Beauty Is In The Eyes Of The Reader

Before I became an author every job I had ever taken on highly favored very attractive people.  Right out of high school I was an aspiring actress.  Then I switched gears and entered the fashion industry.  I took a little time off when my son was born and when I went back to work I was hired to do marketing and sales at an expensive Tennis club.  I can honestly say that half of my sales at that club were to much older men who vainly hoped that if they gave me a commission I might consent to a date.  When I finally turned to writing I realized that for the first time in my life I would be pursing a career path for which my looks couldn't help me.  I would be judged on my work and my work alone.  I was rather proud of that and hopeful that I would be able to prove myself.  I got an agent and after some last minute revisions she started shopping Sex, Murder And A Double Latte.  The first editor who showed an interest contacted my agent and asked if we could email her an author's photo.

That gave me a moment's pause. Why did they want an author's photo BEFORE making an acquisitions decision?  How could my looks have any bearing on whether or not I was going to get published?  I sent them a picture and I have to admit, it wasn't very flattering.  Furthermore it didn't look like me.  I had let a friend do my make-up and it was WAY too heavy and my hair was styled differently than normal but again I figured it didn't matter.  This was all a technicality anyway.  A few days later they passed on the manuscript.  To this day I don't think it was the picture that was the problem but of course there was a little tiny part of me that wondered.  As it turns out I got offers from a few other publishing houses, one of them was Red Dress Ink and since they offered me the best deal it was their contract I happily signed.  It's important to note that none of the publishing houses that actually made offers asked for my photo before hand. 

When Red Dress Ink did get around to asking me for an author photo that they could use for my books they were very casual about it.  I sent them a few choices, they enthusiastically replied that they loved the pictures and told me which one they picked and that was that.  I went to New York a few months later to meet my new editor and find a publicist.  The moment I walked into my editor's office she lit up and her arm shot out to the phone.  "Kyra Davis' is here," she said almost conspiratorially to whoever was on the other line, "and she looks exactly like her picture!" This was apparently a welcome surprise to everyone and the person she had been talking to (one of the other editors) came in to confirm the truth of that.  My editor laughingly told me how her colleague had been in her office when my email arrived with the attached author photo. 

"I said, okay are you ready for the moment of truth?" she laughed.  "And then when we opened the attachment, you were so cute! Not that being cute is a requirement for being an authors," she added quickly.  "But it helps.  And you actually look like your picture too! That's really great."  

But again I couldn't help wondering why it mattered. When I asked friends who were in the industry they explained that every publishing house wants cute authors that will look good when and if they score an appearance on a talk show during a book tour and whatnot.  But even then I knew that most authors are never sent on tour and that the chances of my scoring a TV appearance were slim.  As it turned out I did both but I don't know that anyone anticipated that at the time.   So again, why did it matter if I looked good?  Perhaps it's wishful thinking on the publishers part. They need to believe that it's at least possible that each of their authors might get those talk-show bookings and therefore want their authors to be camera ready.

But here's the thing: if you go down the list of authors who are on the New York Times bestsellers list you will see very few potential beauty pageant contestants.  I'm not saying that authors are ugly or anything, I'm just saying that in terms of physical appearance we are, as a whole, a pretty average looking bunch.  While the publishers may want their authors to be cute or look like their protagonists the reading public seems to be primarily concerned with what's inside the book, rather than the picture on the back cover.  If sales are any kind of indicator it's extraordinarily clear that what readers don't care about is an author's waist size or whether or not they have a big nose, thinning hair or a handful of pimples.  And since we all know that publisher's rarely do pay for tours and it's only the luckiest of the lucky who are going to get on TV (particularly these days) many authors DO choose author photos that look nothing like them.  Where's the harm?  Who, other than the author's personal friends, is ever going to know?

I'm not sure if the aforementioned publishing house still asks for author photos before they make acquisitions decisions.  If they are it may explain why their sales have been lagging behind those of many of the other New York based publishing houses.  They're focusing on the wrong things.



Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Mystery Series
and
So Much For My Happy Ending
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