By Jayne Kingsley
Recently, I've found myself with time to kill on Saturdays in the city and being the book lover that I am, I've been spending that time perusing the fabulous offerings of local book stores. What's struck me, is the blurring lines of romance book covers and just how the hell I'm meant to understand the 'reader promise' from some of the new trends that have emerged.
With that in mind, I thought I’d delve into a bit of research about how romance covers have evolved over time.
Let’s start with the good ol’ ‘bodice ripper’ or ‘clinch cover’ as they were affectionately known. What’s not to love, right? The Fabio-esque male and his leading lady with luscious locks whose clothes clearly weren’t made well, since they always seemed to fall off at his one saucy wink. Too much? Fair. Back in the day this was the epitome of the romance novel – no confusion over the reader promises here. Truth – I have quite a few of these in storage
Moving on, and we start to see the rise in steamy and erotic romance, their covers depicted by suggestive single item objects and dark backgrounds. I can still recall when I was first told about the Fifty Shades phenomenon. Being a massive Twilight fan at the time (team Edward, always and forever), when I looked up Fifty Shades my immediate thought was that it was another vampire novel (I was really into Twilight so completely misread the situation). Reading the first few pages I kept waiting for the penny to drop… and it did… or should I say the whip did, not so much the penny. I’d based my entire thought process about the first Fifty Shades book on the front cover. I’d bought the e-book version, as it was the fastest copy of the book I could get, so I didn’t bother to read the blurb. That single object, dark mysterious cover had me sure that it was going to be a billionaire, hotter than Hades, vampire romance. My bad.
Of course, there has always been the wonderful realistic depiction of an in-love couple on the front cover – screaming ‘read me if you want the romance promise of HEA’. These are a favourite of mine, and a large portion of the romances that I own have this style of cover. The slightly varied version that is still strong and has stayed within the ‘reader promise’ guidelines is rural romance – where we have a lovely, picturesque background graced with a main character – often a wholesome female lead or rugged handsome man.
Authors such as Emily Henry, Ali Hazelwood, and Sally Thorne are just some of the names attributed to the great rise of the illustrated cover, which has been the dominant romance cover rising trend since 2020. The bright, composite, happy colours, bold font and illustrated couple are eye-catching, and are now synonymous with romantic comedy style romances with a HEA promise.
This brings me to where I start to come unstuck with a cover. The title and author name are usually clues that it’s a romance, but the actual cover image leaves me a little stumped. Take for example, the beautiful watercolour covers. I first picked up Becka Mack’s novel ‘Consider Me’ at the airport. I was drawn to the watercolour illustration and was intrigued about the type of book. I had assumed maybe a sweet small-town romance or women’s fiction. You know what they say about assuming! 'Consider Me' is a sports ice hockey romance, quite a steamy one.
These covers below—text heavy, devoid of characters—have been popping up all over the place, and without reading the book I am left wondering if I’m going to be getting a steamy romance, sweet romance, young adult romance, cowboy romance or something else entirely.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not a complaint. I’m loving the variety of covers that are out in the wonderful world of romance at present. The popularity of the genre and shift in covers is, I believe, creating a wider readership, allowing for more reading in public without the fear of censorship or judgement. It also gives me more reason to try new authors; and let’s face it, it’s always good to have another reason to buy more romance books, right?
**all images and photo credits contained in this blog post are courtesy of https://www.amazon.com/**
