How can a 20-year-old bag a fortune for his first novel? Is it because it’s a stunner – or because he is? Dan Glaister investigates books and looks
The four words most frequently used to describe Richard Mason are sensation, advance and Hugh Grant. Sensation because Mason is 20 years old and his debut novel, The Drowning People, is accompanied by a marketing campaign to rival the best of Martin Amis. Advance because, according to Britain’s Sunday Telegraph, Mason (now visiting the South Africa he left as a child, to promote the novel) “received a 200 000 book deal from Penguin … and a bidding war has begun in Hollywood for the film rights”. Breathless stuff, and nobody really minded if the figures were a little awry. (For the record, Penguin paid 100 000 for two books from Mason.)
Which leaves Hugh Grant. “When I tell him that his foppish, clean-cut looks remind me of Hugh Grant’s, he blushes Grantishly and mumbles generalities to change the subject,” declared his first, ever-so-slightly smitten interviewer.
The British publicity campaign for Mason’s book included the front and inside covers of The Bookseller, the trade’s weekly, carrying an advertisement for The Drowning People. The foppish, clean-cut Mason stared moodily from the page, his Hugh Grant hair flopping lazily into the most delicate of curls above one eyebrow.
“We absolutely did not buy the book because he was good-looking,” says Mason’s editor at Penguin, Tom Weldon. “The most important factor was the book itself. It was a first draft and it was a very compelling psychological drama. The writing was very sophisticated when you discovered how old he was. You’re always looking for writers at the beginning of their careers and he was very serious about his writing.”
And? “He’s promotable as well. The look is interesting in the sense that the book is about quite a privileged world. Some people will be surprised that it still exists, and he takes you inside it. The way he looks is part of the product of his upbringing.”
Mason, despite the hype, is not unique. From the soft-focus image of Edna O’Brien on the cover of The Country Girl, published in the Sixties, to the photograph of a naked Amanda Foreman, winner of the Whitbread biography prize, hiding her modesty behind a stack of books, form and content have come together to aid the publishing industry in its mission to sell books.
Yet while the industry is unashamed about the need to adopt some of the marketing techniques of its cultural cousins – the glamour of film, the riotous living and bad teeth of rock’n’roll – publishers are coy when it comes to discussing the importance of “the look” to a writer’s success.
“Unfortunately it’s true,” says one leading publisher who on this occasion prefers to remain anonymous. “Good looks are very helpful. Take someone like Paul Auster. Bookshops will love to have him for a signing because he’s startlingly good-looking.”
The literary equivalent of the casting couch used to be the manuscript. But that too is changing. “Now when you’re interested in an author,” explains the anonymous publisher, “you contact the agent and say do you want to come in and have a chat? A subliminal part of the signing process is what the author looks like. If it’s slightly marginal and in walks an absolute stunner it could quickly become the latest literary sensation. It does probably give an unfair advantage to the good-looking author.”
The savvy agent – or indeed the clued-up first-time writer – may now enclose a black and white photograph with the manuscript. The clichs of the book-jacket author photograph are easily imitated: moody, windswept, enigmatic.
It’s not everything, but it may help. In some cases, as with Mason, it can become part of the fictional package. The jacket photograph of thriller writer James Ellroy, not a conventional good-looker, together with his dog, belongs as much in the author’s fictional world as the prose.
“If a writer is bloody good-looking and articulate, you draw attention to it,” says one veteran agent. “It shouldn’t be important but, because of the way the media works, it’s been made into something important.”
Another veteran agent – again speaking anonymously – says: “Publishers are not averse to the motto `Hire pretty’. It never hurts. It didn’t do Jay McInerney any harm. Anything that helps to market books is not a bad thing. In a country that publishes 100 000 books a year, if you have something to make [your book] stand out from the herd then you use it.”
Stunning looks can, of course, work against a writer. The whisper before 1997’s Booker Prize, won by Arundhati Roy for The God of Small Things, was that she was very beautiful. Not a word about the prose.
Mason’s editor denies that it makes any difference, subscribing to the view that good looks may help in the short-term, but in the long run the quality of the writing is what counts. “You can fool the public once, but you want them to be reading for a long time.”