does a cover blurb ever make you buy/read a book?

i mean if stephen king calls someone the future of horror are you sold on the spot? he does that a lot. (hey, he sold me on clive barker with that legendary quote.)

certain names will definitely make me read a book. picked up a sci-fi paperback and ursula le guin was quoted and that was all i needed really. (sheri s. tepper - the companions. "sheri s. tepper takes the mental risks that are the lifeblood of science fiction and all imaginative narrative." which, to be honest, is kind of vague. she doesn't say if they are SUCCESSFUL mental risks. but i'll take it.)

About 75% of the quotes on the backs of the books the company i work for publish are from other authors we publish or the newspaper we own so i tend to take them with a pinch of salt. I'm pretty sure that's common practice.

just wondering if people would buy a book based on a blurb or blurbs alone. i probably have. if i see two or three names of people i like on a book.

A blurb alone won't sell me. Since I have the book in my hands, I always open it and browse it first. For a blurb to have any effect on my purchase, it has to capture something fairly specific that the blurber admired about the book, not just gush out a shapeless blob of praise.

i bought 'cassandra at the wedding' because of blurb from carson mccullers and description likening it to 'member of the wedding.'

I've seen some amazing blurbs have the movie trailer effect like "that was so perfect there's no way the actual thing could live up to it so I won't see it" but these are mostly blurbs for trashy trash.

I don't think I've ever bought a book just because of the blurb on the cover. Maybe a few times a series of blurbs have pushed me to buy a book that already looked or sounded interesting. A blurb can be the tipping point. However, I usually don't even read them. Looking at this book next to me, the cover blurb (from GQ!), "The coolest writer in America" might have caused me to put the book back on the shelf if I had noticed it.

sontag blurb will go far.

in my callow youth i think i tracked down books that pynchon had blurbed, also wallace? no, i looked up stuff wallace had boomed in other contexts (gass, markson) but i think his words have now been turned into pull-quotes

pynchon in the 90s mainly blurbed books that were all like 'hi guys i've totally read thomas pynchon', unsurprisingly

i like the authors who use the same blurb from more famous authors for multiple books. they work that blurb! i'd probably do the same thing.

I'm sure a lot of people interested in philosophy have bought a couple of books on the strength of Zizek blurbs, before realising that anything he likes he's doing to describe as an epoch-defining instant classic. One example of many: "I wonder how many people will be aware, when taking this book into their hands, that they are holding one of the key texts of the last hundred years – that a new classic is being born, on a par with Heidegger and Wittgenstein."

If he's blurbing your book and he says it's a well-written contribution to the debate then you know you've written an enormous piece of shit.

Ha, you're right. http://thinkingblueguitars.wordpress.com/2011/08/

I like, “It is easy to write a deep book on a big crucial concept like anxiety love or evil..." Yeah, super easy.

the previously unheard-of-by-me Cloud on Silver by John Christopher:

Being cast away on a desert island brings elemental fears and desires to the surface for ten people living under a cloud of inscrutability both actual and metaphorical.

eh?

bollocks - it starts in the middle of a dinner party. I am actually going to have to read this now. partly to see whether it is actually a proto-Lost, which will be difficult as I'm not sure I've ever seen an entire episode.

and on the back of the Christopher:

THE DAY THE CALL CAME by Thomas Hinde.

ANTHONY BURGESS Writes:

"This novel has the same superb economy as Ninety Doubly Martinis. The prose is taut and powerful, and it serves a story as compulsively readable as any I have met in the last 20 years. Naturalism is brilliantly welded to an over-heightened cauchemar quality. The result is the most superior entertainment but also an illumination of the human condition which is, I think, as profound as anything put out by names like Graham Greene, Patrick White and the rest. There is not a word wasted; every situation tells. This establishes Thomas Hinde as one of our finest and most individual novelists. A superb book - deep, rapid, thrilling, disturbing."

AB: will write for money.

'cauchemar' indeed.

ugh, inadvertent line break before NINETY DOUBLE MARTINIS. not doubly. touch-typing. always do that. along with 'paragraphy'.

junot diaz is a blurb monster. half the fantasy novels or comic book collections i look at have him calling it "spellbinding" on the cover.

he's on the new sam delany's cover, which seems somehow odd

bollocks - it starts in the middle of a dinner party. I am actually going to have to read this now. partly to see whether it is actually a proto-Lost, which will be difficult as I'm not sure I've ever seen an entire episode.

It actually is a sort of proto-Lost, with some lord of the Flies--never occurred to me before, but it's all about people stuck on an island with a big mystery

Not sure if I've ever been totally swung by a blurb.

i remember in the 1990s when it was compulsory for every single new novel to have a blurb from either Nick Hornby or Fay Weldon

Only once and not on a proper book but on the first issue of King City by Brandon Graham, which featured a Bryan Lee O'Malley blurb. O'Malley didn't steer me wrong.

A blurber's stock is quickly devalued if they frequently dispense blurbs, something compulsive blurbers don't seem to understand.

I'm not going to read a book because (insert famous/respected author's name here) says it's an awesome read if s/he's said the same about 62 other books this year.

More often I get convinced when pummeled by six to eight blurbs, like these one's for Anthony Holden's poker memoir Big Deal:

* 'Vivid, engrossing, superb . . . the best description of world-class poker we've been given' Salman Rushdie

* 'A very good book and an important addition to the literature of gambling' David Mamet

* 'Mr Holden writes with extreme grace and wit' NEW YORK TIMES

* 'A remarkable odyssey — part Damon Runyon, part Dostoevsky' VANITY FAIR

* 'Sharp, feisty and well-crafted . . . fascinating' SPECTATOR

* 'Bursts with extraordinary, real-life characters' DAILY MAIL

* 'Tony is toney . . . When the pot gets high, the hour late, and you need to see what he has in the hole, the lounge-lizard melds into a loan-shark' Martin Amis

*'BIG DEAL is the classic book on big-stakes poker. Praised from high and low, all players love this book, and all those wannabes, dreaming of raking in that monster pot, will eat it up' IRISH TIMES

(ones not one's jeez)

was always impressed that b s johnson got beckett to give him a blurb, until i read j coe's johnson biog and learned that sam b wasn't too thrilled abt praise that he'd written in a private letter to johnson being used in this way :-(

friends of mine who worked in publishing in the 80s and 90s said that john le carre was the most generous - you could say undiscerning - cover blurber

Not the cover so much, but I am definitely swayed when books have several inner pages (the first three! five! more!) dedicated to quotes, especially when those quotes are quite lengthy. It's just the relentlessness: you are holding an object of undeniable quality.

I picked up John Hodgman's first book because of a pretty hilarious blurb from the Church of Satan.

Blurbs will catch my eye, but I think, conversely, I tend to have greater respect for publishing houses that use them well. I'll give far more credit to a blurb if it's helpful and true and not vapid boilerplate.

last night my fiancée was reading some goofy fantasy novel with a junot diaz blurb while i was reading some goofy manga with a junot diaz blurb. how does he even have time to read all this shit!!??

I bought Oakley Hall's "Ambrose Bierce And The Ace Of Shoots" because it had a quote of praise from Michael Chabon on the back. Turns out Hall was one of Chabon's teachers and was best known for his 50s and 60s westerns; the book was written in 2005 and stank.

this one by arthur c. clarke always seemed to me like faint praise:
"the best book on the colonization of mars that has ever been written!"

On the cover of At Swim-Two-Birds:

"This is just the book to give your sister, if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl."

Oh, that's from Dylan Thomas.

oakley hall taught chabon?? huhhh

i think i was probably swayed somewhat when i bought christopher logue's selected poems for 99p by its reprinting ezra pound's quote on his first collection: "Not bad. I can read quite a bit of it."

and re: the inner pages thing, i always enjoy when books use this space to highlight a spate of reviews that call it TERRIBLE or CONTROVERSIAL, particularly if these are interleaved with the fawning ones -- sadly the only example of this i can think of is a not very good book but there were others

Mamet's book on acting, True and False:

"This book should be read and considered by everyone who acts."
--Steve Martin

"Entertaining and enlightening...Mamet's new book on the actor's life makes me proud to be a participant in that life."
--Joe Mantegna

"I agree with almost nothing Mr. Mamet says in this book and encourage you to devour every word. Mamet is a genius."
--Alec Baldwin

I also like the ones that combine literary figures and others like.

"Great novel." - Stephen King
"A wonder." - Toni Morrison
"Definitely good." - Paul Weller
"Really worth reading." - Nelson Mandela

"This book shat on my dick" - Henry James