The author does a stellar job of taking us through the history of publishing and the development of the blurb, the authors who hate it, those who burn it, the hyperbolic nature of Americans and the French who have a habit of avoiding the commercial nature of it. You can’t sell them the experience of the book – you have to sell them the expectation of reading it; the idea of it.

Blurb Your Enthusiasm: A Cracking Compendium of Book Blurbs Blurb Your Enthusiasm: A Cracking Compendium of Book Blurbs

Thank you to the author, NetGalley and Oneworld Publishing for the ARC it was read, read out loud and will be purchased as gift for my bookish pals to read. George Orwell worried over his blurbs in detail with his editor, and his original description of Nineteen Eighty-Four as “the history of a revolution that went wrong” is still used on many editions today. Each reader will home in on certain topics here: the art of the first line, Dickens’s serialization and self-promotion, Orwell’s guidelines for good writing, the differences between British and American jacket copy, the use of punctuation, and so much more. Each part is divided into punchy little chapters that feel excellently balanced – you’ll want to keep reading, but you won’t get lost if you do have to stop and pick it up again later.Do not be surprised if after reading this, you find yourself venturing into reading a genre you normally avoid, and wanting to read a pile of other books that you had not anticipated, that is how good this is. All of these things have one purpose, to get you to take a book home rather than put it back on the shelf. she is full of vim, blessed too with an unusual sense of enquiry, a comic turn of phrase and a talent for investigation into almost every nook and cranny of the business and pleasure of books. eliot on louis macneice: ‘his work is intelligible but unpopular, and has the pride and modesty of things that endure.

Blurb Your Enthusiasm: A Cracking Compendium of Book Bl… Blurb Your Enthusiasm: A Cracking Compendium of Book Bl…

But Matt Thorne, whose novel Tourist was blurbed by Julie Burchill ("As sad as a Sunday and as sexy as a scar"), is in favour of the practice. I enjoyed it, it contained lots of interesting facts and was fun to read, and I trusted the author’s judgement enough to add three of the books she praises to my TBR queue. It’s stuffed with literary anecdotes and historical details together with some excellent writing advice based on Orwell’s Six Rules for Writing with their emphasis on brevity and clarity, much derided by Will Self, unsurprisingly.The Wizard Of Oz example made me proper chuckle and I will never look Holden Caulfield the same way again. And I read Coupland's Shampoo Planet partly because of a blurb by Nick Hornby ("A rich, intelligent piece of work"). Nothing to see or learn here, just a few jokes, jokes, and jokes, it's like ten late-night monologues in a row. But the process of getting blurbs - which the US journalist Rob Walker has termed "blurb-harvesting" - is thought, by some, to be a necessary part of modern book publishing. Some authors love blurbs, some hate them, and sometimes readers get frustrated when the blurb doesn't seem to match the book's contents.

Blurb Your Enthusiasm by Louise Willder | Waterstones

Really well written and enjoyable Lots of interesting examples and the history of blurbs and titles. A ‘tell-all’ of shameless promotion, this book examines all the paraphernalia designed to hook a reader: title, subtitle, first sentence, jacket art, review quotes, flattering remarks from other authors, and so on. In a more serious vein, Willder explores the history of book promotion, from William Caxton’s medieval flyers to the marketing tricks that helped sell Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo. I loved Willder's funny and lighthearted tone throughout that had me giggling away and pausing to recite a particular line to my partner, and I loved the breadth of her subject area.

Willder concludes with an in-depth look at how blurbs are constructed – and what makes a blurb achieve its goal: getting the reader to purchase the book. I really liked this book, what would have been great was a reading list of the books mentioned at the end along with the bibliography , that would have taken it to five stars.