Why Book Blurbs are Important

You know those tiny paragraphs that used to be printed at the back of any book you were holding to give you an overview of what it is about so that you don’t stumble into a totally alien universe uninformed?

Those are called book blurbs and they’re very important.

Before we dive into exactly why those small little bunch of words even matter can I please rant how I’m pissed the hell off with the fact that people seem to be replacing book blurbs with praise and words from other authors like WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?!

 

No, I don’t want to hear what John Green or The Times has to say about this piece of art, you can easily include that inside the book in the first few pages before the actual story that almost nobody reads! I WANT MY BLURBS BACK.

No, it doesn’t even work if you’ve shifted the blurb somewhere else because now I have to make an actual effort to find it. Is it on the inside of the dust jacket cover? No. Okay, the page before the title? No. The page after the title? No. The page after the title comes twice? No. After the prologue? No.

You have three frickin pages for the title but not one for a simple short description of what hell I’m about to enter? It’s your loss cause I already left that book back at the bookstore since I’ve got 250 books on my TBR flapping their pages and begging me to read them.

 

You can see this is a topic I’ve been wanting to talk since a long time. So without further  ado let me tell you exactly why book blurbs are important.

 

1) SOME GENRE KNOWLEDGE is needed before one can dive into the pages of a book. Here I picked up a title saying ‘Death, Murder and Blood’ expecting to revel in some dark mystery or bloodshed but it turns out to be some kind of historic fiction? 

I did not sign up for this. It is such a huge turn off I can’t even begin to talk about it. Now what am I going to do? Be forever salty about it and not pick this book up even years later because this was betrayal at its finest.

 

2) WHAT AM I READING? I know that there are some people who start reading a book without having no idea what it is about but excuse me I am not one of those people. As it is I have a hard time remembering names and plot lines and then the side plots I need to have an actual outline of what’s going to happen! I’m a person who’ll go re-read the blurb during the middle of the book like where am I?

Oh okay the blurb says girl’s sister dies, family moves away, finds a boy because isn’t that the best way to deal with grief, said boy might be a magical raccoon. Hmm check, check, check. I guess magical raccoon is coming up next!

Seriously, it’s a great way to keep track. 

 

3) WE GET AN IDEA OF THE WRITING STYLE from the blurb. It’s a great insight into how the author’s tone might be and whether the author is going to be writing short summarized paragraphs or page long descriptions about the love interest.

NEVER judge a book by it’s cover but ALWAYS judge a book by it’s blurb!

Blurbs can seriously make or break your book.

 

 

So now you all can clearly see how very important those short passages at the back of a book are! Can we please get back the trend of beautiful book blurbs printed at the back cover? 

 

Do you get annoyed by the lack of book blurbs too? Or are you one of those who don’t even glance at them? Wow you’re definitely into black magic. Have you ever happened to read something completely opposite to what you were reading because of deceiving titles? Comment down below 🙂 See you guys later!