7.3 hOW TO TAkE ThE righT AUThOr PhOTO This is an important and hard truth that most authors avoid: Readers will judge you AND your book based on your author photo. Is that fair? Maybe, maybe not. Is it reality? Absolutely (and you probably do it, as well). Why do people do this? Because biologically, humans are visual creatures. It’s mostly unconscious, but snap judgments of other humans based solely on physical characteristics and facial expressions evolved as a way for humans to quickly assess threats, opportunities, and determine relative social status of a new person to know how to interact with them. A deep discussion of this topic is far beyond the scope of this piece, but basically, it evolved because it worked (there is a ton of research and science on this, and most of it falls under what is called “signaling theory”). This might seem bad, but it is actually a good thing. Now that you hOW TO TAkE ThE righT AUThOr PhOTO · 267