Blurb Your Enthusiasm by Louise Willder book blurbs uncovered
21 November 2022
You’ve probably read more of the work of London based copywriter Louise Willder than you realise. Although her writings can be found in bookshops across the world, Willder has only ever written one book, which was published in October 2022.
Certainly Willder may not be in the same league as Elena Ferrante, Sally Rooney, or Kazuo Ishiguro, but her work may well have adorned one of their novels. Willder is a book blurb writer, and in a twenty-five year career at Penguin Books, estimates she has penned some five-thousand of these attention grabbing pitches, intended to entice someone to buy the book in their hands, having read the blurb printed on the dust jacket.
And in Blurb Your Enthusiasm (published by Simon & Schuster), Willder shares all she has learned about the craft of blurb writing:
We love the words in books — but what about the words on them? How do they work their magic? Here is a book about the ways books entice us to read them: their titles, quotes, covers and, above all, blurbs — via authors from Jane Austen to Zadie Smith, writing tricks, classic literature, bonkbusters, plot spoilers and publishing secrets. It’s nothing less than the inside story of the outside of books.
For my part, blurbs are something I take or leave. If a novel has a good enough recommendation — for instance it has been shortlisted for a literary prize — I’ll probably only settle for reading a mere outline of the story. And if I notice an endorsing blurb written by another (high profile) author, I’ll just about always ignore it. While I can’t be sure, I often get the feeling such “endorsements” have been given over sight unseen so to speak.
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