This isn’t particularly uncommon in the romance industry. There’s a fair number of men writing under female pseudonyms. Though I admit I’ve never heard of anyone hiring a stand-in to do in-person publicity before.
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That’s where it crosses the line. Up until that point they were selling the “idea” that there “could be a woman who teaches algebra, is a young attractive model, and also writes ultra-violent pulp fiction that is sells well” as a way to market their pulp fiction.
Do people want to consume that idea? Sure. It sells. So yes.
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Well, technically, a person posing for pictures is a model. And there are many models who are not stereotypical “beauty models”. Including people who look like “soccer moms” or “retired teachers”. When you do a stock photo image search with those terms, you are going to find examples of models posing as soccer moms and teachers (maybe even are those things when not modeling).
So anyway, I believe these are the images of the model used for the pseudonym’s agent page. They just show a woman looking away from the camera - adding to the mystique, I suppose. First photo posted, link to the page with 3 other images below that.
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The article says it’s a €1m prize, which is a bit more than $1m.
This “prize” isn’t a typical book prize that’s recognizing existing books. It’s for unpublished manuscripts that are submitted to the publisher Planeta and the winner has to agree to that publisher getting the publication rights to the book, so it’s basically a money-making competition that a publisher puts on, not a prestigious literary award given out by a neutral body.
I agree with some of the critics who are saying that the real offense wasn’t just using a fake female name, but creating an entirely fake persona as a marketing gimmick. Plus, for this prize they had to actually apply for it, so they certainly can’t claim it was unforeseeable that they could get chosen for this in part because of their marketing.
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They needed 3 guys to do the job of one woman and then they gloated about it afterwards? Which part of that is new and shocking? To use a quote from Rick& Morty, " welcome to womanhood!"
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Yeah, I’m going to disagree with you here. My wife and I both use pseudonyms and manufactured author photos for our published works. Being even mildly recognizably famous sucks and it can’t be undone. Both of us have previous experiences, and neither of us has ever found any benefit to being recognized by our fanbases. In my wife’s case, it has been actually dangerous.
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As the last of the snow has melted in the foothills of (insert characters location - I have no idea where it’s supposed to take place) the elusive female solitary detective prepares for her once-a-year migration to the warm breeding grounds of the Floridian peninsula. Once there she begins the annual mating ritual by prowling classic car meets and luring potential mates with the promise of karaoke and fine grappa.
After a week of debauchery, her energy spent, the solitary female detective begins the journey back to (again, insert place here) and returns to the slow solitary life for the remainder of the year.
See makes perfect sense. What middle age woman doesn’t keep living the Girls Gone Wild Spring Break lifestyle that we, middle aged men holding onto our teenage selves, imagine them to live.
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Out of interest are people concerned about the amount of heavy lifting that word ‘model’ is doing here? If it had just said ‘they hired a woman’ or they hired a female actor’ would the objections have been as vociferous?
Of course, they did, apparently decide specifically on a ‘model’ - which we all presume is shorthand for ‘fashion model’ or similar, so it is a valid thing to note.
I have not read the back-story fully, but did the publisher know it was three men when they accepted the manuscript (possibly sent in the woman’s name) for publication?
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Apparently the manuscript was submitted to the contest under the pseudonym Sergio López, so it didn’t win on the basis of the gender misrepresentation.
BTW, there was a decent British comedy a few years ago with this plot:
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I wish I had been there for this! That accent never gets old. The tension in the room, the perfect amount of awkward, the fashion! What a ball. I wonder what food they ate? I would have enjoyed this so much, thanks BB for bringing it to my attention.
Ah, that could explain it.
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Yeah, that’s an interesting wrinkle. Here’s what it says in a Financial Times article:
So that raises the question: why even bother to reveal themselves as the writers behind the Mola-authored books instead of just revealing themselves as the writers behind Lopez?
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When Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light™, was starting the shopping-channel phase of his career, he shot a promo in New York featuring him and his charming family at home. The family were all actors; the real family were in the real home back in California.
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IIRC author Gail Carriger has called such characters something like “men with boobs”, and I’ve certainly gotten that impression from some urban fantasy main characters. But I also don’t want to fall into the trap of expecting all women to act one way or another, such that we exclude women with “unfeminine” interests and characteristics from being considered “real” women characters. But I don’t know how to balance that with the wish that women characters are written in realistic and representative ways.
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Pretty much any male character is seen as acting in male ways, or is seen as being “enlightened” enough to do feminine things like cry, wash dishes or ask for consent. It doesn’t matter who created the character. Women are presumed to be more accurate at writing about women, because men can’t be bothered to learn what it’s like. If we want people to be shown in all their diversity we need to stop assigning behaviors as “manly” or “feminine”.
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I’m confused, why should there be „anger flowing“ towards anyone involved in this story?
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Which is a far cry from masquerading as a woman when you’re really three middle aged men. I completely understand that. Do you and your wife do interviews as your pseudonyms? Or just have stock photos and stock descriptions of the “author”? Curious to know.
I’ve known people who write romance, and yes, they often publish under pen names. I’ve never known any of them give interviews, though, and rarely saw men masquerading as women (far more likely for a woman to want to keep her private life private to do it), but I haven’t been close to that market in almost a decade and wasn’t that deep to begin with. That’s where this sort of feels weird to me.
But hey, maybe I’m making much ado about nothing. Wouldn’t be the first time, won’t be the last. 
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Possibly in The heroine’s journey? Though that’s non-gender specific in her formulation.
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I’m not a great judge of either. The thing of it is I know people who, if I read them as a protagonist without knowing them, I might consider “unrealistic” because they aren’t typical.
So, I save my ire for bad relationships in books, where many excuses are made for male characters to behave like jerks. In some ways, the entire genre of urban fantasy seems tailor made to not just excuse such behavior but to celebrate it, because the male vampires, or alpha werewolves, or whatever, are justified in their jealousy and rage and possessiveness because they are half animal, for which we are supposed to consider them noble. :-/
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They just need a female without soul to tame them.
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