Maybe we all got fed up at the same time. Last week, Sean Manning, the publisher of Simon & Schuster’s flagship imprint, announced that it would no longer “require” authors to procure blurbs for their books. This news came just weeks after I told my own circles in a Substack post that I was exiting the world of blurbing for at least two years — a message prompting comments and emails from authors who’ve recently made a similar decision, or wish they could.

For those fortunate enough not to know, blurbing is the laborious process wherein writers beg one another for nice words for the covers of their new books, and, in return, read and provide blurbs for other new books. It’s apparently true that the term originated in 1907 with a fictional character, Belinda Blurb, shouting praise on the cover of the humorist Gelett Burgess’s “Are You a Bromide?” and I guess we’re all still in on the joke — or maybe we are the joke.

Early in my career I decided it was my duty to write at least twice as many blurbs as I received. I’ve now written about 20 times as many, and I’ve been happy to do it. But recently three things broke me.

First, I had decided that 2023 would be the year when I protected my time and blurbed next to nothing. And yet I ended up with 18 books to blurb in the summer and fall alone. I realized I needed a hard-line no blurbs policy. If I make one exception, I’ll make 50.

Second, I got a blurb request for a friend through their publisher. This friend is someone I admire, who did something nice for me once, and I was willing to make one of those exceptions at what was otherwise an extremely busy time. Writing this blurb meant not working on my own book, not doing other things I needed or wanted to do, for the 12 hours or so, spread over several days, that it took to read my friend’s book. When the book came out — and I emphasize here that the fault was the publisher’s, not the author’s — my blurb was not on it. The publisher had over-asked, and my blurb was relegated to Amazon. The experience made me seriously question how I was allocating my time.

Finally, in the past year I’ve had remarkably little time for my own reading. I had been reading my way around the world in translation — a memorial to my father, a linguist and translator — and managed only two of the books on my list all year. Every time I tried to pick up the Eritrean novella I meant to read this fall, I remembered there was something else I urgently had to finish.