? Well, the answer is kind of obvious. As Scott Adams described it:

“A typical blurb process might involve picking some famous authors in the success field and asking my publisher to ask their publishers to ask the famous authors to 1) Read my book, and 2) Write glowing reviews.”

Adams felt this process was wrong and too made up. Which is why he decided on a new approach for his own upcoming book, How to Fail Almost Every Time and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life. He decided that he would allow readers of his blog to come up with blurbs for his book before the book was released! But wait a minute, surely his publishers wouldn’t allow Adams to send out copies of the book to random people on the Net, would they? Of course not. Which is why Adams gets very creative.

He tells his (blog) readers to come up with generic blurbs that match his known style in the Dilbert strips, the Dilbert books and his own blogs! He warns that you:

“don't be so overboard that it looks disingenuous.”

At first, this sounds crazy. How can you blurb without having read the book or having any other reviews to refer to? But when you think about it, tell me honestly you couldn’t write such generic blurbs for the next Sidney Sheldon (“Twists and turns on every page”), the next Richard Dawkins (“Articulate…evolution rules”) or the next Dan Brown (“Page turner…conspiracies galore”). I guess formula writers are very blurb compatible!

The best blurbs logged on Adams’ blog would get printed on the book. So if you want to try blurbing and see your comment on the cover of a book (anyone can comment on Amazon.com, but this is different), well, here’s your chance.