Attention authors: Forget about hustling, wheedling and logrolling for the perfect book-jacket blurb.
Never mind asking that friend of a friend of a friend to get in touch with Joan Didion so she can, God willing, plug your next tome as "a marvelous tale told from the heart." Dispense with the impulse to beg your agent to track down Michael Chabon on vacation so that he might agree to glance at your manuscript and, if he's so moved, proclaim it a "modern classic."
Turns out, you don't have to work nearly that hard to generate a little book buzz. All you need is someone famous -- that is, far more famous than a Didion or a Chabon -- to be photographed holding a copy of your latest work. (And we're not talking about Oprah, either.)
Best of all, unlike those who might be inclined to laud your literary prowess, these celebs don't actually have to read the book. In fact, they don't have to read any book at all. Ever.
Just ask Kim Barnouin and Rory Freedman, co-authors of Skinny Bitch, an irreverent, animal-rights-touting, vegan-venerating diet book. Skinny Bitch enjoyed steady sales after being published more than a year ago. But now suddenly, it's going gangbusters.
The reason, according to this week's New York Times: Victoria Beckham -- also known as the pop star Posh Spice when she's not known as the wife of soccer golden boy David Beckham -- was photographed in May carrying a copy of the book while shopping at a chic Los Angeles boutique. After that noted bastion of literature -- E! News -- picked up on Beckham's evident interest in the volume, U.S. sales soared. This Sunday, Skinny Bitch is set to hit No. 3 on the Times' bestseller list of paperback advice, how-to and miscellaneous books.
It is hardly news, of course, that celebrity sells. A survey last year by the global marketing giant WPP Group found that one in four ads now features a celebrity, compared with just one in eight a decade earlier.
Still, there is something wonderfully fantastic about having Posh Spice emerge as a champion of the written word. In what was surely the most stunning part of the Times story, the paper reported that Beckham confided in a 2005 interview that she had never read a book in her life.
Now, nobody would argue that Skinny Bitch has much in common with a well-crafted narrative or an erudite work of nonfiction. Yet there's no reason the basic formula shouldn't apply widely.
After all, how hard could it be to get Paris Hilton to hold up a copy of, say, Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity the next time the paparazzi are swarming? Why couldn't Lindsay Lohan be persuaded to clutch the latest offering from Joyce Carol Oates the next time she rolls into rehab?
Talk about win-win. These party girls, who have endured more than their share of bad press of late, might finally be taken a bit more seriously. As for you, you haggard wordsmiths, you'll soon be on the fast track to the morning talk-show circuit and a high-six-figure book deal.
So, get busy. Throw down that Publishers Weekly. People magazine awaits.