Cover Theory (or, Revenge of the ManChest)

A recent conversation on Twitter about what readers like and don’t like about romance covers inspired me to put down the thought process behind my own covers.

I should point out here that the way I design my covers has nothing to do with how I feel about bodies, both male and female, and their attractiveness. The entire goal of my covers to get a reader to stop, click, and hopefully to buy. It’s all purely mercenary on my part.

Covers have a lot of work they have to do. In half a second they need to capture a browser’s attention, enough so that the person wants to learn more about the book. The cover also needs to signal as much as it can about the genre, sub genre, and underlying story. In order to make my covers work as well as they can at this task, I have to take advantage of the visual short hand that already exists in historical romance covers.

So let’s break down some covers, starting with my Western historicals:

 

Signaling the sub genre with these is pretty easy–man in a cowboy hat, mountains as background, women in vaguely period dress equals Western historical. But, there’s slight problem when it comes to my books and the larger Western historical market: there’s a big demand for “sweet” or “clean” Western historicals and mine definitely have sexual content. (But they aren’t erotic or anywhere close.)

So how do I signal the heat level to readers? By using couples in a clinch and having the men (mostly) be bare chested.

(You’ll note that the man on The Farmer Takes a Wife has his shirt on. That particular story is on the sweeter end, for my books, and the cover reflects that. Although, there is still sex.)

But! The women are still in the center of the covers and the bared chests of the men are mostly minimized. Which hopefully communicates the spirit of my stories–my heroines generally begin a story thinking they are pretty darn awesome and the ensuing story just reinforces that. (My heroes are the ones who need some work, which the heroine is happy to push him towards.)

You’ll notice there’s one large exception to that though:

Which brings us to the biggest limitation of cover art for writers doing it themselves and that’s stock photos. That cover begin life as this stock photo:

This was the only stock photo where the model even came close to capturing the expression Franny would have. She’s fierce, she’s accomplished, she can do anything she sets her mind to; she would never be looking wistfully at Felipe while he kissed her. But she also wouldn’t be holding a gun on him. In order to hide the pistol in the model’s hand, I had to put her at the edge of the cover and the male model in the middle.

I could have gone with a different stock photo, one where I could keep the female model at the center, but then I would have lost that expression that is so typically Franny. Like everything to do with covers, it was a trade off.

So while in an ideal world, I’d have covers that perfectly captured not only the spirit of the books, but also the way the characters look and my own personal philosophy of how a cover should look, in reality, my hands are tied by a lot of things. I’m constrained by what photo stock is available to me, the kind of models and clothing used in shoots (the heroine of The Sheriff Takes a Bride is short, round, and decidedly not pretty), the expressions on the models’ faces, and my own skills at Photoshop (the hair of the heroine on the cover of The Farmer Takes a Wife still isn’t quite to my liking).

Which brings me to my next issue with covers: I have two series. The western series is actually relatively easy to come up with covers for. I don’t have to reinvent any kind of visual shorthand for those. But a historical series starring scientists in turn of the century California? Yeah, there aren’t any comparable covers for those. And these covers also have to say “Same author, different series.”

I’ve used a few simple tricks to try to do this:

As you can see, the font on my author name is the same for both. But the title/author placement is switched, and the models on the science series are all on the left, while the western series has the couple on the right. Also, the colors in the science series are warm, while the colors in the western series are cool. And rather than invent an entirely new shorthand for this series, I’m simply using the short hand of lady in a poofy dress equals general historical romance. The font hopefully gives a clue that these are not Regencies. Also, all the models here are reclining, providing another clue that the titles are linked.

You’ll note that the heads are chopped for most of these. I personally prefer headless models; it helps me to visualize what the author intended a character to look like, rather than having it forced on me by the cover. Also, it makes it easier to fill space in the cover if the model’s body takes up most of it. Personally, I find covers that are tightly cropped to be more dynamic–it suggests to me that I’ve walked in the middle of something and makes me want to learn more.

To help these covers pop, the dresses are all very brightly colored (probably in an historically inaccurate manner) and the background colors were chosen to mutedly contrast with those dresses. While I would have liked to have period appropriate dresses on the covers, stock photos of those are almost impossible to find.

All of these covers began life as stock photos of women in bridal gowns. The cover for Atlas of Desire began as this:

After some careful background extraction, coloring of the dress, and putting some wallpaper as the background, it turned into this:

Definitely not accurate as to time period, and not exactly how I envisioned Artemis physically, but the spirit of the model, draped in the chair as she is, is true to Artemis’s spirit. And the way the the yellow-green of her dress pops against the light purple of the background just makes me happy. (Since that whole novella makes me happy, this cover fits very well.)

 

The point of all this wasn’t to suggest that you can’t complain about covers (I do, often)–it was to give a peek behind my own personal process for doing a cover. Are these covers perfect? Nope, not by a long shot. But are they eye-catching? Do they communicate what they should to a browser and invite them to look closer? I hope so.

And if they don’t, then it’s back to Photoshop for me. 🙂

(I should point out here that all of my Western stock photos come from http://hotdamnstock.com which is one of the best stock sites I found for Western historical stock photos.)