Links, Pics, Queens, and Other Things

Deb sent me this screen cap of a cover image that's… very popular.

Deb says, “I thought you'd find this as funny as I did. I noticed a month or so ago that there were *a lot* of covers using this photo. It's becoming more and more common to use covers from what must be a very small set of pictures, I think, or maybe I'm just noticing it more. This particular cover is obviously over the top popular! 😀 

And it makes the title of this one sort of ironic, given what comes up in the “also bought”…”

Don't Judge a Book... two dudes laying in bed, but the image has been used a dozen times for different books!

Clearly the realm of stock photography needs a few more well-lit shots of two dudes in bed. Stat! 


 

Maureen Johnson has been crowned “Queen of Teen UK” – a reader-voted prize for authors of teen literature. Congrats to Maureen!

I am fascinated by the photos of the tent that are…flowered? Where do you get a tent that's made of my grandmother's bedsheets? That's awesome! It'd be like sleeping under childhood memories. Or eating petit fours, then sleeping. You know, priorities.


Instead of flowers, grab a map, a flashlight, bottled water, a compass, and possibly some emergency flares because the RWA literacy signing map (PDF) has been posted and I am, alas, very confused. 

I live in the NY metro area and have any number of interstate combinations to get from point A to point B. It's like an Olympic sport in my husband's family, deciding the best route to go when driving somewhere. I think my father in law might own 8 GPS devices, all different. I may need to borrow two because that map is befuddling me the more I look at it. There's the tables where Folks With Long Lines go, as usual, and there's some…grouping of authors. I'm going to have to study the map to navigate the signing, I think, unless there's a code key I haven't figured out.

Courtney Milan's explanation of her location is probably the best one yet. I'm going to dress as Ms. Pac Man. 

If you're going to the Literacy Signing, which authors are you most looking forward to seeing?

(And if you're attending, Emma Petersen has a great page of local info about the hotel and surrounding area.)


BOOKS! I got some books to be telling you about!

  • Colter's Promise by Maya Banks * $2.99 * A | BN | K | S |

    This book is $2.99 from July 6- July 8 only. 

  • Collision Course by K.A. Mitchell * $0.00 * A | BN | K | S

    Free, cheezy bread, free! 
     

  • Time After Time by Constance O'Day Flannery * $4.39 * A | BN | K | S

    This appears to be a new digital release of one of Flannery's 2001 titles. If you're a fan of her time-travel romances from the 90s, which ones did you like best? 

 

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The Link-O-Lator

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  1. Meredith Shayne says:

    Those identical covers are used quite a lot in m/m romance, to identify stories sold as part of a themed set from a publisher – christmas stories, valentines day stories, that sort of thing. Sometimes you buy the entire package and get one story a day for a month (for instance), other times the stories are available individually.

    Meredith

  2. Gemma says:

    They also seem to do it for books that aren’t particularly related by the timing of their release or the theme of the stories. I think perhaps they are sometimes books which are a certain length. I remember being completely baffled why a picture of two almost identical men had been used on the cover about a romance between two physically dissimilar men. It wasn’t until I saw the publisher reusing that cover frequently that I twigged that it was some kind of publisher’s series cover.

  3. Ren says:

    Well, I think it’s great there’s a demand for stock images of craniopagus conjoined twins.

  4. ChaoticChris says:

    Actually, the realm of stock photography just needs a lot more shots of guys! I do a weekly Monday blog feature called the Misadventures in Stock Photography that highlights stock photo overuse in a (hopefully) humorous way.

  5. Taylor Reynolds says:

    I just clicked on the literacy signing map and got a 404 page at RWA. Maybe they realized it’s confusing and are updating?

  6. Readsalot81 says:

    Let me just say, that map is the possibly the most hideous map I’ve ever seen. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the way this is arranged (to me, at least). And that really bites, as I’ll be twisting the map upside down, doubling back.. probably landing at a table that I think is the correct one, only to go DOH!  In a cool turn of events, Courtney Milan is at a table with another one of my all-time fave authors, Jenn Bennett.  Besides those two… I’d like to have things signed by Carolyn Jewel, Delilah Marvelle (actually bid & won dinner with her at the B Novak auction), Alexandra Hawkins, Kristen Callihan, Carrie Lofty….. and more! I’ve set my book budget to be pretty steep for this. 😀 I’m very excited, can’t wait.

  7. Sandy James says:

    I saw Courtney’s map on Twitter. Cracked me up!! And so apropos!

    I’m seeing more and more stock image covers being repeated through different books, but I have to admit, I’ve never seen anything as ridiculous as this Amazon screen shot. The one I see ad nauseum is a contemporary image. 

  8. Juliana says:

    As for that book cover this was Silver Publishing’s theme cover for their “A Mind is a Sexy Thing” group of works. Some companies will publish works with a common theme like that with the same cover. Yeah it is stock photography but it does make it easy to know what books are in the set, and if you buy one you must obviously want all of them according to Amazon!

  9. Ros Clarke says:

    I don’t know if it’s available in the US, but you might be interested in this tent, Sarah: http://www.cathkidston.co.uk/p…

  10. RachelT says:

    This cover is used on all the books in the series A Mind is a Sexy Thing from Silver Publishing

  11. Trixienv says:

    LOL, on the book cover I like how the arrow points and says “Click to look inside.” 😉

  12. LG says:

    I’m not really a big fan of the “same cover for all stories in a series” thing. I like cover images to tell me at least a little something individual about the story/book, and this just screams cookie cutter, even if that’s not actually the case.

  13. miofrosty says:

    This isn’t as bad as Movellas or Wattpad in which the users steal copyrighted material for their covers.

  14. Heather says:

    Speaking of m/m romance – the romance review mag “RT Book Reviews” will be doing a feature on m/m romance in next month’s issue! I can’t wait. M/M has been so ignored, despite the fact that it’s very popular subgenre of romance.

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