Authorial Identity

Unit: Professional Writing and Presentation 212 - Fakes, Frauds and Fictions
Journal for Week 2 (300 word limit)

I admit that I first thought authorial identity was concerned with the perceptions audiences brought to the reading arising from who the author is. Things like, you expect a certain style or level of quality from a particular author. In fact, it turned out that it would include this and something more.

Authorial identity comes to equally mean that readers come to trust in the author wholly, because of the authority that they have. (Is it then surprising that “author” exists in “authority?”) This leads on to the book scandals that occur through the misleading of the reading public over the true identity of the author. I'm not sure this would occur quite so dramatically in a purely fiction demographic, as the author does not really seem to exist in the same “world” as his/her book. However, in the marketing of the non-fiction, the author truly does become the voice of authority. It seems that this is especially the case in terms of biography. It had never occurred to me that an author would reconstruct their history in order to write a book, because I guess the short of it is, why can't they just write their story and call it fiction? Well, because scandal sells, for a start. Seems a pretty sloppy way to go about marketing your book though, on scandal rather than proper quality. It is also disturbing to note the kind of racial divisions that can be widened by such books, and its all very sad if its all based on a lie to earn the author money.

Studying publishing, I find it intriguing that publishers do not hold themselves accountable, even though I would have expected that they would look into the truth of these “non-fiction” books. Who chooses to market the book as truth? It is something I would have though the publisher would get a good say on, and yet they hold no responsibility. Very odd.