And that Shakespeare was good-looking as a young man, before he lost his hair and puffed out from home-cooking, seems at least likely, on the fixed general principle that writers who become very celebrated in their youth, as he did, are, to a first approximation, almost always good-looking. Byron and Shelley, Mailer and Updike and Salinger, Fitzgerald, Dickens, Tennyson, Lowell, Ted Hughes—all celebrated in their youth, all not just O.K.-looking but an oil painting, each and every one. There are many good funny-looking writers, but it’s hard to think of good funny-looking writers who get famous young. Funny-looking writers, at least funny-looking male writers, get famous late—Samuel Johnson and Sinclair Lewis and John Milton and Philip Larkin all come instantly to mind—or else they don’t get famous. They get read, but they don’t get celebrated.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/adam-gopnik-look...
Of course, he was already becoming famously reclusive by this time so maybe he's exempt from this rule.
Anyway, I love that headshot.
Marketing is just as, if not maybe even more, important than actually completing a saleable novel. Unfortunately like many of us, writers are usually only interested in their specialty--writing--and so find marketing difficult and tiresome. Lots of great novels have languished due to an author's disinterest in marketing. Likewise lots of mediocre or bad novels have succeeded thanks to clever and diligent marketing.
This is one of the many reasons why self-publishing will never overthrow the big publishing houses, like so many people predicted a decade ago. The fact is that going from manuscript to financial success involves lots of different skills that most authors just haven't been trained for, like cover design, copyediting, printing, and marketing. In the traditional arrangement, publishing houses do all of that non-writerly work for the author in exchange for a profit share.
One can self-publish and keep all the profits, but most writers don't understand that that also means you must also be a pro-level cover artist, copyeditor, printing expert, and marketer (or have the money to hire them yourself).
(There are other good reasons why publishing houses aren't going away anytime soon despite technologist's frenzied predictions, this is just one of them.)
My brother in law, whom I love dearly, self-published a novel. He's gone to all sorts of local fairs in order to sell it. But when I ask him for the elevator pitch, he can't give one. I've listened to him talk about it, and he can't even get ME interested in reading it.
Dan Brown is the quintessential example of a horrible writer who is nonetheless successful. By any measure his prose is terrible. His fact checking is nonexistent. (In the first book, the hero looks out the window of a bathroom in the Louvre towards the Eiffel Tower, and you can't see the tower from there.) ...And yet he is a good tale-spinner and excellent with "and _then_ what happened?" plot, so it works.
One very successful fiction writer pointed out to me years ago that fiction can rely on several items: voice, plot, character, setting, etc. So "being a good writer" is just an overall label that obscures those things. Ideally an author is great at all of them, but few are.
And as the same author pointed out, if you write (and want to make a living at it), you have to publish, and you have to get noticed. There's an old saying that books don't become bestsellers if they're hidden in a trunk. In the olden days when book publishers ruled the earth, an author could rely on the effectiveness of a good agent or publisher (and the luck involved in finding one). Now, the author has to learn to present herself with confidence, which does not necessarily come naturally. It becomes another relevant skill that has little to do with plot, character, etc. -- rather like the skill of getting your own butt into the chair in the first place.
That does indeed map to tech skills. Just as a thoughtful writer (and reader!) identifies the various parts of the novel, so too does a thoughtful developer consider her tech skills (idea generation, debugging, team building, whatever). And the ability to communicate/market is among them.
Sometimes the absence of an attribute encourages the reader to fill in the blanks; readers' own imagination is an important element. So if the characters are undeveloped but the worldbuilding is superb, the reader supplies what the story lacks.
It works because people read fiction for good storytelling, not for the facts within. I can't see how getting that detail wrong makes him a poor writer.
Fiction requires the willing suspension of disbelief. But you should not have to hang it until dead.
Each of us is sensitized to different things. A doctor friend watched less than 60 seconds of the original "E.R." TV show because in that minute he saw someone use an IV upside down. That made the entire show untrustworthy.
It rarely takes a lot of effort to get it right. Why not do so?
Because, contrary to your claim, it takes a lot of effort to get it right, since there are a near-infinite number of ways every individual element of description or presentation can be wrong. And it's often a high cost:benefit ratio, because most errors will only be noticed by a small share of the target audience and will only break suspension of disbelief in an even smaller share (conversely, getting it right will often strike non-experts wrong and break suspension of disbelief; verisimilitude in fiction is not actually about matching reality, but audience expectations.)
So, except on the things about which your target audience is particularly knowledgeable and concerned, accuracy may not be worth the effort put into it.
In startup terms it's often like "Uber for X". Consider Harry Potter. There are tons of variants around the theme of "Young person with powers goes to school". So you end up with things that are like "Harry Potter for College", "Harry Potter but Superheroes", "Harry Potter but Female lead".
None of which is marketing in the sense of placing ads, but more fundamentally about writing/making something that will sell.
I don't know about you, but I binge read something like fifty Star Trek novels when I was a kid because that's what the library had. That was once I ran out of the other shitty sci-fi on offer, because I'd already read all the Asimov three times over.
I think we think of women as doing this more because men tend to be employed more often than women, and once the kids are old enough to become self-sufficient - and/or shipped off to school - homemakers of both genders get more downtime to sit down and read.
And on the guys front, plenty of guys read cheap thrillers that are all about explosions and blood without much prose behind them.
Also, Star Wars.
Motor vehicles (muscle cars, Japanese sport bikes, Tesla, etc.), programming languages (JS, Lisp, Rust), liquor (vodka, whiskey, Moscow mules), electronics (hi-fi audio, pagers, TVs, smartphones), web frameworks (too many to list), beer styles ("imports", stouts, IPAs, Pilsners), grooming (sideburns, beards, mustaches), etc.
As far as I can tell, the main difference between men chasing trends and women doing is that dudes sink way more money into it and take it way more seriously.
In my opinion this trait exists for all genders.
An ugly monolith that solves pain is going to be worth more than a beautiful piece of software that doesn't solve the pain. I'm not saying you can't have both, just that writing beautiful code by itself doesn't help, much like very good prose in novel writing.
It could of course be argued that in literature what is said is more important than how it is said, but at least it has to be understandable. You don't have to have a wonderful prose to be a great author, but at least people need to be able to figure out (some of) what you are saying.
And then there is James Joyce :-)
This could be said about most things to be honest. What something says or does is generally more important than how exactly it does, regardless of whether the thing is a book or a piece of tech or anything else in between.
It's one of the reasons so many startups and projects struggle, because they think their work is going to be about solving a programming problem while it's actually about solving a marketing/network/human one. So many people all programming community software to become the next Facebook or Reddit or whatever else. So many losing to some guy setting up a forum script because the latter actually focused on the community and the former were interested in the shiny tech.
It might just have been her bias but she gave me the impression that sort of stuff mattered quite a lot.