by Maya Rodale
For all that readers love to hate on the classic clinch cover, they must have some secret fondness for them, because these covers sell—and not just to account representatives who have a fondness for bosoms. There are other types of romance covers available to readers now—some with just a female in a dress or couples on a beach, or there are the “real estate” covers featuring a grand house shrouded in mist. “I think this is one of the things where the mass in mass market comes into play,” says Esi Sogah, an editor who has worked at both Kensington and Avon. “I will hear a lot of individual complaints about the beefcake shots. But in terms of numbers, you’ll see more [of those covers on] books, clearly signifying that they’re selling.”
But as much as we roll our eyes (“Ugh, Fabio!”) at these covers that “all look the same,” there have been changes over the past few decades. A shift in the poses of the couple reflects the changing portrayals of the relationships in the stories, from ones with dominant heroes to ones with more egalitarian relationships.
The bodice-ripping cover
It is the covers of the early romances (yes, the bodice rippers) that many picture as the quintessential romance cover. Perhaps the most wonderfully outrageous example of these is Johanna Lindsay’s Savage Thunder featuring...Fabio! The couple is in the dessert. A black stallion bucks in the background. A mesa rises phallically in the distance. The heroine is on her knees before the hero, seemingly begging, a classic pose of submission. Her pink shirt is falling off. Her red hair (read: feisty heroine!) is cascading down her back as she tilts her head to look up at him. She clutches his fringed leather vest. (Or is she stroking his nipple? Hard to tell.) He embraces her as best he can, while standing in a fairly awkward position. Fabio wears jeans with boots that resemble Uggs. A weapon hangs off his belt. His hair blows in the wind; hers does not.
Gentle Rogue is another Johanna Lindsey title with a classic romance cover featuring...Fabio! This is ship captain Fabio, standing firm on a ship’s deck, hanging onto some rope with one hand and the girl with the other. This time he wears black leather pants and a white shirt that is unbuttoned and opened to reveal his broad, muscular chest. The heroine’s dress barely hangs onto her body, the sleeves are off the shoulder, there is a slit up to her lady parts and her breasts look ready to burst out of the gown. Interestingly, the heroine of this novel spends the majority of the novel disguised as a boy with her breasts bound. But the pose... She has her back to him, but Fabio seems to be thrusting her against him, holding her tight. Waves crash all around them.
I’m sold. I want this book. This cover promises extreme passion. It’s not shy or coy. It is not ashamed. As one romance reader commented: “I think the clinch cover is great: It says, in quite unapologetic terms, ‘Yes, I am a romance. Within my covers you’re going to read about a woman and a man falling in love. Plus, they are going to have sex.’”
For all that sex sells (especially if it’s a woman’s body on display), a designer for Berkeley Publishing once told me, “Anything hot and sexy usually does well as long as it’s tastefully done and not over the top. Anything too revealing won’t be picked up by some of the more conservative buyers so there is a limit to what you can show on the cover without offending some people.”
There is also the matter of how the reader feels. She might actually like those beefcake covers but not like the judgment she perceives when she reads them in public. Publishers were aware of this. Jon Paul, the cover illustrator, explains that “in order to solve this problem, they [the publishers] were going to do the step back. They would put a still life with flowers on the front cover, and when you open it up...” there’s the clinch we know and love, but only for our private pleasure.
One man. One woman.
The step back was one solution to making readers feel more comfortable about reading a romance in public. Another option was to keep those beautiful illustrations, but portray an individual rather than a couple.
The 1990s marked the era of the lone male on the romance cover. One male in particular. “In the nineties it was driven by Fabio, to be honest,” Sogah says. “Bare-chested Fabio was on nearly every cover and if you didn’t have Fabio, you got a close substitute.” Jon Paul agrees that there was definitely an era where the male dominated romance covers.
But some aspects of men did not dominate. When it came to chest hair and facial hair, Jon Paul, who is hired by publishing companies to create the cover art, says, “whoever is making the decisions is saying they don’t want it.” That’s especially interesting in light of the descriptions of the heroes, many of whom are hardly the waxed, buffed, and polished metrosexual males that are illustrated. Many, many romance heroes have chest hair and facial scruff. Not that you’d know it by looking at the covers.
Another interesting trend in romance covers was the headless hero, in which the cover showcased the man’s hot body but didn’t interfere with how the reader pictured the hero. You can credit or blame the publisher for these, but “I never do a piece of artwork with a cut-off head,” Jon Paul declares.
These days “you don’t really see a single man on the cover,” he says. “Now it’s a single woman. The publishers go through periods.”
Especially in historicals, the lone female with the big dress is having a moment. But fun fact: You’ll never find those gorgeous dresses available in stores or for rent. “A lot of people compliment me on the dresses,” Jon Paul says. “They’re totally made up out of my head.”
Frequently, the single woman on the cover is not quite alone. In the past decade, her gown might be open in the back (which she obviously didn’t do herself), she might clutch a bed sheet, or she might blow a kiss...all suggesting a lover just offstage. However, I have noticed a new, recent trend in covers that portrays just a woman, fully clothed, with a smile to the viewer. One example is Tessa Dare’s Romancing the Duke, which shows a woman in a striking red gown, smiling and making eye contact with the viewer, all while standing in front of the castle she has just inherited.[129]
Covers like these represent how much the genre is unabashedly female, and how vitally important the heroine’s transformation is, on her own and not in relation to a man.
But how well does she sell?
“Regardless of genre you will see at different times, just having a woman on a cover doesn’t work as well,” Sogah says. “In paranormals in particular we would see that. Even if a series was about an ass-kicking heroine. Those overall didn’t sell as well as the ones with a half-naked guy. There were certainly exceptions—but they were exceptions.”
Are women—gasp!—objectifying men?
According to Jane Litte, the answer is not really. While she does see a growing online trend of objectification of men by woman, the appeal of the hot, buff and naked man cover is the signal it sends to readers. “The male chest cover gives a coded message to the readers,” she says. It’s “less about the sexual content and more that this is a romance. The more explicit covers are code to romance readers that these are romance books. You’re not going to find the naked man on any other type of book.”
The updated clinch
In spite of the trends featuring lone men and lone women, the clinch has endured, though the gender dynamics the pose suggests have changed. Covers like the ones on Savage Thunder or Gentle Rogue project an image of a relationship that is hierarchical, as opposed to a partnership, even though this generally is no longer idealized in popular culture. But the stories have changed. The covers have, too, but not obviously enough to make an impression on the casual passerby.
The clinch cover can, in the words of one reader, “generate a typical dominant male/subordinate female feeling.” In reference to the poses on the older covers, I’d agree. However, the way the couple embraces has changed. The man no longer holds the female in a way that suggests his dominance or her captivity. The woman is no longer on her knees; she’s either clasping the hero, too, or is on top of him.
A prime example is the cover for Pleasure for
Pleasure by bestselling author Eloisa James. Both the man and the woman are topless, and the angle of the shot reveals both her back and his six-pack abs. His hands are placed on her waist, and her arm reaches up to hold him. They are equally naked (or “objectified” if you wants to be prude and snarky), and their hold on each other mutual.
Or consider the covers for some of my own novels: It’s a hero on his knees on the cover of The Wicked Wallflower, and the woman is on top of the man on Wallflower Gone Wild. For What a Wallflower Wants the couple is dancing.
These modern covers are done in the same painted/illustrated style as earlier covers. The layouts are largely the same, often with the author’s name featuring prominently. It’s easy to see how a slightly different pose has gone unnoticed.
Shades of gray
The latest trend in romance covers was popularized by 50 Shades of Grey and has been repeated endlessly on similar books, such as the Crossfire series by Sylvia Day or Maya Banks’ novels, which feature fruit or butterflies (next: the birds and the bees?) on black backgrounds. There is no couple and there is almost no color.
These books buck the previous trends in romance, and this may have contributed to their phenomenal success. Because the covers don’t scream ROMANCE with all of its implications, more women might have felt comfortable picking them up, reading them in public, or leaving them lying around the house (at least until the world figured out what those books were about).
The popularization of this style of dark, stark cover also coincides with the rise in e-reading devices, which, for the first few generations, only showed the cover illustrations in black and white and as very tiny thumbnail images. The simpler the better happens to be a great visual fit for the content within. For other subgenres, there has been a rise in black and white covers, whether they feature a couple or an object.
This style of cover is also much easier (and less expensive) to create than the classic historical clinch cover, which can be cost prohibitive for an individual to produce. Jon Paul points out the costs of hiring models and renting costumes. There is also location, lighting, and the photographer to account for. “The publisher puts out 1,200, 1,300, 1,400 dollars,” he says. That’s before Jon Paul gets to work creating an illustration from the photographs. It’s done digitally these days, because publishers can no longer wait for oil paint to dry. A lot of people “don’t realize what goes into this,” he says. It’s all beyond the budget of many self-publishers. Having said that, some indie authors and publishers still stage their own photo shoots to create this style of cover because of what it signals to the reader: This is like books you also like.
Many attribute the rise of e-readers to the embarrassment with the usual romance cover. With the cover hidden, no one needs to know what she’s reading. It’s interesting, then, that many of the covers of books published especially for those e-readers still rely on the classic clinch to signal their readers. Despite the protests, there are still a lot of hot naked man chests.
It’s not Fabio’s fault
Covers are not the sole source of the bad reputation of romance, though they may not have helped the genre be taken seriously. Many are judged not on the quality of the artistry, but on the fact that they are designed to appeal to women. Jon Paul says, “I remember art directors when I was young said to me ‘remember this is women readers.’” Not only are these images for women, but they’re incredibly sexy images, glorifying (or objectifying) brawny men. It reminds us all that—gasp!—women like sex. Or it reminds us that women are proud to stand on a cover alone, not needing to reveal any skin, and confidently smile at the viewer. Traditionally, confidence and sexual agency were not qualities our culture liked to see in a woman.
Perhaps it’s not that the covers give the books a bad reputation, but that the feminine content of the books gives the covers a bad reputation. “If you go back long enough, before we had such a thing as covers for books, people were still making fun of books written by women about female concerns,” says bestselling author Courtney Milan. “I think it doesn’t matter what the content is. I think it doesn’t matter what the covers are.”
The modern version of Savage Thunder shows a house in a field with mountains in the distance. The updated version of Gentle Rogue, which takes place largely at sea, depicts a London townhouse. But a recently published historical romance by Sarah MacLean features a single woman proudly wearing...breeches! The title, appropriately enough, is Never Judge a Lady by Her Cover.
FROM LEAN IN TO BEND OVER
WHY 50 SHADES OF GREY AND LEAN IN ARE SO POPULAR AT THE SAME TIME
Two of the bestselling books in the past few years were Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg (2013) and 50 Shades of Grey by E. L. James (2011). One is a self-help book focusing on how women are held back in the workforce and how to get ahead and become a successful executive, written by a self-made female billionaire. The other is romantic fan fiction about an innocent young girl navigating a dominant/submissive BDSM relationship with an arrogant, controlling billionaire. It was self-published by E. L. James, who made 95 million dollars in its first year of publication, launching her to the top of the list of highest-paid authors. It seems these two books couldn’t give more conflicting messages to women: One says to sit at the table, the other says to lift your skirt and bend over it.
What is going on that American women will send these two books to the top of the bestseller lists and keep them there at the same time? A Newsweek article finds it “intriguing that huge numbers of women are eagerly consuming myriad and disparate fantasies of submission at a moment when women are ascendant in the workplace.”[130] Are there two distinct readerships or are these books together addressing the needs of the modern American woman?
Lean In has sold about 2 million copies—and that is a huge number of books to move in today’s publishing environment. 50 Shades of Grey has, to date, sold about 100 million copies. What are these two incredibly successful stories telling us about what women in America want?
Does she want to be the boss or to be bossed around?
The exhaustion of the modern female
Sheryl Sandberg, arguably the heroine of Lean In, is exceptional: She’s incredibly smart, well educated, and accomplished and balances a marriage and family with her job as COO of Facebook. Her story is one of an intrepid young woman succeeding through intelligence, hard work, and risk-taking.
I’m a huge fangirl of Sheryl, but when I read about her days—up with kids, off to run a major corporation, home in time for dinner with the family, and then back online for a few more hours of email—I am exhausted. I can only imagine how exhausted she must be, as well as all the millions of women like her who are balancing families, careers, and households. These days, 40 percent of families with children under the age of eighteen include mothers who are the sole or primary provider. Of this group, 37 percent have a husband who pitches in and 63 percent are single mothers. Both groups of breadwinner mothers have been increasing over the past few decades.[131]
In the summer of 2012, Anne-Marie Slaughter sparked a massive cultural conversation with her Atlantic piece “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.”[132] She pointed out that “the women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed.” But that doesn’t mean the rest of us aren’t doggedly pursuing the myth or feeling enormous pressure to succeed at everything, all of the time.
We live in the age of girl power—when we regularly ask women how they manage to have a bikini body two months after the baby, a corner office, 2.5 kids, and date nights with their husbands. This is what American women are supposed to achieve, or at least aspire to. And many do a pretty damn good job or at least put in a herculean effort. You’d think that all these kick-ass women would want to spend their free time (ha, free time!) reading about kick-ass heroines who do manage to have it all. For a few hours, perhaps she could see how it’s done, learn what it feels like, and take notes for tomorrow.
There are probably many of these heroines as well as readers who adore them.
And then there is Anastasia Steele, a mousey college student in possession of her virginity and in want of a laptop. She somehow captures the attentions of Christian Grey, a young, hot, control freak, and they embark on a relationship exploring roles where he is the dominant who controls everything from buying her underwear to taking it off. He has a chef, a driver, and a whole host of help who ensure that Anastasia never needs to do housework. She gets a job; when she has problems with her boss, he buys the company and tries to make her CEO. It is hardly the reality for so many women trying to lean in. But that’s exactly the point. Instead of signaling the demise of feminism, the popularity of a character like Anastasia might be a sign that it’s succeeding.
In the Newsweek article “Working Women’s Fantasies,” the author writes, “There is something exhausting about the relentless responsibility of a contemporary woman’s life, about the pressure of economic participation, about all that strength and independence and desire and going out into the world. It may be that, for some, the more theatrical fantasies of sexual surrender offer a release, a vacation, an escape from the dreariness and hard work of equality.”
Elyse Discher, a reviewer for Smart Bitches Trashy Books, agrees. “I have a crazy, stressful, busy job,” she says. “When I come home at the end of the night, my brain is shut down. For me the fantasy of being in a position where you can rely on someone else to take care of everything and know that your needs are going to be met and you’re going to be satisfied is appealing.”
Romance readers read for entertainment, escape, and relaxation. After staring at a computer screen all day, how nice it must be to imagine being a heroine who doesn’t even own a laptop. After making decisions all day, from what to wear that will convey strength and femininity but not be too sexy, to what healthy meal to prepare for dinner that will please everyone, all while trying to convey leadership ability while not coming across as bossy, it’s easy to see the appeal of a heroine who doesn’t have to worry about any of that. The only thing on her to-do list is Christian Grey.