Photoshopping with Words

Photoshop -- vanity's best friend! Have you all seen THIS recent instance of image-altering craziness?

The artificial slenderizing of Beyonce made me realize something. Authors frequently Photoshop themselves. Of course, they do it with words.

Award-winning! Critically acclaimed! Bestselling!

These are phrases you'll routinely see when authors try to Photoshop themselves. Certain words function like that program's nifty glamorizing techniques. But for any discerning reader (just as for any discerning viewer of a magazine ad), an author's glossed-up image raises more questions than it answers.

Which awards? Acclaimed by whom? Bestselling where and for how long? And why, exactly, should any of these high-flown descriptors impress me?

Frankly, I hate hype. I'm embarrassed to use it and put off when I read it (although that largely depends on the author; some just seem snootier and more pretentious than others). Like a Photoshopped image, there's something fundamentally dishonest about author hype. And fundamentally meaningless.

Yet perfectly understandable . . . and sort of poignant.

Given the plethora of awards in the book world -- from a popularity contest on Goodreads or some Yahoo group to the august Nobel Prize -- just about every author can, at some point in his/her career, be "award-winning." And the more contests s/he enters, the greater his or her chances are.

And what the hell does "critically acclaimed" mean? I honestly don't know. Does it mean a paid reviewer said nice things about your book? Or unpaid reviewers on Amazon said nice things? More to the point, why should that difference matter? Does the opinion of professional book critic Clarence Montrose Terwilliker III have more inherent value than the opinion of any intelligent reader? Fuck, no. So this in turn means that every author can claim to be critically acclaimed, because every author's work has been praised somewhere, at some time, by somebody. (And bless you readers for that!)

Bestselling? Yeah, okay. Tell me where. Your publisher's site, or within your genre (at which third-party seller?) or nationwide (according to which media outlet)? How long did your best-sellerdom last? And what ranking did your book achieve? Was it vigorously pimped by your publisher? By another, more famous author? In other words, did you spontaneously burst from the teeming horde of  your peers, or were you somehow given a leg up?

These are the questions that have always popped into my mind whenever I've seen a writer Photoshopping his or her image. Unless the hype carries an implication of superiority, I just smile and shake my head and think, God, how badly we all want to look good! :-)