Picking the best books among many good ones

booksfromgreats.com

4 pointsbarisozmen4 comments

Inside publishing offices, people who give a lot of blurbs for books are known as "quote whores." It's very much a game of who you know, who your editor knows, who your agent knows, etc. It's not to say a blurb is worthless, but a blurb from someone who doesn't give a lot of them may be worth more.

Totally makes sense. There could be a scoring system where each endorsement is weighted by a "quote-whoreness" score or something like that.

I also have a couple of tangential ideas for weighting endorsements:

- Expertise match: e.g. Elon Musk endorsing a rocket engines book vs history book

- Strength of endorsement: e.g. "This is the best book I've ever read," vs "I liked it."

Editors do try to get and use _relevant_ blurbers. And a weak blurb probably wouldn't get used unless they really had nothing else. Also, the first readers of blurbs are booksellers and reviewers, not readers, who may pass over a title if no one is willing to vouch for it. If you present a title to your sales team with no blurbs, they will make frowny faces at you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com