Recently, Simon Manning, a publisher of Simon & Schuster’s US imprint said he’ll no longer require the authors in his stable to obtain endorsements for their books (note that in the US, these are known as ‘blurbs’). Writing in the Publisher’s Weekly, Manning says that, during his research, he discovered that the covers of many well-known and successful books are unadorned with hyperbolic praises from other authors in their first printings.
Such books included Psycho, Catch-22 and All the President’s Men. He also points out – not unreasonably – that in no other creative industry is this practice common or expected. After all, he says we don’t see a filmmaker appear on another filmmaker’s movie poster.
