As publishers, we love getting good blurbs for our authors. At their most basic, they’re a simple marketing tool: for readers not familiar with an author, seeing a quote from another author they’re familiar with offers a way into a world they might not have exposed themselves to otherwise.
But there’s a trick to getting blurbs. It involves fostering the right relationships, leveraging contacts, calling in favors, and sometimes just plain extortion. Often enough, savvy readers understand this and no doubt many of them resist blurbs for just this reason.
Here is Mark Jude Poirier on blurbs:
A blurb from an author I actually know and dislike on a personal level—usually based on their abhorrent behavior in graduate school—means I will turn the book backward on the shelf in the bookstore or hide it under a stack of Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue.
Every year, the New York Public Library award $25k to a writer under 35 based on a book she published the previous year. Here’s the full press release.
Here is this year’s list:
Citrus County by John Brandon (McSweeney’s)
Vida by Patricia Engel (Grove Press)
The Instructions by Adam Levin (McSweeney’s)
Death Is Not an Option by Suzanne Rivecca (W.W. Norton & Company)
For twenty years, Columbia University professor Manning Marable worked on the book that, as a New York Timesstory by Larry Rohter notes, “he considered his life’s work: redefining the legacy of Malcolm X.â€Â The book, Malcolm X: A life of Reinvention, “described by the few scholars who have seen it as full of new and startling information and insights,†is due out today. Marable died Friday.
Cory Doctorow, of BoingBoing, recommends Steven Johnson’s new book Where good ideas come from
For Johnson, the secret lies in the “thin air” — the unplumbed space we credit for the “sparks of brilliance” and “happy accidents” that create new connections, strategies and thoughts. And for Johnson, this thin air is anything but: rather, it is a relatively predictable outcome arising from certain pre-conditions.
…Johnson makes a convincing case that innovation is fractal.
We have just added 400 new eBooks to our collection.  These new titles are all available to you for use both on campus, or off.    We love feedback, so leave a comment on our blog or via twitter @wcctoddlibrary to let us know what you think of these new additions!
We love feedback, so leave a comment on our blog or via twitter @wcctoddlibrary to let us know what you think of these new additions!