If I ruled the world...

[ladyofastolat]

When I am supreme ruler of the universe, the following things will be declared illegal forthwith:

- Books with one word titles. Exemptions will very probably be granted when the word in question is sufficiently unusual, but common words are right out. Calling your book by a word ignored by most search engines (such as "it") shall lead to punishment more dreadful than any man has ever dreamt.

- Authors who insist on spelling their name in an unexpected fashion. If your readers are going to ask for you as "Susan" then you will jolly well be forced to spell your name "Susan", not "Soozun". (Made-up example to protect the guilty.)

- Books that appear to be called on thing - e.g. "Let's talk about recycling" - but actually secretly call themselves something else - "Recyling", which happens to be in the "Let's talk about" series - and don't bother to tell anyone.

- Vacuous celebrities with no talent who still manage to get themselves publishing deals, which they use to "write" books telling 6 year old girls that beauty is everything.

Actually, on second thoughts:

- Stupid, idiotic, poorly designed search systems. Once they're banned, I might even allow the others to become legal again. Except for the last one. There's no excuse for that.

Comments

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

Agh, yes. I saw a book today in which, according to the blurb, the entire point was that the heroine was far from beautiful in a world that prized beauty above all. So what do we find on the cover? A very beautiful girl. I did much mental ranting about how this reflected an appearance-obsessed society (presumably publishers think that plain girls don't sell books). However, it's probably nothing to do with any nasty agenda, but is just the usual situation of cover illustrators not bothering to read the book. (Though it's probably not their fault. They're probably writing to a lazily-written brief.)

[pellegrina.livejournal.com]

Argh! that winds me up. It's bad enough that so many heroines are described as so hawt 'n' sexay, or only possessed of flaws that aren't flaws ("her lips were too full for beauty") even when we are in fact imagining them so they don't have to be played by Hollywood starts to be marketable. But if a rare book actually allows the heroine to be ordinary or even plain and the cover shows the usual bodice-ripper beauty... argh. Argh.

[jane-somebody.livejournal.com]

I think it's both, though. Yes, the immediate cause is badly-briefed cover artists, but the fact that their default image of a 'heroine' is beautiful nonetheless bears witness to an agenda (conscious or not) by both publishers and society in general.