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.