Endorsements – i.e., Blurbs

One of our truly messy bookshelves

Our book Sensing the Future, A Field Guide to Precognition, will be published on January 3, 2017. As part of our publicity for the book, we’ve been writing to various authors who books have contributed to our knowledge, whose books we enjoy, asking if we can send them a PDF of the book in early August.   If they enjoy the book, we would be delighted to have them blurb it.

Initially, the publisher was going to provide just an excerpt from the book, which is what we said in our email to Robert Moss, whose books on dreaming , oracles, and synchronicity are terrific. He responded quickly:

Dear Trish and Rob

 I don’t “blurb” books (such an ugly word) on the basis of excerpts. Send me the whole book – by pdf if you like – and I’ll consider writing an endorsement, but can’t promise to get to this for a while.

bright blessings

The publisher agreed to send a full PDF of the book after I forwarded Moss’s email. And we used the word “endorsement” from then on. Rosemary Guiley, author of the Djinn and co-author of a book with George Noory, Talking to the Dead – also responded quickly. I loved DJinn and Rob is enjoying Talking to the Dead,  so this email was gratifying – and gracious.

Hi Trish

Congratulations! I will take a look at it. You can email it to me at…

We also contacted Rupert Sheldrake. Ever since reading his Presence of the Past in the late 1980s, we have been big fans of everything he writes. He’s a British biologist, a visionary  A few years back, TED talks banned his talk from you tube.

 Nature magazine called his work “infuriating…the best candidate for burning there has been for many years.”

Our kind of guy, for sure. The initial response to our request was answered by his research person, Pam:

Dear Trish and Rob,

Thank you for your kind email enquiry, which I will pass onto Rupert Sheldrake.  Your books sounds very interesting.  Although I need to mention Rupert is completely inundated at the moment and never endorses books he hasn’t read.  Your book is on a subject Rupert has a lot of interest in but he is awash with tottering piles of unread books.  Good luck with yours.  Best wishes

I felt this was a fairly positive response and replied that a PDF of the book would be available in early August and that if Mr. Sheldrake had worked his way through his pile of books by then, I would be glad to send him a PDF. The response to this email was from Sheldrake himself and kind of blew us away:

Dear Rob and Trish,

Thanks for your email and offer of sending the PDF of your book in due course.  As Pam says it’s very unlikely I’d be able to read it, and I never endorse books I haven’t actually read.  However I would of course be interested to look through it given that it’s close to some of my own interests. 

Best wishes,

Rupert Sheldrake

Wow!  Sheldrake isn’t just brilliant, he’s a nice guy. He’s giving himself an out in the event that he hates the book, and that’s only fair. Now compare these gracious responses from Guilley, Moss, and Sheldrake, with the complete antithesis, from a man whose books we have been buying since 1994:

As a general rule I tend to support books that either refer to my work or are sufficiently close to my interests to command my attention.  I do get a lot of requests from people seeking endorsements to do this; almost every time I speak at a different venue, someone comes up and tries to either hand me a book or make a request to have me read his or her book.  Before I consider even reading anyone’s book, I need to know the following:

   

Who is publishing the book and where, what countries is it being published in?
  In one page (under 700 words)  what is in your book that has not be said or written about before?  In brief, what is new in your book?
       

Do you reference my work in any way other than a footnote or in the bibliography?  If so, I need to see what you have written about my work.
 

I ask about (1) because I do not tend to support self-published books.  I will make exceptions, but not often.  I expect a book to have legs of its own and not depend on my endorsement to make it in the marketplace.  My endorsement means a lot to me and I don’t use it unless I really know the work and the author well enough and I believe in the work. 
      

I ask about (2) because I really don’t have time to read what people send me and I need to see that the writer has really done his or her homework and knows the field well enough to reference other people’s works and writes well enough, by providing me a short summary of what is new in his or her book, to deserve my full attention. 
   

I ask about (3) to see if the field the writer has written about is one that I have written about and have knowledge about.  If the writer has actually read any of my works and indicates that he or she has and has used my ideas in a new or original way, it goes a long way to having me support the book, even if the writer disagrees with me.
     

In brief I tend to support works that really deserve my full support because of my true interests and not just my name.

Seriously, dude? I need to write a college term paper justifying my request?  I wrote him back and answered his queries in less than the 700 words he had stipulated. His response was odd:

Could you please let me see where and how you reference my work in any way other than a footnote or in the bibliography?  I need to see what you have written about my work.  After I see this I’ll consider looking at a pdf of your book.  OK?

I’m not sure what contributes to such an inflated ego, but Rob and I have decided to delete any reference to this author in our book. And it’s unlikely that I’ll buy one of his books from this point forward.

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