Picking the best books among many good ones

Re:Picking the best books among many good ones by Finnucane on Thursday June 25, 2026 @06:44PM (#48680149)

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.

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Re:Picking the best books among many good ones by barisozmen on Thursday June 25, 2026 @07:00PM (#48680291)

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

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Re:Picking the best books among many good ones by barisozmen on Thursday June 25, 2026 @07:05PM (#48680329)

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."

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Re:Picking the best books among many good ones by Finnucane on Thursday June 25, 2026 @09:09PM (#48681215)

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.

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