A few words about blurbs...

Advance praise for Blithedale Canyon

Photo by: Tamea Burd

Maybe you’ve wondered about blurbs, those relentlessly enthusiastic, often over the top words of praise that appear on the covers of books. Isn’t this just a low-cost form of advertising? Don’t writers simply ask their friends to say nice things about them? Do blurbs matter at all?

The answers to these questions are: Yes, yes, and yes.

Most blurbs are in fact written by acquaintances of the author, or – this is even more egregious to my mind – by writers affiliated with the author’s agent or publisher. And it is just advertising. Blurbers strictly adhere to the Thumper School of Literary Criticism: If you can’t say something nice, shh! Say nothing.

But that, weirdly, is the value of blurbs. Books enter the world with remarkably little metadata: the title, cover art, the author’s name and brief bio, and some promotional material from the publisher. Blurbs help people in the book business – bookstore owners, review editors, etc. – place a book in the market by giving them a sense of who its friends are. A novel enthusiastically blurbed by Anne Tyler is probably going to be a work of literary fiction with commercial potential while a book blurbed by Glenn Beck is going to be popular with the Fox News set. Before the reviews come out, before the promotional campaign has cranked into gear, this is crucial information for readers and book-industry professionals alike.

A good blurb also gives readers a sense of the book’s subject (“an epic family saga,” “a hard-hitting exposé”) and what the book is like as a reading experience: “Fresh, luminous prose…” (The writing is the star here.) “A masterpiece of fastidious research...” (Probably kind of dense and slow.)

All of which helps explain why I’m so thrilled with the blurbs I’ve gotten for Blithedale Canyon. Check this one out from Edan Lepucki, bestselling author of California and Woman No. 17:

“Blithedale Canyon is a compelling and lively debut with a narrator I won't soon forget: a deeply flawed young man who longs to be more noble and honest, a person who is at once full of so much love and tenderness, and yet also capable of such deceit, too. With this riveting novel, Michael Bourne gives us a vivid portrait of Northern California at the turn of the 21st century: the complicated signifiers of wealth, the crushing inevitability of gentrification, and that old California, part myth, part memory. A story of love, addiction, regret, and hope. I couldn't put it down.”

It’s all there, isn’t it? Edan is a bestselling author whose sensibility and subject overlaps a good deal with mine. In her blurb, she gives a sense of Blithedale Canyon’s main draw (its mercurial, emotionally complex narrator) and its thematic concerns (“Northern California at the turn of the 21st century”) and then, right at the end, she promises it’ll be fun (“I couldn’t put it down.”)

No surprise I asked my publisher to put that one on the front cover of the book. There’s marketing and there’s promotion, but at the end of the day I wrote this book to communicate, to say my piece and be heard. And when I saw that blurb from Edan, I thought: Oh man, she got it. She heard me.

I’ve felt that way with a bunch of the blurbs for Blithedale Canyon. Take a look at this one from Teddy Wayne, author of Loner and the forthcoming The Great Man Theory:

“Michael Bourne’s debut novel is an ode to the pleasures and pains of the return to the familiar, to the gravitational pulls of addiction, old friends, and Springsteen on a car stereo, but mostly of home. Blithedale Canyon is a tenderly nostalgic and page-turning portrait of a man who can’t control his worst impulses, written by an author in full command of his own tools.”

Teddy picked up on a key theme of the book, that deep down it’s a story about hometowns, how claustrophobic they can be, but also how sometimes they’re the only place you feel truly yourself.

Then there’s this one from Pamela Erens, author of Eleven Hours and The Virgins:

“Trent Wolfer is a screwup, but one so smart and observant and oddly self-aware that we can't help rooting for him – and noting the ways in which we're a little like him. Trent wants more than anything to find some truth amid his own and others' bullshit, and we're kept on edge as he keeps losing and finding and losing that truth again. The perfect story for our age of con artists and systemic scams.” 

I love that last line – “The perfect story for our age of con artists and systemic scams.” – which is on the back cover of the book.

There’s plenty more where those came from, but you get the picture. I went into this process dreading the polite silence of indifference and came out grinning at my great fortune.

In other news:

Blithedale Canyon will publish on June 30, 2022. Before then, you can pre-order it, either through my publisher’s website or via Amazon, Bookshop.org, or Barnes & Noble. Canadians can order via Indigo or Amazon.ca. Or you can just skip all that and ask your local bookstore to put in an order for you.

If you belong to Goodreads, please consider marking Blithedale Canyon as “want to read.” It’s nuts, but these kinds of things really do matter.

Poets & Writers Magazine will carry my story on publishing a novel without an agent in the July issue.

My book tour is still taking shape, but so far I have events planned in Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Los Angeles, with more to come. I’ll let you know when I’ve finalized my tour dates.

Oh, and I got some new headshots done. I could go the rest of my life without seeing another picture of myself, but Vancouver photographer Tamea Burd was friendly and encouraging and took some nice shots. Here’s another: