PicoBlog

When I first read R.S. Benedict’s Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny, I felt like something that had been gnawing at me finally bit hard enough for me to be incensed. The essay is about the correlation of unheard-of physical perfection in movie actors with their growing sexlessness, and how we’re so so lonely in our sculpted, puritanical ideal.

When I look at a bookstore table of popular romance novels (often spouting #BookTok, my second home) or best-selling trade paperbacks I recognize that same sexless homogeny that the essay mentions. We get bright, big trade paperbacks with either large text and florals or cartoon people hovering in proximity of each other. Some of these books are cute and low-steam, as the covers would suggest. Others are filthy. Can you tell which ones?

In Benedict’s essay, she juxtaposes the lived-in house of 1982’s classic horror Poltergeist to the modern movie McMansion trend as a metaphorical representation of the evolving portrayal of human bodies on-screen:

“Homes in films now [are] massive, sterile cavernous spaces with minimalist furniture. Kitchens are industrial-sized and spotless, and they contain no food. There is no excess. There is no mess.”

In romance, these are the McMansions:

This is the excess.

I’m often told that romance novels are a billion-dollar industry dedicated to female pleasure, but when people talk about these changing cover trends and why everything looks the same now, it always comes back to shame.

In their article Can We Still Judge a Romance By Its Cover?, Electric Literature posits that “modern romance covers are opting for graphic illustration in a bid to outrun the sexist stigma that has dogged the genre since its inception and repackage the books for new audiences.”

But are we fighting misogyny by hiding from it? And would a misogynist endorse a book with an artful flower design in a way they wouldn’t an embracing couple, or are we just hiding our increasing discomfort with sexual content under the guise of reducing stigma?

In the article Colleen Reinhart, the Associate Art Director at Penguin Random House, talks about how traditionally published romance now plays it coy. She says, “Because they can look very fun and young, they sometimes can look innocent. I’ve had friends of mine read books that I’ve done the cover [for] and have been surprised that they’ve been so steamy.”

Reinhart designed the cover of The Roommate, a book where both characters work in the porn industry. This cover is beautiful and eye-catching, but it’s difficult for me to interpret the intentional obfuscation of the book’s sexual content as a good thing.

While the Electric Literature article does have its new cover trend skeptics (notably Leah Koch from The Ripped Bodice, who says that sometimes cartoon covers can be “infantilizing”) most of the people working at major publishing houses quoted are relatively untroubled by dialing down sexual content on book covers.

Not only that, but it’s framed as progress and as a way to combat sexism, which is antithetical to the idea to the idea that romance portrays healthy sexuality. Is compulsory obfuscation healthy?

One point in favor of graphic illustration is that you are more likely to see marginalized groups (people of color, queer people, disabled people, etc.) on an illustrated romance novel cover. As Electric Literature points out, best-selling romance novelist Talia Hibbert is “happy with the illustrated covers Avon designed for her Brown Sisters series, which depict her main characters as described, with diverse bodies and backgrounds. For her prior self-published books, Hibbert says she struggled to find accurate and representative stock photography.”

But this is comparing Hibbert’s limited self-publishing resources to the ones she had with Avon, which is an imprint of one of the Big 5 Publishing Houses, HarperCollins. Avon can, and frequently does, do photoshoots for their books instead of relying on stock photography.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes from romance cover artist Victor Gadino, where you can see the photoshoot for Lorraine Heath’s Return of the Duke morph into the eventual clinch cover:

You could argue that Avon only hires Gadino to do photoshoots for historical romance, which is one of the few subgenres of traditionally published romance where you can still find overt sexuality on the cover.

But the thing is, Gadino got his start working on the reissues of Gordon Merrick’s romances in the 70s, which were not only unabashedly gay, but horny as hell.

These reissues were also published by Avon. They can do photoshoots and hire clinch artists for marginalized groups if they want to, and they’ve done it in the past. (Gadino told The Advocate that he was initially hired by Avon for his “talent and gay sensibility.”) So why don’t they want to now?

When Avon later released a mass market cover for Get a Life Chloe Brown, it appears they used stock photography.

I take issue with the way cutting sexual signifiers on romance novels is labeled as being “ accessible” enough to reach new romance readers.

If publishers really wanted romance books to be more accessible they would release more mass market paperbacks instead of the larger trade paperbacks, which can be up to three times the cost. Electric Literature says that “trade paperbacks also lend romance novels more weight—both literal and figurative—than mass market volumes” but where did that figurative weight come from? Genre fiction is closely tied to the mass market paperback — they’re easy to carry, collectible, and cheap. Romance readers are repeat buyers, and economy is what keeps midlist authors, who don’t have the heavy marketing of lead authors, afloat.

When people think of romance at its most genre fiction, at its sleaziest and campiest, they’re likely picturing a Zebra Historical Romance.

Zebra is an imprint of Kensington, a major publisher which was founded by Walter Zacharius and Roberta Grossman in the early 1970s. Both Grossman and Zacharius had their genre fiction bonafides before founding Kensington: they previously worked at (or in Zacharius’ case, co-founded) the 1960s science fiction and fantasy paperback publisher Lancer Books.

As a proponent of genre fiction, Zacharius was decidedly not a snob. His New York Times obituary quotes him as saying, “We’re not impressed with what’s selling on Fifth Avenue or Rodeo Drive. Our readers patronize suburban shopping malls.”

Zebra was proudly inexpensive, as demonstrated by this 1993 issue of Romantic Times Magazine:

“Someone has to take the lead.” So says Walter Zacharius, Charmain of the Board at Zebra Books, in a press release announcing his decision to lower cover prices on lead title paperbacks from Zebra. “The economy is such that our readers have less to spend on book purchases, and the lower cover price of $4.99 will be welcome news.”

They also published unknown authors who would eventually move on to more lucrative imprints, like Judy Cuevas, who later wrote under the pen name of Judith Ivory after signing with Avon. Her first book, Starlit Surrender, was a Zebra Historical Romance.

But in 2022 this pipeline can look different. It’s not just Zebra to Avon or Berkley. It’s also self-publishing superstar to Avon or Berkley, as evidenced by Talia Hibbert, Ruby Dixon, and countless other authors that initially gained traction with their steamy self-published covers before releasing books with major publishing houses.

Once that happens, the books suddenly lose the genre signifiers that helped lure readers in the first place. An alien romance on Kindle Unlimited is a hard sell without a visual representation of the goods, but when Berkley picked up Ice Planet Barbarians, Ruby Dixon’s spur-dicked aliens get softer.

I’m skeptical of the claim that these covers have the unique capacity to reach new romance readers when the books behind them have the full-force push of major publishing houses.

In the 90s, Avon used to fly Fabio and cover artist Elaine Duillo to New York for individual book cover photoshoots, which is an expense I cannot fathom in today’s publishing climate. With the rise of digital artwork (which was partially spearheaded by clinch cover artists like John Ennis, who wrote 1997’s Going Digital: Artists Guide to Digital Illustration), some romance cover artists, like Sharon Spiak, were out of a job. Others, like Gadino, adapted and embraced the new medium.

But after the initial wave of digital clinch cover illustrations, it’s hard not to notice corners being cut. Instead of hiring models, publishers are using stock photography with increasing frequency. And that’s for the clinch covers that do get made, as you’re much more likely to see a cover that’s purely vector art now.

I will concede that this type of illustration can be eye-catching, beautiful, and appropriate for the book it’s selling. It just shouldn’t be on everything, and to dress this cover art similitude up as advancing the genre is a lie that’s very comfortable and economic for publishers.

You used to be able to buy a horny book cover in a grocery store aisle, but now I can’t scroll BookTok for long without seeing someone say they refuse to read a romance novel with real people on the cover because it's corny and embarrassing. Publishers are using the stigma against romance novels, the “This isn’t your Grandma’s Fabio cover!” of it all, to pay less for cover art, charge you more for trade paperbacks, and package it as genre progress instead of what it truly is: a capitulation to puritanical backlash. Genre romance is often horny and weird and gross. It would be a shame to lose that.

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