On How to Be Lovely

"I love your funny face...." Fred Astaire

RO: Someone is standing in a bookstore. She's holding your book in her hot little hands, reading the flap copy. She smiles, good! She likes it, or at least something in the description has struck a chord. Then she turns to the inside back cover, reads for a minute and puts the book back on the shelf. Agony. What the hell happened?

Okay, does this scene really take place in bookstores and malls all over the country? Can it? Do readers make buying decisions based on a bio and/or a picture of the author? Did you ever buy a book based on either of those things?

JAN: Yikes, I don't think I've ever bought or not bought a book based on the author bio, or worse, what the author looked like in his/her photo, but I don't know, I suppose I could have been influenced without realizing it. Especially if the person had a really bad haircut. I'm kidding. Everyone knows bad haircuts make you look literary.
Anyway, I expect it's the back cover that influences most decisions -- the price of the book. But I suppose I could be turned off by a truly pretentious or overly poltical bio. Or if, say, the book was about how to nurse an infant, and I flipped open the back page to see the author was a man and perhaps not the expert I wanted in this field.
But I don't know, this is stuff I can't worry about. The real reason people don't buy your book, I suspect, is that they've never heard of you. Sigh....And that's what I worry about...

HANK: Confession. I ALWAYS look for the photo. If there isn't one, I wonder why. If the photo is poor quality, I wonder why. I'm not only interested in what the author looks like, although that's intriguing, but I'm fascinated by why they chose the photo they chose. I always envisioned my author photo (and ok, we'll skip the rest of the discussion on that phrase. I have also envisioned the dress I'll wear on the red carpet at the Oscars, it's just something some people do...)

But anyway, I'd always envisioned my author photo in a chunky black turtleneck and maybe pearls. With an expression like: Oh, yeah, this is great and I love my book and I'm pretty happy and confident but not TOO happy and confident, just in a realistic enough way that the potential reader knows I'm a good person and pretty serious but not TOO serious. And that the photo is probably pretty much what I actually look like. In good lighting. Then the person who took my photo said if I wore a black turtleneck, I'd look like a floating head. So much for that idea.

I actually saved a photo of one author--which, of course, I tossed last week in my latest "Some of this stuff has got to go" cleanup and now I forget who it was---and she had the look down perfectly. She was sitting on a stairway, inside what you had to imagine was her cozy house, and she has her wrists resting on her knees, back leaning against the wall. Just casual, in jeans. Like she was just sitting there, and someone said, you look nice, let me take a photo. In reality, there were probably a zillion lights, but it didn't look staged at all. (I shouldn't have tossed the photo.)

And looking through some books, Suzanne Brockmann has a photo somewhat like that. And her's looks great, too. I'm definitely going to swipe the idea.

Now: Cornelia Read? That's a terrific author photo. MJ Rose, love it. Lee Child. You know the good ones when you see em. Who do you think has an especially effective one? (And anyone you wish you could tell--hey, get a new one)

(Not that this is that important. We know. It's about the writing.)
Do I buy the books--or not--because of cover photos and bios? Um, I don't think so...

RO: I think the Lee Child photo is a hoot. He's definitely an attractive guy, but don't you think he was having a little fun with that collar thing? The photographers shot about 800 pix for my jacket, and I think if they'd just taken a few more...

(Hank: Yeah, I think the collar thing would be--off--if he weren't such a fabulous writer. But there's another photo, the one on Bad Luck and Trouble, that's the one I was talking about.)

HALLIE: I do look at author photos. Sometimes just to find out if the androgynously named author is a he or a she. And I do get turned off. First by an obviously amateurish photo - if you're an author, you should invest in a professional quality photo because it's your professional face to the world. I also get turned off by too much glitz. I warm to a photo of someone who looks like a PERSON not a movie star. And it's great when the photo has got something cool about it that echoes what the book is about. My sister Nora's jacket photo is brilliant for I FEEL BAD ABOUT MY NECK...she's peering out over the collar of a black turtleneck that's pulled up to her nose.

RO: Love that picture, too...and the book. Great...now I'm worried about my neck. We could always go the JT Leroy route....mmm, maybe not. Know who that is in the picture? Any guesses?? Hint, it's not JT Leroy.

PS Oddly enough, I saw Lee Child walking down the street yesterday after I wrote this; I almost ran over and asked him about the collar thing.