The presses, they may be small, but the WTFery perpetrated by the following covers is as mighty as it is wide. Fear them.
From Jane and Robin we have:
Sarah: I’d like to thank this cover for highlighted the importance of a breast self-exam, particularly at the opportune moment when one is stark naked and betwixt two stay-puft marshmallow men.
Candy: I have never seen a woman look so superfluous in a menage cover, ever. Look at them! The guys are all “Ew! Boobs! Man-nape on, the other hand…NOM NOM NOM.” And the chick’s all “But…but? Boobs? I has them. OK, how ‘bout I make an O-face? will that make it better? Guys? …guys?”
From Karen S we have:
Sarah:: Say it with me now: “When the burning, itching, and soreness of hemorrhoids flare up….” Fiachra’s Kiss will turn your ass into a flaming, burning world of hurt.
Candy: Man, how much does it suck to have your book confused for a Terrance and Phillip movie?
And from Erastes, we have:
Sarah: I opened this file and literally said out loud, “Oh, God. No.” The poor butterfly. A perfectly acceptable image tossed into slimy pit of bad Photoshop hair, bad Photoshop skin, bad Photoshop horns, a miserable excuse for a Photoshop tail, and on top of all that, Bacchus’s badly Photoshopped son is humping a tree. That poor butterfly. Every one of its 12,000 ommatidia must be screaming.
Candy: You know what I think when I see that sassy little tail? I think of a poor, misguided chipmunk spelunkin’ for nuts. Except they’re not quite the nuts he wants or needs.
WHY???? Call me a rabble-rouser, a naive newbie, forever blackball me in the industry, but …really. Why? I’m confused why authors seem to be so accepting, so … passive on this point. I get that the publisher has a lot of the power here, but it certainly can’t help sales, the bottom line, if the author is embarrassed to be seen in public with their book because the cover is so heinous.
DO.NOT.GET.
I love you two so much!
Nah. Dontcha know the children of Bacchus have TWO—even the girls?
I just got a gorgeous cover from Loose Id, btw. They produce some of the best in ebookland . . . most of the time.
Oh, now I know what’s up with that tail. It isn’t a tail at all. It’s a wick. This is the same dude from the cover above, before his vindictive girlfriend, with the help of Joey Greco, caught him fooling around in the woods!
karmelrio, one takes what one gets often because there is no time to do otherwise.
I got cover art the day before one release. Something about they lost the request sheet three times over the Christmas holidays.
When there is time, the artist may be willing to make changes. One made one of the white gym bunnies he’d given me into a Cherokee, and slimmed down the other and recolored the truck.
Another publisher…I don’t know what my cover looks like until release day. It never really occurs to send art to the author.
That 2nd cover – Fiachra’s Kiss.
Am I the only one thinking that he lit his own fart?
It was a big one, too…
My sympathies to the authors.
Man nape? Nom, nom indeed!
I hope the tail isn’t proportional.
Holy Christ. To paraphrase a line I heard elsewhere:
“That’s not just bad. That’s a bad apple that fell off the bad tree, hit every bad branch on the way down, landed in a puddle of bad, then got eaten by a bad rat, who crawled up the bad peasant’s leg, bit him in the balls, and started the bubonic plague of bad.”