Blurbs, testimonials, and quotes are a great way to promote yourself or your book as you let the clients and readers do the talking. No worries about sounding like a braggart. But there are good, bad, and tricky testimonials.
“This is a great book!”
“Joe did an excellent job on the project!”
Do these tell you anything? These are empty and generic quotes. Here’s one that’s an example of a tricky testimonial, but you wouldn’t know it:
“Jane is very reliable.”
This tells part of the story. The rest of the story… “Jane is very reliable in arriving late for work every day.” Makes it easy for someone who didn’t like the person’s work to avoid saying something bad. But in most cases, the employee wouldn’t use such a person as a referral. So referrals can’t be trusted 100% — another problem with the traditional job search process.
When reading book reviews on Amazon or elsewhere, you can tell which ones are the author’s friends. They’re short and empty. They tell you nothing about the book. It’s better not to have a testimonial than one like this, I think.
What if a big name wrote this kind of blurb? The blurb is useless in terms of convincing you to buy the book, but the author’s association with the person could convince some people to buy it (that old “It’s who you know.”).
When asking for a testimonial after the person agreed to supply one, ask the person to answer this results-oriented question and the testimonial will more likely be valuable.
“What has [product or service] helped you achieve?”
Roy Peter Clark of Poynter.com and author of Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer says it’s the 100th anniversary of the “blurb.” Since when do words get their own anniversaries? How do we know which ones deserve an anniversary?
A reader responding to Clark’s article wrote a great comment and an excellent example of a tricky blurb:
My all-time favorite came from a soft-hearted sportswriter who was asked to provide a blurb for a memoir by a washed-up and nearly illiterate professional boxer. His contribution: “Obviously a labor of love.”
You can make your testimonials more credible if you include one that’s not positive. Why would you want to include that? It shows you’re honest and human. But why would we want to show our weaknesses? C’mon. Everyone has weak areas and we might as well as be upfront about them and earn credibility points.
I tried to get one from an editor on an assignment that didn’t work out. I even told the editor that I fully expected a testimonial that wasn’t positive. No luck. But then again, I understand because it would be difficult for me to point out something negative about a person’s work and then let it get published for all the world to see.