Authors can't afford to be lost for words - and you can quote me on that

The latest thing to appear on all the most important book jackets is the celebrity quote (for which read: "a quote by anyone in the world more famous than the author of the book").

The first time I was sent a book and asked to provide a quote, it was one of the most thrilling things ever to have happened to me. It meant that I existed! I was no longer the least well-known author in the world.

Quotes used to be a little something that would help a browsing bookshop customer select something to read. Now they are used to convince bookshops to stock the book in the first place. For this reason, quotes must be obtained as soon as possible. In today’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it publishing world, where books frequently have less than a month’s ‘shelf-life’, publishers will use every marketing trick in the book to shift their ‘units’. Well, except any that actually cost money.

But the currency of the endorsement system isn’t money. Oh, no. It is much cheaper than that. In Endorsement City you can trade using flattery, alcohol, bribery.

You can even get endorsements on credit - many people, after all, do seem to return these sorts of favours. Surely such a system is open to abuse and corruption? Well, yes.

Quotes are a bit like mobile phones. Disapprove of them as much as you want, but once everyone else has one, you have to have one too.

So when my American publisher started talking about the ‘blurbs’ they would need for their publication of my book I did not say: "What kind of whore do you think I am, corporate scum?" I said: "OK. I’ll make a list."

I did make certain rules for myself though. I would handwrite the letters myself. I would not contact friends. I would only contact authors whose names I would feel proud to have on the cover of my book.

I can’t quite remember exactly what I said in my letters, but I did get some very nice responses. I must have invited Will Self around for tea because he wrote back to say that he would love to drop in (although he didn’t mention whether or not he had read the book).

Another author - who will remain nameless - had read the book, loved it, and spent a page or so telling me why. But would he quote? No. It turned out he didn’t believe in quotes. Fair enough.

The next response, now a good seven months after I sent the original letters, was from an old acquaintance, who I won’t name either. He had loved the book, too - though he hadn’t quite finished it.

We got chatting by e-mail about other things. Unfortunately, during this exchange I felt compelled to nudge him gently for the quote. I haven’t heard from him since. I should have refused to do this, I thought. Here I am, simply alienating all the people I admire...

Fast forward to the present, now nine months after I sent out the letters, and it’s almost too late to get anything else on the American jacket. I’m sitting at my computer and then, all of a sudden, there it is. An e-mail from Douglas Coupland.

I had actually written to him several times before without response, and this last letter was an apology as much as anything, and a promise never to bother him again. And, yes, although I haven’t actually seen it yet, he has agreed to give me a quote. Now it’s just a case of getting the, er, units, into the shops.

Scarlett Thomas is author of Going Out