Facing up to the publicity game

Life gets slightly weird when you publish a book.  Today I was invited to make a guest appearance on a website to promote Looking for Buttons.  Fabulous.  Except I need to provide an author photo.

Ah.

As I've said before, I'm not photogenic.  It's been over a year since I last had my picture taken, unawares, and when I saw it posted on Facebook I wailed about my Cold War-era Eastern Bloc shotputter's arms and pleaded for it to be taken down.  I can only think of one set of recent(ish) photos I can bear to look at, and then I was wearing a furry lion suit to entertain small children at my local library.

I started to wonder when this image-hungry world started to drag an author's mugshot into prominence.   Surely it's a modern phenomenon.  If I looked along my bookcase (or in fact gingerly peered at the teetering overflow pile in front of it, currently nearing six feet high), surely I would find faceless authors.

A random selection:  Terry Pratchett - photo inside cover.  John Buchan - photo on back cover.  Ngaio Marsh - photo on back cover.  Adam Hall - photo on inside flap of dustjacket.  Mervyn Peake - wonderful artist, self-portraits.  OK, maybe it's a twentieth century phenomenon.  Go back further.  Charlotte Bronte - painting by her brother.  Charles Dickens - used to be on a banknote.   Further still.  Christopher Marlowe - the Corpus Christi portait, might be him, might not, great image anyhow so who cares?  I can put a face to almost every author in my collection.  People like to know who they're reading.  I'm no different, so I really can't deny that an author photo is going to become necessary at some point.

But will anybody accept a lion who writes romantic comedies?

Portrait of the author

When I was getting ready to publish Looking for Buttons (yes, she's going on about that again), one of the many gems of wisdom from the fabulous indie author Lexi Revellian was that I needed an author page on Amazon.  With a photo.

Ah.

I don't do photos.  Not in a diva-ish, sunglasses on, hand-over-the-lens sort of manner.  More in an oh-sorry-did-I-just-break-your-camera-by-looking-at-it? way.  A few (okay, more than a few) years back, I had vague hopes that eventually I might mature into Eleanor Bron-esque elegance.  All I've managed is brontosaurus.

But in this image-conscious world the look is all, and I can't possibly go on blogging facelessly.  I'm not going to do all the work for you, though.  I'll give you a thumbnail sketch and your imagination can fill in the rest.  This is what I look like:

The secret love child of Nana Mouskouri and Harry Palmer.