Wake Up Hun, New Author Headshots Dropped

It's-a me, Andrew.

If you felt a great disturbance in the force recently, it was because I had a photo session to take new author headshots. These were done by the divine Jenny Lynn Photography who had previously had the great pleasure of photographing my objectively more-attractive wife. Clearly, Jenn had to work harder to craft the raw clay of my face into something non-crab like. I was going to shoot a behind-the-scenes doc of the day, but it went mostly like this:

It’s something of a shame that authors - people who choose to meet the world through the printed word - have to have headshots. Can’t we just vividly describe ourselves? Do we force models to send out a short story every time they want to promote themselves? No. And that’s because we live in an hotocracy. Pretty privilege exists and if you look at the best-sellers over time you’ll notice that now more than ever, authors seem to be getting hotter. Gone are the days when authors with faces like a nuzzled pork scratching such as Dostoevsky, Kafka, Woolf and King could ride high in the sales charts.

As visual mediums like social media (hey! Follow me!) become the default way to market books, it’s imperative that authors not only know how to smile for the camera, but that they don’t break the lens when they do so. Consequently, less facially-blessed authors are having to work harder and we’re left lamenting how deeply unfair it is that authors like Mandel, Whitehead, Williams and Maas get a headstart on this sort of stuff. I mean look at them - CALL YOURSELF A WRITER?

Anyway, enough griping. Here’s what Jenn came up with:

Yikes, you’ll be pleased to know that I don’t rock a headshot on any of my books.