Dee Savoy

Or romance woes part 1

Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of discussions of book covers and romance covers in particular. I’m suffering through a cover woe of my own in which I don’t feel the cover the publisher has in mind has any relation to the book I’ve written (more on that at a later date).

First off, I have to admit, I’m no fan of clinch covers. There’s got to be some way to depict that the story is about folks faling in love beside two bodies groping each other on the cover. I also have to admit that I like my latest cover from BET for this month’s release, LOOKING FOR LOVE IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES. All you see is Jim’s, the hero’s, naked back (he’s um supposed to be wearing a bathing suit, but you tell me if you see one). You catch a glimpse of the heroine’s body, but mostly you see her face. It’s the intriguing expression on Liza’s face that makes the cover for me. It hints at something beside romance. As LOOKING FOR LOVE is a romantic suspense, that’s a good thing as far as I’m concerned.

But back to the typical clinch cover for a moment. My opinion is most romance readers are tired of them-especially the more blatantly sexual ones. A clinch implies that all that is important in the book is the sex, which, as both a reader and a writer, I have to protest. Modern romances (as in those published in the post-Rosemary Rogers era) have plots, well-developed characters, and deal with, on the odd occassion, actual themes and issues that matter. Yet all the casual observer sees is sex. No wonder we romance writers get no respect and romance readers are painted as sex-crazed horny housewives.

I understand that romance publishers reach for the clinch cover as a means of identifying the book within as a romance. Considering that the majority of mass market books sold every year are romances, it’s wise to find some identifier. But honestly, with the lines of women’s fiction, chick lit and other novels marketed to women blurring every day, sometimes the only difference between a book of women’s fiction and a romance is that the former gets to say penis and the other doesn’t. Half the time, the only difference between a romantic suspense and a mystery with a heavy romance sub-plot is that most mystery writers would rather cut off their own gonads than attempt to write about what one does with them. The romantic tension is there: the sexual descriptiveness is not.

So would it be so terrible if a person who was not a romance reader picked up a book that interested them and unwittingly got a romance? I thought the point of a book cover was to intrigue the reader enough to pick up a book, examine it, read the back blurb and maybe a page or two and decide if that was the book for them. Often what the clinch does is prove to readers that there’s no point in checking this book out any further. I may be a bit biased, but there are some damn fine romances out there that can hold their own with any other genre of commercial fiction–no matter what you see on the cover.

But compared to what?

As a romance author who loves to talk about her books, I’ve gotten a lot of strange and unusual responses to trying to introduce the reading public to my work. I’ve had folks at book signings toss my book back at me like they suddenly discovered they were holding a tarantula in their hands once they realized the book was a romance. Sometimes when I tell people I write romance, they respond that they won’t be picking up that kind of book, as if they were certain every other word in the text described some perverse sexual act.

Most of the time, I find such responses to my work humorous, but there is one kind of comment that truly irks me. It goes something like, “I don’t read those sort of books. They’re not real.”

It’s not the sentiment itself that bothers me. Those of us who understand romance know that in part it encompasses the fantasy ideal of finding true love. Romance protagonists, like those in other genres, represent an idealization of character. Genre heroes and heroines are, well, heroic—larger than life. Even the characters in mainstream fiction are set apart from regular people by having a cohesive story to be told.

Yet, increasingly, being “real” has become a synonym for being “street,” “urban,” “ghetto,” or whatever other name you wish to call it. If your story isn’t fraught with drugs, pimps, hos, slang and or at least a little vulgarity, it is viewed as suspect. I’ll be the first to admit that this subgenre of fiction is as valid as any other, though it is neither my cup of tea nor my reality. To me, this brand of fiction is no more inherently “real” than the lifestyle depicted in romance is inherently “false.” Both offer insight into different worlds.

Aside from that, since when has fiction’s primary mission been to depict reality? If you want to see the world exactly as it is, you’d do just as well to turn on the nightly news. I have always believed that the primary duty of fiction was to expose truth. No matter how much fantasy is injected into a story, what truly makes a story real is the veracity of insight into the human condition. Every author, no matter what they write, has the obligation to offer readers a moral imperative, an object lesson, or a good old fashioned moral to the story, not simply an unremitting view of reality, whatever the author deems that to be.

The truth may not always set you free, but without its illumination, the world is a very dark place.