Check out today's post from Agent 007: http://agentoo7.blogspot.com/ (Read #4)
Why is Agent 007 so obsessed with the way authors look? Does this bother anyone else?
Friday, October 07, 2005
Judge A Book By Its Cover?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I read the post.
ReplyDeleteFor me, an author becomes an auto-buy because of their writing and storytelling abilities.
Personally it bothers me to see a lousy designed book cover - especially on ebooks. It tells me that if they didn't pay much attention to the cover, then they might have done the same with the editing of the story. What catches my attention first is the cover of a book. Then I move to read the burb.
ReplyDeleteI personally didn't think that 007 was saying that people needed to look like Charlize Theron to get published. I think her point is that you should look presentable. Photos can be taken professionally and air-brushed if necessary to get the look you want. It's really about the total package.
ReplyDeleteFor example, one of my fave writers, CSFriedman writes SFF. Her pictures are hideous (at least the ones on her website are...). I'll still buy her books because I enjoy her writing, but she's probably smart not to put her pictures on her books. (None of her books have her author photo)
JMHO.
BTW - Silma - I agree w/ you. I hate crappy covers, and I noticed many god awful covers on ebooks. Given how visual I can be, I don't buy books w/ awful covers unless it's a book that I really want to read (like the author or highly recommended by someone whose taste I trust or something like that).
Yeah, it bothers me. I hardly bother to look at author photos and even if I did, I probably wouldn't ever recognize these people in the grocery store because that's not how they really look. Maybe I'll just send author photos of my cleavage, since that photographs better -- and is better known -- than my face. *gg*
ReplyDeleteI'm guilty of standing in a bookstore and reading what is inside a book and not looking at the cover. Plenty of times when I listened to the advertising and not the excerpts, I didn't enjoy the book. Thank goodness for the Internet being invented... I don't have to bend up books at the bookstore anymore. :)
ReplyDelete