For the past few months, publishing has been consumed with debate over that ever-divisive topic: blurbs, those breathless little testimonials from other writers that appear on the back of a book’s cover, which hardly anyone likes to write and even fewer people like to ask for.

One big author and one major publisher announced within weeks of each other that they were through with the practice of blurbs, and the resulting conversation threw publishing into a tizzy. In the process, it provided a new lens on who has access to clout and resources in an increasingly precarious industry.

Authors traditionally set out to procure blurbs after their books have been accepted by publishers and gone through the editorial process, but before the books have been finalized, typeset, and printed. At that point, some combination of author, editor, and publicist reaches out to other writers, ideally famous ones, and ask them to read the manuscript and write a few nice words to go on the back of the published book.

Sometimes the people being asked to blurb the book are close connections — a former teacher, an MFA classmate, a fellow author under the same editor — and sometimes it’s a cold pitch to a publishing heavyweight. (Stephen King sometimes blurbs suspense novels, and it’s always a big deal when he does.) Either way, the idea is that these blurbs will act as a kind of sympathetic magic, one author lending their own established brand to another as the new book makes its way down the gauntlet of publication.

Authors have long groused about blurbs, but the current conversation began in December, when the bestselling author Rebecca Makkai posted to Substack that she was taking a hiatus from blurbing for at least the next two years. She had realized that reading unpublished manuscripts and blurbing them was taking up more of the time she had allotted for her own reading and writing, and she could no longer justify the time and energy.

“As of this fall, I was getting about five to ten requests a week. And I’m sure there are people out there getting a lot more,” Makkai wrote. “I do think it’s important for writers to understand this when they set out to procure blurbs.”

A few weeks after Makkai’s newsletter, Simon & Schuster publisher Sean Manning published his own........

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