Nobody used to care if an author was telegenic, or photogenic for that matter. You didn’t need to be a hottie or a hustler to be a writer. Just tell a good story, get it published, do a few author readings and hope for it to hit the best-seller list.

Except for blockbuster authors who achieved star status, the book business was more about getting attention for the writing than the writer. Most authors stayed somewhat hidden. You saw their photos on the back of their books, friendly faces in what looked like vacation pix taken by a relative, but you wouldn’t recognize them if they walked past you in the airport.

That was before authors were expected to be marketing experts. The author job requirements today are more than to be imaginative, ironic and understand metaphors. It’s way beyond the writing. An author needs to get out there and sell herself. She needs to create a fan page on Facebook, gather Twitter followers and update her website with new photos showing her at important well-attended events. She needs to blog regularly to niche audiences. And that’s only the virtual book tour.

In terms of face-to-face promotion, you still have your traditional book readings at book stores but also your author events with food and wine and theme party book launches.

It’s all about doing whatever you need to do to help keep your book and the book industry alive. Just as publishers and book store owners struggle to stay relevant in the electronic communication age so must authors. This means using all the tools to create your own buzz, including getting your teeth whitened and taking improv classes so you’ll be ready for primetime.

This is a new demanding world for the average writer, often a quiet, cerebral type, a happy loner content to spend days on end in a small room with a closed door, drinking cold coffee and dreaming up great characters and memorable dialogue. Authors do not normally aspire to be rock stars. On the glamour gauge they are of the scuffed shoes and comfy jeans style, somewhere near classical musicians and college teachers. They tend to look intense and act frazzled, perhaps from thinking so hard. Your average writer is not skilled at selling herself.

If she got the dream call from Oprah, she would be both thrilled and sick to her stomach.

But you have to do what you have to do. So before you even start writing the book you work on a press release. You take a special marketing class for authors where you learn it is not enough to produce a book, you need a brand. You learn what to wear on TV. No black shirts, no white pants, no sandals. And you support each others’ author gigs.

One I will be supporting this Saturday, Sept. 19, is the Sonoma County Book Festival which celebrates the local literary community and happens for the 10th year at Santa Rosa’s Courthouse Square and inside the main library. (Details at www.socobookfest.org)
It’s where authors, mostly from the Bay Area, get to do it the old fashioned way – read from their latest works and talk about writing with people who love books. (Disclosure: I’m not one of the authors but will be cheering on friends and my daughter and their new books.)

The book festival is a day of no hustle. Just people who write and people who read, the two most important ingredients for a book. It’s tradition and it’s free. And if you go and discover a great writer, feel free to tweet Oprah.

I’ve been in Austin this week writing with my daughter. We set up our two laptops at opposite ends of her dining room table, stayed tuned for hurricane updates and played with words.

Sam is the newest writer in the family and has a book deadline the end of September. I am here to be a copy editor before she sends her manuscript off to her New York editors.

I think of us like mother and daughter piano players. Or mother and daughter painters with side by side canvases. We share the same passion for the craft even though we have different styles and references. “Who is Damien Rice” I inquire about one of her musical mentions. And she pulls up iTunes to educate me.

We are wordies. Some call us endangered. Words are not given as much respect as they once were. Book contracts are sparse. Books themselves are shorter, adjusting to the shrinkage of readers’ attention spans. Same with newspapers, where my writing comes from, which are skinnier, owing to news junkies lured over to online blogs and 24/7 cable news.

We are wordies. Some call us endangered.

The traditional word form is threatened and yet many people keep at it. My friend Ellen just finished a novel set in Greece. Pam in Mexico is taking notes on the ex-pat community. Sophie is working on a mystery. Jan is writing a tragic memoir about a mutual high school friend.

We write books because we read books. None of us can imagine our world without them. Given an extra hour in a strange town we seek out a book store. We’d never go to bed or take a bath or pack for a trip without a book.

I watch my daughter wrinkle her forehead and scrunch her eyes searching for the right word. Without first googling. Or going to a Thesarus. She scans her own memory to deliver the perfect anecdote or piece of dialogue that will be so good she will stop to applaud herself.

People who would like to write a book think that authors sit at home in their pajamas experiencing daily epiphanies and drinking cold coffee. Except for the epiphanies they are right. Some days you’d rather work at a bank.

Today’s at-home writers need to do more than come up with words. If you have an editor waiting in New York you are also brainstorming marketing ideas before you finishing writing the introduction.

That is because if you are of the lucky few, you will one day have to get out of your pajamas and turn into a hottie intellectual who can dazzle a talk show host who hasn’t read your book. Writers now have to be camera-ready. HD camera ready. I tell Sam she’s lucky to have good cheekbones.

I’m thrilled we share the same world. I imagine her eavesdropping on airport conversations and scribbling dialogue. I expect she’d be more excited to meet a David Sedaris than a Johnny Depp.

She gives me a “hold on there, mother” look and says, “Actually, that would be a toss-up.”

Listen to the World of Wordies Podcast at Another Voice on KRCB-FM