The con has been invaded by a Roman legion and there’s now some sort of gladiatorial contest going on in the main program room. Meanwhile I have been talking publishing.
There is no dealers’ room as such here, but there is a bookseller – Barbara and Peter Clendon of Barbara’s Books have a table here. It is plain to see what sells in New Zealand – paranormal romance and urban fantasy, just like anywhere else. But Barbara is not happy. She says that publishers are increasingly putting historical romance and bodice ripper covers on ordinary fantasy books. As a result, fantasy novels that stood a good chance of selling to a male audience will now not sell to them at all.
It isn’t entirely clear why this should be so. Perhaps it is just a publishing fashion, or perhaps in hard times everyone is trying to position themselves in the most lucrative market around – romance. But whatever the reason, Barbara says it is hurting the sales of perfectly good fantasy books, and she’d like it to stop.
Comments anyone? (Assuming that you are not all at BEA and therefore not reading blogs.)
While I understand the instinct to sell into the Romance novel market – But imagine Flinx & Pip with a bodice ripper cover – Gak.
I’d love to hear from a publisher as to what the reasoning is…
Chasing trends vs. Setting them.
And exactly what is wrong with a tall man with long hair and a sword on the cover? Should appeal to all genders and sexes.
Kathryn:
That’s not the sort of thing that Barbara is complaining about. No men, no swords. The covers in question show things like a sad-looking medieval woman sewing, or belly dancer having her skimpy costume removed by anonymous male hands.
Lou:
That’s what I told her.
Can’t say I have noticed this about Oz covers, at least not the Voyager ones. They look pretty much as they have always done – heavy on the fantasy scenery.
I grew up reading SF paperbacks with subdued, semi-abstract cover art by the likes of the Dillons or Richard Powers, and I find the whole trend towards blaring, hyper-realistic Frazetta-style action scenes, with embossing and huge glaring title lettering, on SF and fantasy alike, to be highly distasteful to my personal preferences. To discuss a trend towards bodice-ripper illos in that context reads to me like complaining that this part of the garbage heap smells worse than that part of the garbage heap.
Example in point: the cover of Chaz Brenchley’s Bridge of Dreams (go to the series web site and scroll down for sulky girl in harem – factually justifiable but misrepresenting the tone of the book).
I know they do this because it’s believed to sell books: is there any evidence that it works?
Yep–I see this all too often in the stuff that comes in for review. It’s really harming some books. A mild example: the cover of Felix Gilman’s first novel. Which was almost like romance pirate fare. But it gets much much worse than that. Beyond that, it’s BORING. It’s the same thing over and over: scantily-clad, sword/gun/knife-wielding woman/man, almost always ridiculously proportioned.