Power of the author
To ‘authorise’ is to endorse, give approval or validate the worth of something. With the weight of that definition comes ‘authority’, so the role of the author is to be elevated by association. A successful, well-known literature author will sell books based upon name alone as their proximity to a text sends forth a perceived value to the audience. (J.K. Rowling’s Harry potter and the Deathly Hallows set a pre-order record of 1.6 million copies ordered before its release) Additionally, celebrity authors exist as a marketing tool and perhaps complicate matters further (I have a theory that Katie Price has written more books than she has read). Autobiographies exist as a vehicle to elevate the subject into the realms of literature, but often are written by ghost-writers that defer ownership to the celebrity individual.
In this text, I examine the exhibited ‘author power’ and the progressive convolutions of authorship evolution.
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