As a major publisher stops forcing books to have author endorsements, is this the end of the road for the common cover practice?
ADVERTISEMENTWill blurbs on book covers become a thing of the past? US publishing house Simon & Schuster is going to give it a try.
Executive editor Sean Manning has laid out plans for the publisher to stop requiring authors find writer’s to quote on the cover of their new releases.
In a blogpost on Publishers Weekly, Manning questioned the point of blurbs: “In no other artistic industry is this common. How often does a blurb from a filmmaker appear on another filmmaker’s movie poster? A blurb from a musician on another musician’s album cover? A blurb from a game designer on another designer’s game box?”
While Simon & Schuster has never mandated that authors find quotes from other authors to fill out their book covers, the practice has become essentially standardised.
Manning notes that the book business has always argued this makes their industry special and that author endorsements show the collegiality of literature. But Manning disagrees: “I believe the insistence on blurbs has become incredibly damaging to what should be our industry’s ultimate goal: producing books of the highest possible quality.”
Instead of spending the time hunting for other authors who can read their work and provide a pithy comment endorsing it, writers should be busy focusing on writing, he argues. Even worse than wasting authors’ time, the practice also encourages “an incestuous and unmeritocratic literary ecosystem” that benefits connections over talent.
As of 2025, Simon & Schuster no longer require authors to obtain blurbs for their books. It doesn’t mean you’ll never see a blurb on a future release from them. If a writer reads a copy of a new book and feels moved to give their endorsement, that’s allowed. This will now be at the author’s discretion, meaning early-career authors won’t be forced to skim their nascent literary connections for endorsements.
It’s a practice that’s not entirely unique to Simon & Schuster. While they often feature inside the cover, Fitzcarraldo Editions’ brand revolves entirely around the quality imbued by their publication, with their simple homogenous blue covers serving as the only recommendation needed.
Similarly, outside of English-language bookselling, other nations pack far less extra words on the covers of their books. Compare the German-language or French-language covers to English books and you’ll find comparatively sparse fronts, allowing the author and title to take main focus over claims about bestseller lists and individual endorsements.
Fitzcarraldo Editions was undoubtedly inspired in part by French publisher Les Editions de Minuit, which specialised in literary fiction. Their plain covers use the reputation of their publisher and the author themselves as their key selling point.
In English, it also used to be more common. Manning notes that the first printings of modern classics “Psycho”, “Catch-22” and “All the President’s Men” didn’t carry any blurbs to sell themselves. It hasn’t stopped them entering the canon as key texts of the 20th century.
Blurbs have a more divisive history than you’d imagine. Although the practice of connecting works to other great writers has long been practiced in the forms of epigraphs, Julian Novitz, senior lecturer at the Swinburne University of Technology suggests the first blurb came in 1856.
For the second edition of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”, Whitman put a quote from a letter to him by philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson on the spine: “I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career / R W Emerson.”
“Emerson was apparently less than thrilled to discover he had unknowingly written the world’s first cover blurb,” Novitz writes in The Conversation.
As Louise Willder points out in “Blurb Your Enthusiasm: An A-Z of Literary Persuasion”, the word blurb was “coined in 1907 to pillory the practice of adorning book jackets with extravagant descriptions of the text contained therein.”
ADVERTISEMENTNovitz notes George Orwell’s 1936 denunciation of blurbs: “In his view, the predominance of blurbs made it harder for readers to discern genuine quality and could eventually lead to exhaustion or disillusionment. ‘When all novels are thrust upon you as words of genius,” [Orwell] wrote, “it is quite natural to assume that all of them are tripe’.”
