One of my favorite book covers is for Jack L. Chalker’s Dance Band on the Titanic. The cover shows (apparently) the author at his word processor or typewriter, surrounded by miniature versions of characters from his stories. A pretty common type of cover…
…until you open the back cover and are confronted with the following:
“The guy on the cover isn’t me. It’s ______, who paints my book covers. This is Me:”
Below this is the picture of author Jack Chalker (It’s him – I’ve seen him a couple of times) with a mean scowl on his face, looking as unphotogenic as possible.
So evidently you CAN become a successful author without looking nice and inviting.
For what it’s worth, I think my jacket photo looks impressive, and friendlier than I am in real life.
Not so. The picture of the author is never a selling point. No one ever has to see the author (other than the photo on the back flap). A rock star, OTOH, has to perform, so looks are important.
Here are a couple (the photos don’t do them justice):
But what about book tours? What about TV? And what about the notion that if an author is good-looking, he/she is more likely to be covered in the media, which helps sell books? I mean, why else would they even have a picture on the jacket flap?
95% of books never have book tours. And 99% of authors never appear on TV. And those who do have tours and do go on TV are established best-selling authors, not young writers starting out. By the time they are established, people are interested in them because of their writing, not their appearance.
The media coverage of authors generally centers on book reviews (where the author’s picture isn’t often included), with the occasional human interest article (“Jane Author spent 20 years in a cave while writing her novel on a stone tablet.”) Since most authors don’t have particularly interesting stories (“Jim Author wrote for an hour a day for six months to complete the first draft”), most do not get any sort of feature articles in major media until they’re established (local media is different, of course).
In my case, the marketing consisted of ads in appropriate magazines, review copies sent wherever they could be, and giving them a list of local media contacts so they could mention I was a local author (which counts as enough human interest to get into the paper in most places). I also contacted local bookstores and media outlets myself; I had a radio interview on WGY. I’m convinced that wll my work probably increased my sales by less than 50. This is probably typical of most first novelists and midlist authors.
As for the picture in the flap: it’s mostly for the author’s ego and to give a face to the author. But when was the last time you looked at the picture on the flap and decided, “That settles it. I’m buying the book because that author looks hot.”?
