Are
authors hot?
I
don’t mean those who have hot books – hitting best-seller lists, getting great
reviews, winning awards – but those writers that are really good-looking.
Think
sexy, pretty/handsome, and alluring.
Most
industries rank their eye candy.
Instagram is filled with looks-centric images by the successful and the
unknown. Some fields are linked to
beauty - Hollywood, models, athletes, and dancers to name a few. But do authors,
often perceived as having beautiful minds but not necessarily the body or smile
to match, possess the right looks to turn readers onto them?
Though
book jackets, author websites, and press releases often feature photos of
authors, these images often lack sex appeal.
Should the book publishing industry consider marketing its
better-looking talent a bit differently?
People
buy books because of the words in them and not the appearances of the ones who
wrote them, but perhaps that will change. Should it?
There
are some lists out there that rate author looks.
Ranker.com
put together “The Hottest Dead Writers,” showcasing only male novelists, poets,
and essayists. Of the deceased, it said
the hottest was Jack Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway, Anton Chekhov, Hunter S. Thompson,
and Roald Dahl.
TheRichest.com
put together its list of 11 of the Hottest Female Writers in the World and
round out the top five as: Vicki
Petterson, Gillian Flynn, Kiri Blakeley, Melanie Notkin, and Katherine Taylor.
A
few years ago, Buzz Feed put together hot lists of men and women, dead or alive,
33 Literary Geniuses Who Happen to Be
Super Hot, Ernest Hemingway, Alice Wallace, and Rupert Brooke were the top
trio.
Not
to be outdone, HuffPost had a piece, 9 Famous Authors Where Totally Hot, and
it featured people like Albert Camus, Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, Harriet
Stowe, Lord Byron and Sylvia Path.
Perhaps
we should be more focused on the sexiest erotic novels of all time, as an Esquire story earlier this year
covered. It highlighted books that
included: Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill, What
Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell, A
Sport and a Raptime by James Salter, and The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis.
Listal.com,
some five years ago, ranked sexy authors with Dita Von Teese on top, but Woody
Allen was ranked 9th so not sure how reliable such a list is.
The
PoeticsProject.com cited 10 male authors who “bring sexy to the paperback,”
but it was challenging to find many lists, and few by big media sources, that
featured sexy authors. People magazine wasn’t naming the
hottest-looking authors. Sports Illustrated didn’t highlight
writers in swimsuits, and Playboy is not dedicating much ink to the hot authors of today.
So
why don’t we have many stories featuring how hot authors are? Because:
1.
It’s
irrelevant to their ability to craft books.
2.
Publishers
don’t market author beauty.
3.
Many
authors are older and may not see themselves as sexy.
4.
Authors
want to be taken seriously and don’t think baring body parts will help them.
5.
Society
has a prejudiced misconception of the looks of people who write -- or read -- books.
6.
Many
authors are introverts and wouldn’t know what to do with new found popularity.
7.
Too
many other hotties seek the spotlight.
There’s no shortage of erotic images online and in our mass media.
8.
Authors
may not believe that objectifying one’s body is the way to sell books or get
their writing recognized.
That
said, could the book industry benefit from a makeover and put a spotlight on
the attractiveness of authors? Yes!
It
does this when it comes to romance and erotica, as if playing up the books of
the author will make the writing better, more believable, or more exciting.
Would
we be comfortable seeing an author photo for a business author featured, in a
short skirt and a provocative position?
Will we want to look at the author’s photo of a historical book and see
a bare-chested guy with a menacing smile?
Certainly,
some books, due to their subject matter, simply would never allow an author to
play up his or her beauty and sexiness.
Religious books, books on death and destruction, children’s tales, or
books about suicide would not endear themselves to have authors dress
provocatively or to appear in a sexy pose.
Maybe
writers deserve a magazine that’s about the image and lifestyle of today’s
writer, a kind of Esquire meets Cosmopolitan for writers. Will we soon see a photo shoot
highlighting. America’s hottest authors? For now, such a story would only focus on
top-selling and popular writers and it wouldn’t be linked to looks or
sexiness. Maybe that will change. But would it be for the better?
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