Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

I think that’s pretty unforgiveable as cover mistakes go, to be honest.  To the point of being downright misleading.  Also, she’s wearing a very strange shade of lipstick.

This does bug me. I hate it when they get the HAIR color wrong on covers. This seems much worse to me. Although, in fairness, the hook might look silly or awkward on the cover. I’m trying to imagine some subtle way they could have incorporated it and I just can’t bend my brain to make the image work.

It’s not strictly a romance (strong romantic elements, though) but the second book in the Sharing Knife series by Lois McMaster Bujold unabashedly has Dag’s hook on the cover. The fourth one too, come to think of it.

It doesn’t bother me in the least.  I doubt that I would have noticed.

It doesn’t bother me, because I pay scant attention to covers anyway, at least in the sense of expecting them to bear much relationship to the novel.  I don’t like a novel to have a literal illustration to the text on the cover anyway, and experience indicates that when it does, it is inaccurate in some way more often than not.

I am interested in cover art in the case of books that stay in print for decades (Heyer or Stewart, for example), when the changes in the covers over time, and the differences between UK and USA editions and the European editions in other languages, become fascinating and very informative about cultural preferences and changes and marketing assumptions.

I hope that it was someone who hadn’t read the book deciding to flip the image rather than the people who put it together not noticing he has a hook.

It doesn’t bother me. Honestly, I don’t spend time analyzing covers all that much, so the small stuff passes me by. I think they were aware that they wanted to conceal one hand, they just messed up which one :) Though, I do think a hook would have looked just fine on the cover.

I hate the big glaring mistakes - like putting kids on the cover when there are no kids in the story, or putting the wrong shifter animal on the cover :dash:

This came up on my Amazon rec list and I was debating buying; it’s a pretty cover.  The could have worked it in in an inconspicuous way; he could have more of his arm wrapped around her and just a hint of the hook peeking out.  I doubt it would have bothered me.

It does bother me when I’m misled about a huge character trait by the cover art.  I don’t care so much about a difference in hair color, etc., but when we’re talking about books that deceive you about race or even a character’s weight (substantially), for example, I start wondering about why the publisher is trying to fool me.

Does that inconsistency bother you?

Yes. Limbs that are supposed to be missed, limbs that aren’t supposed to be, wrong hair colour, wrong skin colour, male characters looking like bodybuilders even though they’re supposed to be ordinary guys, random Sexy Women who aren’t in a book at all… Not a fan.

I am familiar enough with the reasons why covers often have so little to do with their contents, but it does bug me—it makes me feel that someone saw the book as just a product to be moved, even though it could have had an editor who cared about it very much.

Unless I’m missing it, his other hand is not visible.  Is it possible that the cover image has been reversed and that what we’re seeing is actually his right hand with the left hand (hook) unseen?  Or am overthinking the process?

I usually don’t notice whether the covers match the story (this is not just a problem with romance novels—many novels have covers that seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with the action in the book), but I think if I encountered a hook on page 1, I’d be looking for the hook on the cover.

BTW, I’m interested in this book—if only because the hero is older than I’m used to encountering in romances.  Does anyone know if the heroine also older?

I woudn’t have noticed - since I have been buying more ebooks, I remember just a vague impression of a cover from the retailer’s webpage, and that’s it.

Having said that, even if I had noticed, I probably would have thought that they intended the other hand to be the hook, and flipped the artwork at some point during the design process. In other words, it would be his right hand at her waist, not his left. The hook wouldn’t be seen, but it wouldn’t be obviously wrong.

Having said that, I would be interested in seeing the actual hook, given that it’s such a big part of the characters’ interaction even within the first few chapters. Same with the rogueish eyepatches and so on for other characters in other books. These are obviously “romancified” people on the cover, just like characters tend to be (pirates not always chivalrous? say it ain’t so! a highwayman won’t always choose love over material gain? women were always politically minded and fiercely independent despite their societies?!), but it’d be nice to start seeing 1) a little more diversity and 2) a little more attention paid to the book the artwork represents.

@DiscoDollyDeb She’s slightly older, yes, but mostly compared to the 18-year old heroines. She’s 30, as I recall, or maybe a year or two older.

I will say I was delighted that she has—and the book talks about—stretch marks, though!

I don’t think I would think about something like that for a Romance novel at all. I think of the process of picking a cover for such books as something like this: Two stacks, one of cover pics and one of manuscripts. When a manuscript is OKed, the picture at the top pf the picture stack is cellotaped to the manuscript.

It actually wouldn’t surprise me if the process is actually like that - those covers are always wrong in some way.

I hate romance novel covers and have learned over the years to just ignore them, so no, it doesn’t bother me.
It wasn’t until I started lurking on romance sites like this one that I realised that not everyone agreed with me. I was baffled at the comments on coverdudes’ hawtness (I find the covers rather tacky, personally) or people obsessing over that Nathan Kamp..Kemp? dude.
But I was also very relieved -that at least someone was enjoying it. It would have been beyond horrible if everyone hated the covers as much as I do.
I only use covers as the code to content -this one obviously is historical, regency and fairly low spice level based on the cover (and I loved it by the way -Ms. Kelly is just plain great, imo). Paranormals have abs and UF kick ass chicks and so on. The code is very useful and distinct, I find. And in that sense the covers (including this one) works very well.

Yes, it bothers me. As do hair colour mistakes, race mistakes, and body type mistakes. My current pet peece is when the heroine is supposed to be normal-sized and the women on the cover is obviously model-thin, but I go through hating all of them. (The ultimate racefail covers are sheikh stories, because I don’t think I’ve ever, not once, seen one feature a PoC model. Middle-eastern sheikhs? NOT WHITE.)

I guess I’d need to know why it was left out before I had feelings about it. Did the author choose to omit it when submitting their cover art request form? Did the art or marketing department choose to omit it? Was it simply overlooked? Did someone upstairs fear it would scream PIRATE ROMANCE and left it out to avoid subgenre confusion?

As I designer, I’d have just flipped the image, so the heroine was conveniently covering the left hand. Select All, Edit, Transform, Flip Horizontal. BLAM! Done.

Isn’t there a saying “you can’t tell a book…” The cover lures you into picking up the book and finding out more. If I chose my books by covers I would have never read anything by Ellora’s Cave, Wild Rose, Siren or any other small ‘women’s’ publishers.

It bothers me immensely.  If a publisher doesn’t believe enough to get the cover right, then why should I buy the book?

For what it’s worth, is that a hook on his right hand, resting on hers?  Maybe?  That may just be a shadow on my resolution.

But, since I like characters that are physically imperfect, the publisher has, in this case, missed the opportunity to market to me by not making it more obvious, so I could see it when I’m skimming the rack.  If I had seen a hook, I would have gone, “Kewl.  Let me get a closer look.”

I’m guessing it’s not an image that was flipped.  There’s a whole bunch of negative wall space to the left of the heroine’s head to allow for branding, which had to have been included in the art notes to the artist from the art director.  That’s pretty intentional; if they know from the get-go which imprint its pubbing in, then they know what specs are needed for the branding, even before the cover concept is thought up.

They might have even gone through a couple of sketches of the couple with the hook prominent and come to the decision of “Yeah, we’re going to have to 86 the hook; we just can’t make it look like he’s not hurting her.”

I was so impressed that the male model actually looks 45- the age of the hero in the story- that I never thought about the missing hook.

It’s also a nice romance about non-aristocracy characters if anyone hasn’t read the book.

I would have flipped the book shut to check out the cover the moment he started thinking about his polished silver hook. It’s just not the sort of thing you let go. And yes, it would have bothered me, but more for the author’s sake. I’m sure the hook isn’t something that would get left out of the art fact sheet.

But yeah, a tough sell in a beautiful image. I’m with Linzenberg on the likelihood the hook got amputated in an artroom somewhere as too awkward, or cheesy. Or too Peter Pan.  Donna Alward got a great arm-less hero on her release earlier this year, so it can be done tastefully. But just not against a bright yellow dress, I guess…

That’s actually kind of insulting to people who have missing pieces.  “No one wants to see your hook, it’ll turn people off.”  That’s not a very nice message, is it?

Worse, the hook would have probably caught the eye better than that cover does.

Over 6 years ago, when I was still reviewing for ARR, I had a chance to get my hand’s on the ARC of “Legendary Warrior” by Donna Fletcher.  Suffice it to say that I had a fit with the cover and had a hard time not making a comment in my review of the book.  From that point forward, I decided that it was in my best interest to NOT LOOK AT any covers that depict the main characters in the story… and I lived happily ever after ... well, kinda sorta…

That’s one of the things I love about my Kindle. Cover art has never sold me on a book in the past, but it’s often turned me off from one. On the Kindle, I no longer notice cover art at all, even when browsing for books because they appear in tiny e-ink and are easily ignored. I’m able to turn all my attention to the writing and conjure up my own mental images of the characters and setting without any potentially inaccurate distractions.

HA - totally read this book in my monthly pkg from harlequin, and did not even notice the discrepancy until reading this post.

Yep, it bothers me. Covers should be an accurate representation of the character. And this one is bad enough that I would’ve written the publisher and told them to tell their art department to pull their heads out of their butts.

Yeah I really don’t care. And I mean at all. Don’t get me wrong, if something has a cool looking cover I’ll say “Hey. That’s an awesome looking cover.” It may pique my interest; but that’s as far as I go about covers.

I don’t know if I just don’t expect them to match after years of romance reading. or if I’ve always been this apathetic about it but either way, I ain’t bovvered.

I just remembered after I posted - I remember reading Jennifer Crusie’s blog when she talked about the last book she released. The book had a dog on the cover, because the marketing people said covers with dogs sell more books, but originally there wasn’t a dog in the book, so she went ahead and wrote one in (she did say she thought it made the book better; she wouldn’t have written it in otherwise)

But I think she wrote bigger dog - german shepard or something similar I want to say. When she saw the cover art, which prominently featured a smaller dog, maybe a yorkie or something, she actually went back to the story and changed the dog breed to match the cover.

I can see if I can dig up the post about it, but not now since I’m interneting on my phone, not my computer at the moment.

It really bothers me.  It’s erasing the hero’s disability, which is way more problematic than getting the hair color wrong.

OMG, this is a huge pet peeve of mine. I have learned to deal with the usual wrong hair color, wrong age, wrong body type stuff, even though it bugs me. But when the characters have a very distinctive physical trait (missing fingers, huge scars, eye patch, etc) that doesn’t appear on the cover it makes me crazy. I was reading one of the Gena Showalter’s where the hero has blue hair. This is commented on throughout the series, and even with the sort of graphic (versus true to life) looking cover, they couldn’t get his hair right.

I guess it bugs me b/c it makes me think these books are just an assembly line.  If any random picture of someone in regency dress works with any random book, that basically means they are all interchangable.  I know that isn’t’ true, so why can’t the publishers be bothered to care more? How hard would it have been to hide this guy’s left hand if they didn’t want to show the hook?

I don’t refer to the cover while I read, making comparisons.  However, I would have been far more likely to pick the book up if he had a hook instead of a hand.

Given what I’ve learned from this very site about how often book covers are Photoshopped editions of a stock set of images, I’d be wondering if they’d even have a chance at finding an appropriate looking image. It’d take somebody REALLY good at Photoshop to get a hook in there over the guy’s hand. So I could very, very grudgingly cope with that.

On the other hand (ar ar ar), if the publisher actually had the dough to shell out for a brand new picture as opposed to just altering a stock image, I’d ABSOLUTELY expect to see the hook.

Also? Props to writing a dude who’s lost a hand AND a heroine with stretch marks. Makes me interested in checking out the book even with an inaccurate cover.

Since I had to look three times to realize the wrong hand was on the cover, it probably wouldn’t have bothered me, but even though I know cover art doesn’t always match the book (BTDT), it does bug me when it’s something basic.

Terry
Terry’s Place
Romance with a Twist—of Mystery

Count me in as bothered by covers that don’t match the story.  It seems to me it would have been easy to just not show the hand if they didn’t want a hook on the cover.

I would be more likely to buy it with a hook on the cover, though!

Yes, it bothers me when covers don’t match the book in an obvious way.  Just seems like sloppy work by the publisher.

The one thing that bothers me is that the characters often look like they have been ‘photoshopped.’ Someone has already mentioned ordinary men looking like body builders, etc.  I find that the heroines often do not fit the cover. It doesn’t really bother me, but I do wonder why there was such disregard for that bit of accuracy.

Yeah, it bothers me.  There’s enough covers out there they could have chosen one to get it right, why one with his hand obviously in the picture?  Poorly done.

IMO the cover looks like a “stock illustration.”  Just something Harlequin had on file, and thought it was pretty enough to use for Carla Kelly.  Maybe if someone looks hard enough, another version of it—perhaps mirror-imaged—exists on some other previously published romance…

I’m the Kay who seems to have started this. As an author, cover art inaccuracies bother me more than they used to. I fill out a page with suggestions, and although I don’t know how Harlequin operates, surely Carla Kelly does also.

I picked up this book because it was 1) by her and 2) I love Regencies and 3) I’d just finished a previous one by her and I wanted more! The cover made absolutely no difference to me until I realized how absolutely wrong it was for the hero.

And then, I wrote Sarah…

Let me add to my post somewhere above this one…

Yes, it bothers me a lot when covers do not accurately depict the characters the author took such a long time and tremendous effort to create.

It does now that you’ve mentioned it. I probably wouldn’t have noticed, but would have looked at the cover again once I read he had a hook. While minor things aren’t really a bother, major ones are. For instance, on my cover the scarves are purple…the the book they are red. No big deal. If they had put a blonde supermodel on the cover though…when I stress the burnette with the not-so-perfect body in my book….I would have had kittens. Yes…kittens.
It wouldn’t have been pretty. Thankfully, I had a great cover artist!

I agree that it sends the wrong message to delete a major hook (yes…pun intended) of the story from the cover when it could have been done. That…or just flip the picture. Major things like limbs missing, hair color, skin color, tatoos, etc….that are wrong tell me that someone isn’t paying attention. It speaks of lack or pride in their work and unprofessionalism. Either the writer needs to fill out her cover art forms better or the cover artist needs to pay attention.

Yes, it bothers me a lot.  As it happens, I’m on the Cover Cafe cover committee and this is the sort of thing I would nominate as a Worst cover, even though it’s otherwise attractive.  Like other posters, if I see mention of an obvious physical characteristic, I go straight to the cover and look for it.  If that part of the body is hidden, I’m okay, but if it’s visible and wrong, then I get really upset.  Even though it’s probably a losing proposition (since it’s so common), I do not like covers, for instance, where the hero is described as a redhead, but he’s shown with black hair.  It’s not that I particularly care for red hair but it’s such an easy thing to do correctly (as opposed to displaying a hook that might make people uncomfortable—I say show it anyway), that the error annoys me.

Related to this post on inaccurate covers, is the number of covers with couples who are dancing backwards, with his right hand up in the air instead of hers.  I know the art department or someone switched the image to “improve” the look of the cover but it’s one of my pet peeves!

Dang it! I bought the ebook, but now that I know about it, it’ll niggle away at the part of my brain that always straightens anything hanging crookedly.

That said, the art department doesn’t have time to read the books. As the in-house client responsible for the end product, it seems logical that the editor would be establishing do’s and don’t's for the art department to follow. Maybe Harlequin has someone else in charge of signing off on cover proofs, but in any case, someone with knowledge of the book should have caught this.

Yes, if had I bought this in print, I absolutely would have noticed it, and it absolutely would bother me.

Natalie L. said.

It’s erasing the hero’s disability, which is way more problematic than getting the hair color wrong.

Yes, this exactly.  Inaccurate cover art annoys me, because it feels disrespectful to the reader/product, but things like this are worse - like whitewashing a cover model. Even where it’s not intentional, it’s still a big deal.
Bad cover art now - well, that’s subjective so I can give that a pass.

This seems to fall in with another trend I’ve noticed, which is that there’s an inverse relationship between how heavy a heroine is mentioned as being and how thin she’s depicted on the cover.  Major overcompensation. How hard would it have been to not show the hook without rubbing it in people’s noses that you’re ignoring it by depicting his left hand?

Yes, it bugs the crap out of me when the cover has nothing to do with the story.  You see that so often, and it makes me wonder why, after so much time working on the book, there can’t be a little more effort to make the book cover represent the story accurately.

One recent occurrence was the TAKEN BY THE OTHERS cover (by Jess Haines).  Great story, but the heroine looked A) like a stripper; B) unrealistic.  Shia is neither, and it made a lot of fans annoyed.

I think you have to be pretty far up in a Publisher’s’ sales chain before they let you have approval for things like cover art.  Dream:  they like it so much they even let me pick the paper and font. Meawhile, if it bothers you, pretend they are looking in a mirror.  Lots of people stand in front of mirrors when they start making out. And her soft focus eyes and his mouth say that’s maybe where they’re at. And, geez, guys, don’t go getting all political again over this, huh?

Yes, it bothers me.  Aside from erasing the hero’s characteristics, there seems to be a disconnect on this one between the title (Admiral’s Penniless Bride) and the fact that the model is wearing a lovely, expensive-looking dress and a pearl necklace.

There’s a wonderful Mary Stewart novel (Nine Coaches Waiting) in which the heroine is a governess at a French chateau.  One of the paperback editions has a typical Gothic castle illustration on the cover.  But in the book the author explicitly says that the chateau does not look at all like a Gothic castle, but is rather an elegant square mansion ...

Here’s my two cents.  Publishers are responsible for producing a book based on the hard work of the authors.  Therefore, I think that they should at least TRY to make the cover reflect the contents of the book.  Things like the main female is suppose to be Amazonian but the cover model is a waif?  The main male character has long black hair that hangs past his shoulder (and this hair is repeatedly mentioned).  The cover model has short hair that is clearly not black.  And don’t even get me started on settings and objects from the story!  I don’t focus on the cover art but honestly how hard can it be to produce a cover that reflects the story?

Yes, the wrong cover bothers me.  Even skipping the fact that they could have angled the art so the missing hand is under her arm/behind her back/otherwise concealed, the author decided to make the hero a character with a very distinctive physical trait—and the cover has a generic romance novel cover guy.  Give the author’s characters some credit!

It’s great that books are starting to have more diverse characters, but we need covers to do the same.  The problem with covers that alter things like body size, ethnicity, or the presence of a disability is that these covers influence (or try to influence) what people perceive as desirable.  If making disabilities (or varied body shapes, or varied ethnicities) invisible isn’t political, what is?

Yup. It bugs me in a big, big way.

I can’t say I would necessarily notice without someone pointing it out (historical romance covers, while I can find them very beautiful, all tend to blur in my mind so very few stick out), but if someone did/if I noticed it does bother me. Maybe a little less egregious than the racefail of certain covers, but a disability covered over sends another bad message: only able-bodied men and women deserve romance.

Plus, from a marketing standpoint a hook is more likely to get me to pick up the book because its “different” than the usual fare. 

It’s erasing the hero’s disability, which is way more problematic than getting the hair color wrong.

This.

Does it bother me? Yes.  Do I think crabbing about it on sites like this will make publishers get a clue? No. And this particular cover could’ve been easily addressed by mirroring the image. Viola, intact right hand. Lazy, lazy, lazy. More to the point, I think they’re afraid we won’t read something with an imperfect man in it.

If I HAD noticed it, I would have assumed a) stock image, they don’t care if it matches or b) they flipped it and that’s really his right showing.

Doesn’t faze me one bit. I own it, though it’s still on Mt. TBR, and doubt I ever would’ve noticed the discrepancy.

And to answer the charges of hiding his disability, I think emphasizing said disability and selling it on the novelty of it only focuses on his status as “other.” This cover forces people to see him as a person first and foremost.

I say this as a cripple myself. I’m sorta glad his hook isn’t on the cover. Romance is dreadfully guilty of fetishizing the other.

The cover is so generic, it makes me think that they didn’t care. Hell, they could have flipped it in Photoshop and had no problem.

I can’t find the Jennifer Crusie post on the dog insertion, I am suspecting maybe she deleted it?

It always annoys me when they have a couple on the cover that clearly doesn’t match the descriptions. How hard is it to get/photshop models to match? This cover could easily been fixed with a horizontal flip. The left hand becomes the right hand, no one knows what the hook is getting up to behind her back, and everyone is happy.

Yes, such a glaring and easily remedied inconsistency between cover and book does bother me. Is the publisher just not paying attention to their author’s work? If not, why should readers?

It definitely bothers me, on more than one level. The inconsistency between the story and the cover is one issue; erasing his disability is another.  Other commenters have said it more clearly than I am, but yes, it’s a problem for me as a reader.

I don’t usually pay attention to the cover art beyond seeing it on the shelf in the store; I recognize that its purpose is to catch my attention by fair means or foul and that it has little or nothing to do with the book itself, unfortunate as that fact may be. It’s branding and marketing and nothing more. I do agree that it SHOULD be, that as packaging it should more accurately describe the contents, but I also recognize that the industry doesn’t always work that way.

In this case, I agree that the discrepancy could have been solved by simply flipping the image, and in fact the image may have originally been created with that in mind. But to me this was clearly a marketing decision. Not as a matter of needing to have a “perfect, unblemished” hero but because he would appear too threatening. Somebody in marketing obviously said “OMG sex with this man would be incredibly painful, just think of the damage he could do with that hook, it will scare readers off, get rid of it.” In a genre that expects the toughest, meanest alphas to soften up around their ladylove and give her gentle and considerate sex, personal hardware like that can be construed as too threatening, no matter how considerate the character may be depicted as being in the course of the story.

Jennifer:

I found the entry, but either she seemed to delete the part about changing it or delete most of the comments section that had that whole discussion. Or they went somewhere I can’t follow. It was supposed to be a dachshund, not a German Shepard. I did scan through the comments section to find anything left where she talks about it and found all these quotes, but nothing on where the discussion originated:

No, I didn’t have to have the dog in the book. But I feel that if I promise readers a dog with a dog on the cover, there should be a dog in the book. Also fewer letters saying, “Where the dog?”

You know, if I’d hated the way it read with the dog I’d have let it go. But I actually think it’s better with the dog. Makes her seem more human.

Then as the commenters get more incensed about the fact that she rewrote it for the cover:

No, no, I ASKED to do the rewrite once I knew the dog was going to be on the cover. Because I didn’t want to answer a bunch of e-mails saying, “There was no dog? Where was the dog? The dog was on the cover. I expected a dog.”

and then “It’ll be a Yorkie in the book now. They’ll change it.”

Sorry, I know it’s not exactly on topic, and I can see where everyone is coming from with the kind of message erasing a disability sends to the public. I just don’t care. I’m with whoever above said that they just use the covers as a code to tell you what kind of story - subgenre, level of eroticism, etc. After the initial impression, I don’t think about the cover again.

Ordinarily I’m inclined to roll my eyes when the covers don’t match the books, when the heroine is shown as blonde instead of dark-haired or modelesque instead of proudly plump.  But in this particular case it would have taken a few seconds to mirror the image!  It’d even be sweet that she was holding his hook in an affectionate gesture.  But no.

And this was said early on but I’ll reiterate it: Lois McMaster Bujold had a hero with a hook for a hand in The Sharing Knife and he was unabashedly portrayed as such on the cover.  Granted, she’s the Lois McMaster Bujold and might have more clout with the marketing department, but still.

Since his other hand isn’t visible, and it’s a pretty cover, I could convince myself that the cover image has been mirrored and it’s his RIGHT hand showing on the cover…

I sadly would probably not have noticed, once I’m reading, I’m usually in the zone.

Lisa

This does bug me—as it does whenever a cover is totally inconsistent with the author’s physical description of the characters. It’s a lovely cover and I wouldn’t have stopped reading the book once I realized the er, lack of hook, but I wish they could have found an image where the hero had only his right hand showing.

And yes, I know that’s often easier said than done. I’m sure “live” cover shoots are a different kettle of fish, but I can talk about stock photo images. I requested changes to the covers of both my latest release and my upcoming one. And when the cover artists had difficulty providing new images, I spent hours upon hours trolling royalty-free stock photo sites and coming up with alternative images for the cover artist to use that better fit my character descriptions.

Was it worth the bleeding eye-balls and the thumping headaches after squinting at thousands of tiny thumbnails? Heck yes.

I know I’m very very lucky to have a publisher willing to accommodate my requests, but I feel that it’s worth at least asking for a change so that readers don’t feel disappointed by a cover that apparently totally ignores the author’s descriptions of the characters.

Bugs me for sure.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - if I was that oblivious to details in my work, I would be fired.

Yeah, I don’t know if I would have noticed—certainly, not on an ebook, but probably on a paperback.

But I just wanna say that the details you mentioned in this blog post made me buy the ebook immediately and read it TODAY on my Nook.

And, by the way, it’s an unbelievably lovely romance novel.

Ignore the cover. The contents are so worth it.

I do mind sometimes—especially if it makes me wonder “Did anyone tell the artist the first thing about this book?” Like the German editions of the Psy-Changling books by Nalini Singh—they’re up on her website, and a whole barrel of WTF for those who have read the books, especially the third book (Caressed by Ice), which has a man with tiger stripes (I think) on the cover. The number of tiger changelings in the books? Zero. The hero of that novel? Psy.

I’d like to think that the publishers cared enough not to have this kind of inconsistencies but we know all they care about is a pretty cover to catch the eye of the buyer. While I’d never buy a book based on the cover, face it, apparently a lot of people do. I never realized it until I started reading so many blogs but half the bloggers I read go on about the cover as much as they do the content. And the ebooks on my Kindle don’t show a cover once downloaded so apparently once they get our money the cover is no longer important either.

I didn’t notice but I was too busy being blown away by the sheer awesomeness of the book itself.  I’ve been reading long enough to know that the cover images are a combination of advertising and branding, more than a true reflection of the story, alas.

It bothers me in the same way it bothers me to see the person of color kept in shadow on cover. I know in this case it’s most likely a mistake and not markeing. But it’s a possibility somebody wanted to hide a handicap to keep readers from being put off.

I read almost all of my books on the Kindle. I glance at the covers in the bookstore or when I order and all I notice is whether they’re aesthetically pleasing (and the Carla Kelly cover is definitely beautiful) or whether they’re over done. The same with the titles. The Kindle lets me forget about them after that - and that’s fine with me. If the covers or the titles are too dramatic or sappy, then I’m grateful for my Kindle so that I don’t have to look at them again.

Yes, it really bothers me when the physical descriptions of the characters are not consistent with the covers.  Especially hair color & scars.  The missing hook would bother me as well.  It’s so common though.  I guess that’s marketing for you.

I feel like, if you’re going to go to the trouble of adding an eccentric quirk like a hook, your publishers shouldn’t do you the disservice of leaving that out of the cover.  I would love to see a hook in this picture!

I’ve already read the book, and I did notice, but I’ve resigned myself to wrong and horrible covers. This one is not unattractive, but that necklace was not in the book either, and although there is a yellow dress, that one seems wrong-too youthful for the character. And where’s her wedding ring? They get married right a the beginning of the book.

It does bother me when physical characteristics on the cover don’t match descriptions in the book.
Especially when it’s a glaring discrepancy, I start to wonder what the publishers process is for choosing covers - do they have a pile of “cover art” and use a random generator to plop a cover on a book?  I feel like it undervalues the author, and I would be pretty upset if my “curvaceous” brunette showed up as a slim blonde on the cover.

This book was fabulous!! Heroes rarely take my breath away in the first scene, but wow, he sure did!

The missing hook on the cover doesn’t bother me as much as the missing hook in the author’s writing!  At one point the hero “rubbed his hands together” in anticipation.  What?  That’s just lazy writing and editing.  And I actually enjoyed this book and want to read more of her backlist.  I feel disappointed mostly that this slipped through the whole process.

Yes, it bugged me when I read the book—as someone said already, as soon as I read about the hook, I went back to the cover image and checked. It’s central to the story, and it would have been easy to use an image where his left hand wasn’t showing. It’s like “whitewashing,” which I also hate.  Not that I think there was any deliberate thought process of “let’s pretend he has two hands for the cover,” just publisher thoughtlessness.  I don’t think they need to depict the hook on the cover, but I think depicting him with a left hand is stupid.

I’d just like to throw out there that I hate 99% of the book covers out there.  Would much prefer plain background (even just a colour block), and text titles.  Forget the clinches entirely.

...but maybe that’s just me.

Have to agree.  The cover art should not affect your enjoyment of the story.  Can’t list the number of books where the house on the cover does not match the house in the story.  Can’t recall a match actually.  Like letting a typo stop you in your tracks.

Wow… I didn’t read all the comments but while looking up the book to read at my library site i found that the cover of Marrying the Royal Marine has a hero with a hook on his left hand.  I am sure I am not the first to notice this.  Do all her heroes have missing parts?  Thanks for an awesome and always entertaining site!

I think someone mentioned this same dude was in other books by her.  Don’t quote me on that.  I get in so much trouble.

@giorgia- I think the covers got swapped by accident! If I recall correctly, the Royal Marine hero had all his body parts.