This entry was inspired by Abby, who wrote to me and implored, “go to amazon.co.uk and look up Lisa Kleypas. WHY ARE THEIR BOOK COVERS SO MUCH BETTER THAN OURS?!?!?!! I am so upset about this, it’s kind of ridiculous. They just look so much classier! It’s totally unfair.”
Is that so? Well, let’s have a look, shall we? All the pics are below the fold – but the poll, depending on the browser, may be up here.
Here’s one of Kleypas’ Wallflower Quartet books, Devil in Winter (my favorite of the four) in the US edition:
It also has a hideous stepback:
And here’s the UK Paperback, published by Piatkus:
The US version of Mine Till Midnight
UK version:
This is the US version of Seduce me at Sunrise:
And this is the UK edition – I found two!
So far, with the exception of Mine Till Midnight, I do like the UK covers better.
Here’s another example, this time of a contemporary novel. The US edition of Christmas Eve at Friday Harbor, hardcover and mass market paperback, looks like this:
And here’s the UK trade paperback edition:
I confess, I like the cover with the actual harbor better—as did folks who nominated books for the Cover Cafe contest this year. This book placed fifth in the cover contest this year.
And while we’re on the subject: what is WITH the communion-hands holding-something position?
It’s communion in the Church of Women’s Fiction Covers! Take! Read! This is fiction which is given for you, to read this and think that it’s cover is twee.
Anyway, communion hands notwithstanding, do you like one set over the other? Which do you prefer, and why?
Cora, not to be stickler here, but…if you look at some fashion history of extant period examples, you will find very rich colors before the Victorian era. They would have been natural and not synthetic, but they did exist. 🙂
That being said, the constant inaccuracy of clothing styles drives me batty as someone who has studied the fashion history of these time periods! So I am totally with you there.
Piatkus in Britain seem to gear their books toward the normal fiction segment in the stores. Here in Sweden, book stores seldom have a separate romance shelf, (except for the ones who have Harlekins, they are usually by themselves). The few romances that are translated to Swedish tend to have less lurid covers so they fit in the fiction shelf:
Here are som Swedish covers (stock photos galore):
Lindsey,Johanna:Man of my dreams
The Magic of You
Deveraux, Jude: Velvet Song
The Taming
Pardon me if this has already been mentioned, but what is up with women’s bodies minus the face?! I get that it should be generic so you can imagine your own face, but it still disturbs me. I almost prefer the cheesy old-skool covers with the models because of this lol
@Demi. There was a thread going about this. I think it was on this site. They mentioned the “no eyes” trend cuz people didn’t want to pay attention to the “character” of the character and how lately they are going back to faces. I’ve heard of two stores doing the hand thing for a display. I like pretty dresses myself and houses if the matches the house in the story. I, myself, do faces, usually. But I’m a newbie and use Getty.
That’s an interesting comment, Demi. You are assuming that the reader regards herself as a placeholder for the heroine of the story, and evidently some do. But not all. Some readers observe the story as a detached third party.
There were a couple of papers discussing this aspect of reading romance in the volume of essays edited by Jayne Krentz and published by the U. of Pennsylvania Press in the 1990s — Dangerous men and adventurous women. It was probably the first academic treatment of the subject that did not start from the assumption that romance fiction is tripe, and although a lot of analysis has been done and published since, it still makes interesting reading.
I like the UK covers for The Wallflowers better than the US, but I think the US Hathways covers outshone ours.
I took one look at that poor woman kneeling in the one clear spot in the snow and thought ‘hells no!’ Sir Frosty Balls needs to get his ass up off that rock and offer the lady a seat cus coming from Alberta, I can tell you two things about where she is kneeling:
1) It’s frakking cold
2) Even if it’s thawing, she is kneeling in cold mud.
Erotic not!