The Way We Love Now: What Does a Romance Novel Look Like?

October 16, 2023 3:26 PM

"So what’s featured on [romance novel] covers today? We looked at over 1,400 covers featured in Publishers Weekly from 2011 to 2023 to find out.....The specificity of stories offered by a glance of today’s covers broadens the world of who and what we consider to be part of romance." What Does A Happily Ever After Look Like? By Alice Liang.

"[Romance] covers imply that it’s possible to believe in a happily ever after for us. Seeing more people of color in Publishers Weekly features means that the publishing industry deems our happiness as worthwhile and important — that our love exists, and it exists in the public sphere." (Via kottke.org.)

Further reading:

Do! Judge A Book By Its Cover Issue 139: Contemporary (Part 33) (Pop Goes the Reader)

Heaving bosoms, begone: Romance novels embrace playful, less steamy covers as readership shifts (The Globe and Mail, 2023): "The idea that the clinch cover needs to disappear to shed that stigma feels like a defeat, a concession to misogyny. If we have to hide our romance novels behind a cute cover, is that really progress?"

60 of the Best, Steamiest Romance Novel Covers for Your Viewing and Reading Pleasure (Book Riot, 2019)

Pulp Covers: Romance

Romance Through the Decades: A Cover Art Retrospective (Harlequin, 2019)

posted by MonkeyToes (34 comments total)

Fun! I recently read a post by urban fantasy author Ilona Andrews (actually a married writing couple!) on the shift in cover illustrations for their own series. I thought this point (which has been made elsewhere I know) is worth repeating:

You can see the change in cover trends driven by advent of ebooks. Large shapes. If there is a person, we are doing a close up, because the covers from the previous decade are difficult to see when they are shrunken to the thumbnail on your device.

Their Hidden Legacy series recently got cover makeovers courtesy of the publisher Avon, from (sometimes partially unclothed) heterosexual couple to dramatic renderings of single objects. As the first commenter says: "i like them! this is much better than the nekkid guy!"
posted by spamandkimchi at 3:39 PM on October 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

That was an interesting read, thanks. I pick most of my books by reading Smart Bitches by RSS and then adding them to my library queue. The visual language of romance covers lets me skip things I will not want to read at a glance and I find it very helpful. There are three distinct cover genres in what I read.

- cutesy illustrations (non specific contemporaries no matter how angsty, cozy paranormals)
- women in colourful ball gowns (english or NY historicals)
- naked dudes (anything involving kink, sports romances)

I am not saying that I want to read everything that looks like those things, but I can easily skip edgier paranormal, westerns, heartfelt low heat novels, etc. That seems to be design doing its job very effectively.
posted by jacquilynne at 3:47 PM on October 16, 2023 [6 favorites]

This is not my genre, but I am interested in the shift to more colorful and playful covers. Thumbnail display issues make total sense! I included the Pop Goes the Reader link because I was having some difficulty (curse you, Google) tracking down cover artists for Emily Henry, etc., and I started wondering whether the advent of AI is going to have an impact on this genre (especially given the shift away from more traditional covers). If you have links to the creators of what jacquilynne, above, identifies as cutesy illustrations, please drop them here.
posted by MonkeyToes at 3:51 PM on October 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

> "cutesy illustrations (non specific contemporaries no matter how angsty, cozy paranormals)"

That definitely tracks with the covers my publisher gave my recent-ish, cozy-ish paranormal romance books. Solid-color background, illustrated character figures, cursive title font. It's interesting to me -- and I thought this when I first saw the mock-ups -- that it instantly identifies not only the genre but the probable sub-genre.
posted by kyrademon at 4:01 PM on October 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

Oh, and monkeytoes, the cover designer for mine was Debbie Clement. My books aren't on her site, but there are some examples of the general style in question there (although mine ended up being a little more colorful than the ones there, for whatever reason.)
posted by kyrademon at 4:08 PM on October 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

Oh, interesting: The Art of LGBTQ+ Romance: A Q&A With Artist Joamette Gil (Harlequin).
posted by MonkeyToes at 4:27 PM on October 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

Back in the 60s and 70s, suspense or gothic romance went through a "woman with great hair fleeing mansion" cover art phase.

A current trend I've noticed in cover art for fiction is "woman or women dressed in vintage clothing walking away from the viewer".
posted by orange swan at 5:30 PM on October 16, 2023 [8 favorites]

This is not a genre I read, but I am really liking these links.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:09 PM on October 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

I find the cartoon covers to be much more attractive commercial art than the chopped off naked abs stock photo covers, but we've been going through a rocky period in the community where many of the traditional signals about relative steaminess based on cover design have been demolished. As a result, returning or casual romance readers are often shocked to find multiple scenes of explicit smut in books with cutesy cartoon covers. Readers who are trained to find high steam sexual content by zeroing in on the headless abs covers will find their eyes skimming past that adorable cover illustration with the cute dog and hockey skates in it.

Readers will adjust.
posted by MagnificentVacuum at 7:33 PM on October 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

Women with Great Hair fleeing Gothic Houses in Gowns - just in time for Spooky Season. (threadreader link, keep scrolling down and down)
posted by bartleby at 7:45 PM on October 16, 2023 [9 favorites]

It's not my genre, so I must ask: one can often deduce the subgenre of a Mystery or Thriller by the cover art. This is a typical cover for International Spy, that one is In Over Their Head Amateur Sleuth, etc.

Is it the same with Romance? Would one say
"Hey I just started a new romance novel this weekend."
'Oo! What kind? Clinch Cover, or Shirtless Torso?'
"Neither! Its a WwGHfGHiG, and I'm really vibing with it."
posted by bartleby at 7:54 PM on October 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

Exactly, bartleby, and as MagnificentVacuum et c. say one of the confusions right now is that the signs and categories are shifting.

I think the Next Thing has got to be ereader programs that let you change the cover art, and a lively aftermarket for it. Like the sets of custom dust jackets.
posted by clew at 8:12 PM on October 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

Book cover design trends 2023:

Layering sans serifs on top of vibrant designs or colors in this way is popular across the literary fiction genre....But it’s not only literary fiction that has embraced this design trend. We also see it in a slightly different iteration on the crime and mystery/thriller shelves.

...

Lastly, we see a lot of retro typefaces on the covers of genre fiction like horror, crime, and suspense.
posted by spamandkimchi at 8:22 PM on October 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

…a rocky period in the community where many of the traditional signals about relative steaminess based on cover design have been demolished.

…the signs and categories are shifting.

I would like to hear more about this, please.
posted by MonkeyToes at 8:39 PM on October 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

There has definitely been a tradition of design signals that would tell the reader what they would likely find inside. Blue sky, fields of crops, a woman with her hair covered by a hat/bonnet? Inspirational. Realistic model based cover of a couple and a pet dog? Low steam, possibly even closed door. Headless naked torso? High steam, could truly be any subgenre, often the clue to which was in the color of the lighting.

Jen from Fated Mates podcast complained in a tweet thread a couple years ago about how new cover trends are straight up confusing and violate much of the accepted paratextual conventions she's come to rely on as a reader and buyer of books.
posted by MagnificentVacuum at 8:47 PM on October 16, 2023 [7 favorites]

Courtney Milan's new one is out today, and it's photorealistic and clinch-ish although not as fully clinch as the first in the series. I think she's consciously going for a throwback thing, though, and sort of making a statement by putting Asian characters in poses that readers associate with formerly-super-white corners of historical romance.

I honestly don't think that I notice covers that much, because I mostly do my romance reading on an ereader. Also, I read a fair amount of indie romance, where the covers often look like the author cobbled something together with stock images and free fonts. But I've definitely noticed the conversation about it, because there are some readers who are really pissed off about cartoon covers, which they see as capitulating to anti-romance prejudice.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 9:41 PM on October 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

I think Milan has a long post somewhere about her book covers, but can't find it. I did find a couple of others on her blog though: Covering the Cover and Can we talk about black women in stock photos? And this interview if people want to know more about Milan.
posted by paduasoy at 11:53 PM on October 16, 2023 [6 favorites]

Relevant to book covers in general, Adam Cadre looked at how trade dress for James Michener novels evolved over half a century, wandering from lurid to austere, cartoony to realistic, following the trends of the times and the audience being courted.
posted by jackbishop at 7:14 AM on October 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

Women with Great Hair fleeing Gothic Houses in Gowns - just in time for Spooky Season. (threadreader link, keep scrolling down and down)

These are awesome! I want the job drawing beautiful old houses in odd locations (one is I guess on or across the street from a boardwalk? ) and women fleeing. I might switch it up sometimes to do woman feeling from suburban tract home, with the big grey plastic utilities box and an odd shaped hedge in the scene.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:41 AM on October 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'm curious why raunchy covers have declined. What's shifting there?

Perhaps it's a kind of veiling, as one commentator put it:
"returning or casual romance readers are often shocked to find multiple scenes of explicit smut in books with cutesy cartoon covers"
posted by doctornemo at 12:21 PM on October 17, 2023

Slightly related: this 24 minute Bernadette Banner video where she redraws historical romance covers to have period accurate costumes was interesting.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 12:30 PM on October 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm curious why raunchy covers have declined. What's shifting there?

Basically, it used to be that reading romance was considered shameful and lowbrow and feminine in a bad way, and raunchy clinch covers were kind of the emblem of all those negative associations. When people mocked romance novels, they always talked about the Fabio covers. Now, it's a lot more respectable to read romance, but newer readers are often embarrassed by the old-school clinch covers, which retain some of the old negative associations. Publishers favor illustrated covers because those covers appeal to readers who aren't embarrassed about reading romance novels but might still cringe at sexy pictures of half-naked men. And conversely, a lot of long-time readers think that there's nothing wrong with clinch covers, and getting rid of them is pandering to snobbery and prudery and misogyny.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 4:29 PM on October 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

Thank you, ArbitraryAndCapricious.
posted by doctornemo at 6:45 PM on October 17, 2023

Also custom photo shoots are more expensive than custom illustrations (not the whole reason by any means but it’s certainly a bonus from the publishers’ perspective)
posted by (Over) Thinking at 9:29 PM on October 17, 2023

> "I'm curious why raunchy covers have declined. What's shifting there?"

Another factor that hasn't been mentioned much here yet, although some of the material linked within the thread alludes to it:

Posts and ads promoting books with raunchy covers risk getting hidden on social media sites.
posted by kyrademon at 6:20 AM on October 18, 2023 [3 favorites]

A current trend I've noticed in cover art for fiction is "woman or women dressed in vintage clothing walking away from the viewer".

I read a lot of historical fiction and this is 90% of the covers. That or "woman with half-a-face". I avoided Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels for way too long because of their terrible covers.

The trend toward cartoon covers is interesting too. I remember when the Harry Potter series came out, they made separate "grown-up" covers for people who didn't want to be seen reading a book with a cartoon cover.
posted by basalganglia at 9:29 AM on October 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

I feel like part of the shift that is resulting in more explicit sex scenes in books with even relatively tame covers is just a general move toward much more sex positive characters and explicit sex in romance. Unless you specifically seek out low heat categories like inspirational Christian romance, you are almost guaranteed to have several lengthy and very detailed sex scenes in a book. I feel like that used to be less true -- you had to seek out the books that had the very detailed and explicit sex and everything else was some range from no sex to no on page sex to a brief description of how they definitely had sex ending in simultaneous orgasms.

I find the vast majority of detailed sex scenes boring to actually read but the kinds of books that don't have them are also boring to read. So I end up reading a lot of books with detailed, explicit sex scenes but just skimming those chapters. I'm not clutching pearls -- I'm happy to read good sex scenes that either contribute to plot and character development or are just crazy hot, but so many of them are kind of meh and could be replaced with a paragraph saying 'they had sex, she definitely consented, he definitely cared about whether she got off' with no loss to the book.
posted by jacquilynne at 10:55 AM on October 18, 2023 [3 favorites]

Jenny Crusie had a post recently about cover decisions.
posted by paduasoy at 11:35 AM on October 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

I avoided Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels for way too long because of their terrible covers.

I'm glad somebody else remembers those! We talked about them here.
posted by MonkeyToes at 1:55 PM on October 18, 2023

This article features a remarkably irritating layout. As an author of kink books, I'd be really interested to see these covers. Too bad most of them are as tiny as Tic Tacs, I can't click on them to see them enlarged and for some reason hitting CNTRL-plus to zoom in only makes them smaller.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 3:39 PM on October 18, 2023

This is where I get to complain about what they did to a number of Mary Stewart's titles, (even though strictly speaking she wrote romantic mysteries, not straight-up romance.)
Around 2008, a set of her books came out with gorgeous covers in the style of the Golden Age of travel posters and clean fonts to boot. I loved everything about them. But then there was a new design, and it went from this to this.

This happened about ten years ago and I still haven't let go.
posted by of strange foe at 8:01 PM on October 18, 2023 [5 favorites]

Ouch, of strange foe, I hadn't seen either set of covers. As you say - the first is great and the second truly awful. That is a misrepresentation of the book. I am afraid to look at what they did to her others.
posted by paduasoy at 12:17 AM on October 19, 2023

paduasoy, the one I linked was the most egregious, luckily the rest of the newer set aren't quite as bad, but still!
posted by of strange foe at 8:38 PM on October 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

Belated thought; the height of raunchy romance covers matched a particular stage of raunchiness in novels — when it was neither unusual nor universal. Readers could use the information, and at the time we were probably scanning a book rack or library shelf.

Now, afaict, it’s *not* having explicit sex scenes that gets signaled, but with words.
posted by clew at 11:40 AM on October 30, 2023