It’s Monday! Time for Cover Snark!
Elyse: He’s checking to make sure his penis is still there isn’t he?
Sarah: “Crap, did I lace my junk into my trousers again?!”
Amanda: Oops, got your bepis.
Tara: What if “Tough Guy” is the penis’s name?
Sneezy: His pants seem to have some strange corset contraption. And why does he need to flex while putting on pants?
From Karen: I’ve been seeing this for the last couple of days in newsletters for sale books and it makes me wonder what I’m seeing every time. I had to view the full size cover to realize that they’ve superimposed a woman’s face on the man’s torso but my imagination for what was going on below his belt didn’t go there. When you see it full size, then there’s the extra issue with his nipple looking at first like a blemish on her face. And what is that blue light? Mostly, this cover is a mess in my opinion and my response to it is “what were they thinking?” Am I right or do you all love it?
Sarah: He’s picking her nose.
Elyse: I’ve never done mushrooms but I feel like it would be like this
Catherine: Bad acid trip.
Great minds think alike, Elyse!
Also, the title – Awakening. Imagine waking up and seeing… this. (Though it does give a whole new meaning to ‘oh, I just woke up this way…’)
Amanda: As someone who is really bad spring allergies, this is an accurate representation.
Sneezy: “Blood Bending: Harmful to You and Others”
Amanda: I feel like Neti Pot should use this image in marketing materials.
Catherine: Just showed this to a friend who was horrified because he didn’t see the face at all and thought that was some sort of slug or leech growing out of the man’s crotch, so there’s a whole other nightmare for you.
Tara: That’s what I thought!
Amanda: 1. his pants look like they’re made of velvet
2. the title reminds me a logic puzzle: if the cowboy is a daddy, what is the firefighter?
Sarah: That floor is gonna give that poor baby a ton of splinters.
Also I see shoes, but no baby socks. Those socks are gone forever if they aren’t in sight. Been there.
Shana: I really don’t get the appeal of romance covers that are baby-forward. Can someone help me understand? Is this supposed to tug at my nurturing instincts?
Also that font is barely legible. I thought it said Couley, not cowboy, and puzzled for several seconds.
Sneezy: This cover inspires nothing, not even snark.
Susan: Genuinely if you told me it was someone’s memoir of a tragic childhood I’d believe you.
Shana: Now it looks like The Cowkoy is a Daddy. What is this chameleon font?
Catherine: Yeah, this doesn’t say ‘romance’ to me at all. It looks kind of bleak, to be honest.
Amanda: I’m obsessed with the idea that this woman wears a huge bonnet to keep men with bad breath away from her
Also…what the heck are those tiny dogs,
Sneezy: Those dogs look like one person wanted baby malamutes, and someone kept arguing for dire wolves.
Elyse: IDK I’m stuck on that hat.
Shana: It’s the feathers. Why does it need feathers?
Sarah: Who decided corgi-shaped huskies were needed?
Sneezy: I mean, there’s a time an place for them.
Sarah: Oooh those might be puppies. I hope they’re puppies. Or weird photoshops.
Sneezy: I think they’re malamute puppies, but I don’t know if they all look like mochi out of the box.
Sarah: LOL “look like mochi.” They really do!
Susan: Now I need to find pictures of corgi crosses, because if I recall they all look like the other dog but with tiny legs.
Tara: You won’t regret it. I met a corgi border collie cross this week and she was a real cutie.
Susan: Oh no they’re as cute as I remember.
I love them.
I took the cover of Tough Guy as a reference to the story – he is on anxiety meds that affect his ability to come. It features explicitly in the plot.
The cover for Awakening is the stuff of nightmares! I didn’t see the woman’s face at first either, but seeing it eventually didn’t make it better. Was this someone’s first day at the photoshop office? That nipple is too low, right? And what is happening with his neck and face? His weird hands cupping her nose? Nothing fits.
And this is on me but I misread the series titel as Promiscuous Guardians. All in all, it almost makes the other covers look okay by comparison (except Tough Guy; that remains weird).
Baby-forward romance covers promote a philosophy that the end game of romantic relationships is making babies, which is intentionally precisely as exclusionary as it sounds. There’s a whole heap of romances with pregnancy, babies, and older children in them whose covers represent adult characters and suggest tone and heat level, per the intended function of a romance cover, because they’re not about the kids. “Put the precious cherub front and center” is a specific choice. (I make book covers and have had this discussion many times, so I’m not just pulling this theory out of my ass. While it’s entirely possible some people are just going with the “put everything in the book on the cover” school of bad design, 100% of the baby requests I’ve personally dealt with have proven, upon attempts to discourage them, to be from the Women Are Wombs crowd.)
Photoshop really needs to provide a warning that pops up when someone is about to finalize/complete a project: ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO SUBMIT THIS F*CKED-UP MESS AS YOUR BEST WORK? DID YOU EVEN PASS BASIC ANATOMY 101? But undoubtedly the designer of AWAKENING would click YES. “Oh baby, my BIBA Best Book Cover Design Award is in the bag with this one!”
TOUGH GUY is actually a good book (m/m romance between a professional hockey player and a gender-non-conforming singer), but that cover does it no favors. I don’t know the technical terms for hockey attire, but he is lacing up his pants for a game. And right in the book, it states that the hockey player does NOT have a six-pack, but here we are.
I remember seeing the Awakenings cover during a free kindle books trawl and thinking “oh hell no!” Did the cover artist realise how wrong it looked? It looks like the guys stomach has a mouth, I imagine it speaking at midnight demanding nachos. Unfortunately Paranormal romance novels are full of these superimposed vomit covers, the Nightfall series by Violet Samuels springs to mind (don’t look unless you really want to see a wolf wearing lipstick!)
@Ren Benton. A couple of weeks ago, I read a mpreg book (totally accidentally) and ended up trying to figure out if this genre was meant to be a way to do away with women. If the only reason for women is, as you nicely stated it, “as wombs,” then mpreg does away with the need for women altogether. And they all had male children. I actually DNFed another book by the same author just because I couldn’t figure out how women fit in that world. They didn’t. I DNFed the thing with malice. Let people keep putting babies on the covers as a total NOPE warning for whatever the genre.
Why did someone elongate that guy’s torso on the Awakenings cover? His whole torso is about twice as long as it should be. Is his super power stretching?
That hat looks like it’s stuck on the back of her head, sort of like a halo. But the puppies are adorable.
I’m pretty sure the woman on Winter Dreams is trying to pass off one of those cat play tunnels as a bonnet. Also, the huskies look more like they were photographed as reflected in one of those distorting funhouse mirrors than like puppies. Why is there a fire sitting on top of the snow? I don’t think that works. Awakening is definitely the stuff of nightmares. Among other things, her lips look like she’s been beaten up, which does not scream romance to me.
“Promiscus” isn’t a word, is it?
“Awakenings” just makes me think “I’m crushing your head. I’m crushing your head.” That’s probably not the reference they want me to have while thinking of the book?
@Qualisign – what does “mpreg” mean? I’m not familiar with that one.
AWAKENING looks like Mr. Fantastic is starring in the book. Also, even with all the other things wrong with that cover, I still have space in my heart to hate the awful font choices.
@MsCellanie Mpreg stands for male pregnancy.
@Qualisign Having been in fandoms where mpreg fanfiction is rampant, I believe the thinking is usually, “I want these characters to have a baby,” without realizing all the icky unconscious assumptions about the world the author is showing they have. It definitely has flavors of internalized if not overt misogyny and that biological children are better/more valid. The genre as a whole also seems to forget that trans people exist.
@MsCellanie: As with all niche sub-genres, mpreg romances are not for everyone, but if you enjoy books with that theme, there’s an enormous quantity available:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=mpreg+omegaverse&ref=is_s
@Ell T — thanks (for nothing) for pointing out the awful/multiple fonts on the Awakening cover. Although I have to say that unlike some cover snark entries, at least you can read the title.
The whole cover is disturbing. And mpeg … I don’t want to disparage something that might be someone’s cup of tea, but I personally find it yucky.
Is there another font problem in The Cowboy is a Daddy? It looks like the “A” is a different font. And I don’t care for the sans serif font in Winter Dreams, especially in the upper right where they stuck in between two lines of another font.
Winter Dreams – that bonnet is NOT on her head. It it literally sitting on the back of her head, like one of those religious pictures with the halo on a religious figure.
At least the first two cover models are not wearing their own heads. Why do book designers think they can swap heads and don’t even need to make them in proportion or properly aligned? Although with Awakenings, nothing is proportional, so I suppose it fits in that sense.
In any case, thank you for the puppy video!
My first reaction to Awakening was “What the hell!?” Like others, I thought he had a red banana slug penis slipping out to his right. Yikes. The malamutes were cropped wrong. Instead of cropping proportionately, the evil person just squished those puppies flat.
Winter Dreams — if you are wearing a bonnet in the Old West, which is what this looks like, your hair would not be down if you were a grown woman. It would be UP. Similar to many covers showing women in 1980’s prom dresses, rather than dresses reflecting the fashions of the time, as has been pointed out here, inappropriate/historically inaccurate hair drives me NUTS on covers.
Also, thanks for tackling babies on covers. I love babies, but truly, they are not romantic or conducive to falling in love. I have birth and adopted children, and all made me exhausted, smelly, and focused on them. And thank you for also pointing out that for many, you don’t need to have children to be happy, and if you do want children, you don’t need to make a baby to love them — how do some authors not get that?
@Luce
And this is on me but I misread the series title as Promiscuous Guardians.
It’s not just you. In fact I came here to say: Why on earth would you give your series a title calculated to make three-quarters of readers think you meant to say “Promiscuous Guardians”–and then, after recovering from the initial wtf-ery, think that you couldn’t spell it?
The Cowboy is a Daddy: I can’t get past some obscure ’50’s movie where Female Lead, newly arrived from the east, looks dismissively at Male Lead’s footwear and says flatly “Black or gray boots with blue jeans. Not brown.”
I was going to comment on the fact that the cowboy daddy’s baby’s fingers seem to be disappearing into the nap of his velvet jeans, but then I Googled Border Collie Corgi Mix, and now I have something better to do with my time.
On the cowboy daddy cover: I honestly wondered how someone so young could be a daddy? I mean, I know men are dogs (no offense to the dogs I know and love) but could a little dude like that produce effective sperm?
And that sent me down a whole nother path I didn’t want to go.
Awakening looks like he crushing her nose and I can’t handle that with my allergies.
I cannot unsee the nipple pimple on Awakening. This is the Manos: The Hands of Fate of book covers.
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