Micro-aggression, sexism, and cover art: some thoughts.

Yes to all of the above!

I've wondered about the preference for half-naked girls on book covers, especially in urban fantasy. It seems obvious it's for a male gaze (not to discount ladies who like ladies, including myself) yet urban fantasy is largely considered a "woman's" genre, more so than many other SFF subgenres.

Usually I get an answer about it being "wish fulfillment." I'm not really sure if that holds water, though, because like you said, most women tend to decry the improbably proportioned/posed/clothed women on covers.

I'm sorry that you got so many nasty comments about the cover of Discount Armageddon. I thought that was a gorgeous cover, and I look forward to reading the book.

Call it jealousy and competition, for when it comes to desirability it aint only guys who get nervous.

Remember when ankles were risque? There's a price to be paid for hiding things, and that price can be steep.

Asking that book covers accurately portray the characters as they would actually dress, move and behave is not "hiding things".

Slapping a half-naked lady onto the cover of a book where none of the ladies get naked (except to take showers "off screen"), arguably, IS--it's hiding the true nature of the story within.

Besides, I don't like the implication that if I'm not willing to walk about undraped (and I'm not!) that I'm willing to accept being forced into purdah or accept it if others are forced into purdah.

who the half-naked women are actually for, if guys don't want to be associated with them.

I think they're for the same non-existent people that the romance novel "clinch covers" were for.

you go girl. I wish all covers were accurate to what is portrayed inside. A lot are - I can think of more than a handful that I have on my shelves that have accurate covers to what is being portrayed.

I feel like a lot of it stems from the standard set by TOR and other fantasy publishers over the past 30 years to portray unrealistic women AND men on their covers, particularly the epic fantasy genre. I keep thinking of some of the covers for The Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind and The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan. They are fantastic books (a bit winded and lengthy, but YMMV) and they set a certain standard for fantasy publishers. Admittedly the urban fantasy genre is a different beast, but the same sort of sense seems to prevail across the publishing industry. If there is a woman in the novel, it so scarcely is someone who "looks" realistic, and is often idealized - of course I realize that this is a SUPER BROAD GENERALIZATION based on my limited reading selection, but I read a lot more about women who are portrayed in one way in the novel, and then idealized on the cover, or hyper sexualized, or just plain outright look nothing like that.

I love covers that are accurate to the text. I also love covers that are well-rendered, artistically. (I won't call out names here, but there are a few prominent cover artists whose style makes my teeth hurt. PROPORTION, dammit!)

If I'm lucky, I find an artist for whom the novels generally work for me. Works by Michael Whelan and John Jude Palencar, for instance, are often purchased by editors who share my general taste, so they're a good indicator. Darrell K. Sweet, on the other hand, is on books I love and books I hate, so no joy for me as an indicator. (There are some stunning artists coming up in cover art, but there's not enough of a trend line for me to know whether they'll work that way or not.)

In general, you can tell when a book was published by the style of the cover art. The last decade has been more abstract (and trying to be artistic) as compared to the 90s, and when you can line up novels from half a dozen different authors and see that they're basically the same concept, it makes you long for the truly unique. Oh, well, at least you've got some good stuff going. Maybe you can start a trend.

I'm all for covers that accurately depict the contents - and I agree with all your points - it doesn't seem to make sense on the surface.

My guess is that at this point, whether we like it or not, the target audience for these various genres has been conditioned to recognize "this is a novel in the genre I like" based on the type of covers we're getting - I know that I can tell, 80-90% of the time, simply by *glancing* at a cover, whether it is likely to be in any of the genres that I normally find interesting.

At this point, I suspect that if you are a new writer, and you are writing in the YA fantasy genre, you will have better sales if your cover has a slim girl wearing a long flowing gown, facing away from the reader, in a misty woods - regardless of whether your novel has ANYTHING to do with that scenario - than if it has a realistic cover.

If publishers start coming up with new types of covers, we the buyers, are going to have to be re-trained in how to recognize "our" novels - and publishers don't want any barriers to sales.

my $0.02 anyway

I'm not sure if you read Sarah and Candy at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books (http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com), but they talked a lot about dodgy covers in their book Beyond Heaving Bosoms (Since, let's face it, half naked men and women are pretty much standard cover issue for romance novels, sigh). I gather it's largely because the publishers and buyers at bookshops tend to be male, and tend to have this idea about what romance novels are supposed to look like, and the fact that readers find them embarrassing doesn't really register, because readers will still buy the books even with the dreadful covers...

Dear Seanan -

I bought your book because your name was on the cover. I'll probably continue to do that with any other books with your name on the cover (or any pseudonyms you can make _very_ open secrets of, so I can hunt them out).

About the only way I, as a book consumer, care about covers is that I sorta tend to treat cover artists the same way I do blurbs - an artist with a clearly recogniziable style, on an unfamiliar book, who has done other work for authors I really like - I'll at least pick up that book in the store and see if I like the back cover blurb. I assume the authors have ... some input and preferences. It's probably worth a look if someone gets a cover related to someone I recognize and like.

I happen to be a male, cheesecake-enthusiast, etc. But it certainly wasn't why I bought DA. Never even occoured to me to be aware of what anybody else thought of the cover when I was reading it.

Please, please, please, get the mice on the cover?

I actually increasingly wonder if those covers do sell more, or if they simply once did sell more, and a publishing industry that - like all industries - is inherently conservative has not yet adjusted to the times, so that only those books with impossible spines or half-naked girls in had impossible spines or half-naked girls on. If female fans are made uncomfortable by them, and male fans are increasingly decrying them (in vituperative and inappropriate terms, in some cases), who are they for? The consumer of ten, twenty years ago, would be my guess...

My last year of the approximate equivalent of high school, I was reading a book. I completely didn't think about how I would be judged by its cover until a classmate made a nasty remark that I must be reading porn, since the woman on the cover was baring her breast.

She was clearly topless, true, but she was also clearly from the kind of painting you'd see in the Renaissance or whatever other time period before the 1700s that liked naked women. Nice association there, guy. :/

(Of course, a lot of those paintings were softcore at minimum for that time, I think.)

Yes!

I encounter the same issue every Halloween. Yes, it's good to call out the way costumes are marketed to men versus women, and yes, it's good to promote alternatives, but can we *not* do it by dissing the women who do, for whatever reason, like wearing skimpy costumes, either this particular year or as a general rule? And every year, someone on my flist or FB or at a party uses the word "slutty", and thus makes me like them a little less.

"Women don't always have to dress sexily," should not mean "Women should *never* dress sexily."

I'm one of the few women, I think, that like the cheesecake covers. I have specifically picked up books because "hot girl with sword" -- but somehow I doubt queer women are their target audience. I don't object to covers that aren't cheesecake, mind, and I absolutely agree with you 100% on that the cover should be representative of the book. I have read plenty of books where the cover was a hot model-esque chick with bared midriff and tattoos and in the book she was described as not caring about clothes, wearing jeans and baggy t-shirts, and mousy hair. That's just like, wtf? (I'd also love to see characters like this on covers too. Truth in advertising, please!)

But realistically covers exist to make people pick them up. At least in my case, it works, but I hear from so many people, men and women alike, that they avoid books with those kind of covers, that I also wonder who they are marketing to -- and I think I agree with an above commenter that suggested their marketing is decades out of date. I'm hoping that a lot of the discussion going around the web about these covers makes it back to the marketing folk!

This entry: Just another way you make the world a better place.

I admit that the cover of "Discount Armageddon" put me off for quite a while exactly because of this - too many half-naked chicks on covers where they make no sense whatsoever. I'm pretty sure these usually are not authors' choices but publishers' choices, so I try not to judge books by their covers. It just made me cringe a little.
But I was actually really delighted when I started reading it and found the picture was actually fitting [i]excellently[/i]!
So, I agree with you 100% - let covers be true to the content, and then there's nothing whatsoever wrong with scantily dressed, armed, pretty girls on book covers. :-)

I could do with fewer corsets on historical novels, especially YA ones. It's like nobody even realises that going out wearing a chemise and corset during any of the eras they were commonly worn is the modern equivalent of going out in a bra and panties that obviously aren't a swimsuit. I got heckled at work about the Libba Bray book A Great and Terrible Beauty and took to hiding it behind the computer tower at my desk when I wasn't actually reading it in the cafeteria.

Seanan, I want to offer my sincerest apologies that I didn't do more to mitigate the nastiness in the comments during the cover battle. I don't want to say much more in a public comments forum, but I wouldn't mind continuing this conversation (read: venting regarding the cover battle) elsewhere. If you're game, please shoot me an email: myyrdneopia [at] gmail [dot] com.

Again, my sincerest apologies for all of that bullshit.

I always felt the tone of the cover to Discount Armageddon was distinctly different to that of generic-scantily-clad-woman-fantasy-covers. It comes across to me as being wilfully playful with genre publishing expectations and celebrating the fun to be found within. It also sends off a strong "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" vibe, which seems like a strong marketing hook for finding an appropriate target audience.

Must admit that I was unsure about Discount Armageddon when I saw the cover. Especially as it was the first book by Seanan that I had read. I was half-assuming that the cover was aimed at the teen girl market. Glad I went ahead and bought it though, and the cover does show Verity pretty much in her work clothes. I do have to explain the story a bit every time I bring it out to show someone to tell them how good it is. Won't lend it out though - just get people to write down the isbn and the title so they can buy their own copy. (I don't lend out books anymore - lost far too many that way).
I do have one point to make: I don't see many men reading books with half-naked women on the covers, it tends to be other women reading them - which is probably what led me to have doubts to begin with as I associated the cover with being more of a teen romance type book.

You know, at first I wasn't sure about DA's cover, but I knew your work well enough by then to figure that if she was portrayed that way, it was probably for a reason. And then it turned out she's a ballroom dancer (and yeah, ballroom dance IS sexy, that's part of it), and the cover was perfect and flawless and actually reflected both the dancer and the hunter. (Also the book was awesome. Verity rocks. I can't wait to read more of her.)

And that's the thing. I don't mind sex appeal on cover art - IF it actually fits the character. But like every sff novel with a woman on the cover seems to portray those women the same damn way, even if there is not a single scene in the novel where she actually dresses that way, and that drives me up the wall. I do judge books by their covers, and if all I'm seeing is omg sex sex sex impossible pose sex sex, I'm going to roll my eyes and pass, because yet another sexy cover = yet another book where even if a woman is kicking ass, her ultimate role is to look pretty. I want to love sff, but those covers make me feel so unwelcome.

But yeah. If they didn't focus so hard on MAKE EVERY WOMAN SEXY EVEN THE ONES WHO DON'T NEED TO BE HELL YEAH, and instead focused on actually having accurate cover art, then maybe these issues wouldn't come up. If a lady is kicking ass and keeping up sex appeal, by all means, the cover should reflect that, and the author certainly shouldn't be criticized for using accurate art. It's just to the point where there's so damn much of it that people mock or disregard the entire book without ever reading it, for the cover alone, and that's a damn shame. If fewer covers showed scantily clad women for no reason, then the ones that do might not get judged so hard.

(Side note: my favorite thing about the Midnight Blue Light Special cover, besides yay Sarah, is that if you take Verity's outfit there and put it next to her DA outfit, you really do get a very complete picture of her character. Gorgeous dancer and armed hunter. Super cool, and wonderfully done.)

...I rambled. Apparently it's what I do when bored in the hospital! >_>

Also it hit me that DA's cover is more work clothes than dance, but the point stands: her job is one that has her in a sexy appearance as well. Cover still accurate and full of win, even if my wording isn't necessarily so. :)

The problem with irony that is indistinguishable from sincerity is that people who aren't in on the irony may mistake it for sincerity.

Interesting posting. I've not read through all the comments, so I don't know if this is common... but when I saw the cover I rolled my eyes and said to my friend, "Yeah, more sexist garbage demeaning women. Not buying that," and then he explained how the character depicted was actually true to the story, and how, and why... and I was so intrigued I got the book.

Very glad I did so, too -- thank you for a delightfully entertaining read. I want to read more stories in that world!

>>I don't actually know very many women who go "Oh, oh, I gotta get me a book with a naked chick on the cover."<<

Well, those of us who write erotica do. Kinda silly to have nekkid people in the book without any on the cover. If I have my erotica collected someday, I'd like to have a smokin' cover for it.

On my books that are not primarily about sexy good times, I prefer accuracy, so the characters should mostly be wearing clothes. Or body armor. Or occasionally bodies.

My three actual covers to date have a woman in an ankle-length dress, a nebula, and flowers.

If you've got a character who actually wears miniskirts, sure, put that on the cover. If not, I prefer accuracy over a wrong cover that's just intended to sell copies.

It frustrates the hell out of me that, statistically speaking, covers with beautiful skinny and usually scantily-clad women sell more copies. Drove me nuts when I was running a women's spirituality magazine. You'd think our readers would've had more appreciation for diversity. The numbers said otherwise.

Do they though? Sell more copies?

We've got women in this thread saying that these covers make them not want to buy the book. We've got men in this thread saying that these covers make them not want to buy the book.

Worries over societal collapse have done more damage than societal collapse ever did.

I like sexy woman with a sword covers because they usually mean that the inside of the book is an urban fantasy. I like both Incryptd and Toby covers with the only exception of One Salt Sea where I thought Toby looked too dead for my comfort. I don't like the dead girl covers, they are too creepy.

i'm late [i'm always late] but i'll say this - my ONLY problem with the cover of DA was the profusion of PINK because I HATE PINK.

but it kicked SO MUCH ASS. not least because, looking at it - it looked like something a REAL PERSON [an ATHLETIC person, but real] would look like. if that follows. one of my big problems with comic books was always how women? don't BEND THAT WAY. i was a BALLET DANCER and couldn't get into those poses!

i picked up DA because i LOVELOVELOVE the Toby books [i have the Feed books, but haven't gotten around to reading them. but i only got them last week - i'm poor, i only get $600/month from SSDI, so - sorry :( ] and one of the things that drew me to Toby - beyond Fae that were, well, like FAE - was the covers. and i'd heard somewhere that you had more input into covers than most, so i figured if DA looked like tht, it was probably accurate.

and bless you, it WAS! i'd have wanted to be Verity when i grew up, if she'd existed back then!