After posting my previous blog entry today, in which I linked to three recent entries on Jenny Crusie's Aargh Ink blog, I came across something else on her blog that's too good to leave out.
This entry, however, is not humorous--or only marginally so, since Crusie is naturally comic and possibly incapable of writing anything completely humorless. Rather, this is a serious entry on a topic of great interest to authors: getting quotes from other published authors for one's books. Or, from the other end, being asked to give a quote praising another author's soon-to-be-published book. Crusie discusses the effects, and the ethics, of the practice in Confessions of a Reformed Quote Wh*re. Worth reading, and worth sober thought.
P.S. (January 20, 2010) Nearly TWO years after posting this entry originally, I've had to go in and change a few words because of blog-spammers, whose spambots apparently are set to track certain words (e.g., "wh*re," but with an "o" instead of an asterisk) and to post spam about certain medications, etc. For nearly a year this entry had five comments, all made shortly after the original post. In recent months, 44 more "comments" were added, all of them ridiculous, but I don't know how to remove them. And I hate to make it hard for my readers to comment by turning on Comment Moderation. What aggravation. Guess I oughta complain to Blogger's powers-that-be, but I'm too lazy.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
5 comments:
This is a great post. Thanks for linking to it. I've gotten pretty jaded about blurbs on books -- looks like for good reason.
Fascinating. I tried to drum up the nerve to ask an author for an author quote, but in the end I didn't need it. My publisher used a quote from a review instead.
So far I've only been asked once for a quote, and since I loved the book I was happy to give it. I can see the danger, though.
Very interesting post. It is amusing to read a vague author quote as mentioned in Jennie Crusie's blog and wonder, Did they like it or not?
I personally HATE the whole author-quote thing. I hate asking form them, and since I'm such a picky reader, I hate being asked for them. Writers as big as JC can get away with announcing, "I don't do author quotes"--and many do. The rest of us can't afford to alienate editors, so we either lie or phrase our "praise" very, very carefully. Unfortunately, the dang things do help sell books--even to editors, who really ought to know better!
Post a Comment