Review: Blurb Your Enthusiasm - Louise Willder ****

By Brian Clegg

As someone with a good number of published books, I couldn’t help be fascinated by Louise Willder’s exploration of everything there is to know about book blurbs (and quite a lot about how books are presented that isn’t about blurbs). But the good news is that you don’t have to be in the business to find this chunky little hardback enjoyable. Willder has apparently written over 5,000 book blurbs (the bits on the back or dustcover flap that tell you about the book) and both knows the topic inside out and also delights in it.

We discover the difficulties of getting a whole book across in a couple of hundred words without resorting to gushing praise, how humour can entice the reader in, how blurbs differ from country to country and far more. As suggested above, Willder also brings in things like cover design, titles and subtitles, front cover text, review extracts and even opening lines (and page 69) as examples of other ways a potential reader might be persuaded to first lift a book off the shelf and then get it as far as the till. I’ve only recently got back to going into physical bookshops after the depths of the Covid pandemic, and it was brought home to me far more than usual as a result, how much the experience of picking books off the shelf and looking at the cover and back is so different from perusing a book website (and how much more enjoyable).

This is, then, an easy sell – though it’s hard to fault the number of entertaining snippets, whether from history, books themselves or the experiences of other blurbists that Willder crams in. This is a book to savour. Having said that, I’m not sure it’s a book that is best read from cover to cover as I did, because after a while it can feel a little samey. The book is dividing into many short sections (though it’s not an A to Z in the conventional sense, despite the subtitle), and I suspect it would be perfect as a loo book, or for short train journeys, taking it in a chunk at a time. 

Funnily, one of the few times I didn’t agree with Willder was reflected in the title of the book itself. She is positive about puns as a way of winning over a book buyer, where I find them a bit cringe-inducing. They also sometimes require a particular cultural awareness. I didn’t realise the book’s title was a pun – I just thought it was rather clumsy. I had vaguely heard of the US TV show ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ – but not sufficiently for it to immediately spring to mind when adding the book to my Christmas list. However, that’s a minor point – this is a delicious little book, if more a box of chocolates to be consumed with breaks than a plate of steak and chips to enjoy as a single entity.

See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.