Blurb: A Story in Three Acts

As a first-time author, I knew that getting back-jacket blurbs wouldn’t be easy. That was an understatement; the process brought me face-to-face with my most entrenched internal critics.

I.

I scanned the email for what—the sixth time?—moving my eyes up and down the text as if something had changed since the fifth time, or the fourth, or the third.

But I’d been composing this one-paragraph note for months now, and there was nothing left for me to change. I read the closing one last time:

It would mean a great deal to me to be able to include your blurb on the back of the book. If for any reason this is something you just can’t do, trust me: No hard feelings whatsoever.

Then I hit “Send.”

It was a few minutes before the tender ache in my belly finally began to subside. There’d been so many junctions and forks in the road leading up to this moment. The months spent trying to attract an agent’s attention; sweating over proposal letters for publishers; the conversation with my writing partner in which she suggested—a witchy look in her eye—that we should just publish it ourselves.

And don’t get me started on the actual writing of the thing, what the process of diving into my family backstory would end up requiring of me. 

But this felt different; more personal. I was reaching out to authors I respected and asking them to say, in indelible ink: This book is worth reading. While I understood on an intellectual level that the barriers to getting blurbs were steep—and that besides, blurbs don’t actually sell books—hitting that “Send” button just felt different.

The first request went, through an intermediary, to a Very Famous Person. It was a long shot, but I allowed myself a glimmer of confidence (through the intermediary, the V.F.P. had shared some kind words about my work). I imagined the V.F.P.’s name on the back of my book, pictured the surprised and delighted expressions of bookstore browsers as they picked up my book and thought: “THIS guy has pull!”

It only took a day or two for an answer to arrive: “No.”

I’m sorry…what?!?

No. The V.F.P. was too busy, and—being a well-boundaried person, as many V.F.P.’s are—that was that. There it was again, that pain in my belly. I’d been preparing for the possibility of a rejection literally for years now, and yet in the moment I felt totally knocked off balance. No delighted bookstore browsers. No handsome royalty check. No Nobel Prize. (Okay, that last one’s a red herring, I promise.)

The feeling passed, as all feelings do. I pulled myself together and got on with my morning. But in the days that followed, something began to come into view. I recognized that this fantasy—of someone famous recognizing my specialness and somehow granting me “success”—was a long-running script in my life, and that it was long past time to change it.

Sure, I wanted people to read and talk about and share what I did; that wasn’t hard to admit. But I saw with greater clarity how I’d held myself apart from the world, how perfectionism and fear of a spectacular, public failure had hamstrung me. It was time for me to engage with the world, to put myself out there and take the slings and arrows as they came.

II.

Though to be honest, that didn’t exactly go great either.

I reached out next to someone I actually knew, a person I’d interacted with at a conference. We’d had a deep conversation; I felt kinship with them, and they’d expressed interest in my then book-in-progress. I reached out via Facebook Messenger, playing it cooler than I felt:

Hey, do you have interest in blurbing my book? Big ask, I know. Take your take—and please, no sweat whatsoever if you lack the bandwidth—but do let me know!

Technology is not our friend. Through the tiny icons beneath the message, I could see that the person read the note almost instantly. Then: Nothing. Later that day, I shared some supporting details:

Here are the other semi-famous people who (might) be writing blurbs! Here’s all the ways it aligns with your own mission and message!

Nothing. This message, they didn’t even bother reading.

Ouch.

I stewed, off and on, for a couple of days. Even contemplated, in my lowest moments, a self-righteous put-down the next time we crossed paths.

But…for what? This person simply didn’t have the bandwidth or the inclination to read my book, and they didn’t know how to take up my invitation and gracefully decline.

So? Was this a reflection of me or my self-worth? Was it really worth holding a grudge over? Wasn’t the whole point of the book about coming to terms with my own immaturity and closedness?

In retrospect, my brief flashes of anger were a gift. I recognized that my book was something worth championing, and that once it was out in the world, I was going to have to wrestle with a whole lot of challenges. If I couldn’t handle this micro-rejection, how were those going to go?

And so I got over it and moved on. And over the next few weeks, I kept asking, and eventually ended up with blurbs. Not just blurbs, but great blurbs, ones that secretly (not secretly) made my heart thrill when they landed in my inbox. They were all from people I greatly respected, and whose words might actually carry some weight for the extremely minute subset of potential readers who will:

1. Encounter my book on a bookstore shelf

2. Pick it up and turn it over

3. Recognize any of the names or credentials of said blurbers

Still, I’d grasped—belatedly—that the blurbs weren’t the gold I was seeking. Instead, the gift in this exercise was the chance to wrestle with intense psychic discomfort, with the desire to retreat into self-righteousness, and to face—raging silently behind all this—the eternal flame of fear. Fear of being exposed as a nothing, fear of being someone whose words in fact didn’t matter and never would.

A different beacon shone inside me now, the knowledge that nothing anyone else could say (or not say) about the book could take away the pride I felt at both having written it and lived it. My work had to stand on its own, as did I.

III.

I’d already reached out to one other person, a spiritual author whose work I admired, in hopes that their name might lend me some credibility in that arena.

Sure, they wrote; thanks for asking. I’ll give it a read.

But when their answer came, I wasn’t quite prepared for what they’d written:

You are a truly lovely writer; I felt invited into your journey. Alas, the telling of it meandered a bit too much for me. Because I am a teacher, I tend to endorse books when they have a compatible learning approach to my own. I so wish you the best of luck with it.

I spent a couple of uncomfortable minutes wondering what I should do. Even—I’m slightly ashamed to say—wondering for an instant: Should I rewrite the book? 

Trust me, Gentle Reader, I did not. It was a little uncomfortable, but I knew that what this teacher was teaching me was something I already knew:

My book isn’t for everyone. 

Some people whom I love, and whose opinion I respect, are never going to read it.

Others, whom I may never even meet, are going to find it by chance and in some small way be changed by it.

Sharing it to the best of my abilities is my work, and it always has been.

Now, at last, I was ready to start doing it.