They say you can't judge a book by its cover....

[conuly]

but I say that if you're going to complain that you had "no idea" a book was a romance instead of vanilla historical fiction with few or no romantic elements at all, then your argument is null and void if the cover shows a hot shirtless guy and an equally attractive woman with bare shoulders.

LOOK AT THE DAMN COVER.

****

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Comments

[jhetley]

Also, please *don't* judge an author by the cover. We often have no control over that at all . . .

[conuly]

True, very true, and I've spent time telling people that as well. Just because the romance novel has hot shirtless people on the cover, that doesn't mean that their clothes are period appropriate or they look like they do in the book, and it gets even more wrong with shirtless people in other genres.

(Still really irked about the time I read a book where we're told that the main character's clock radio has red numbers, and the picture on the cover had it with green numbers. More irked about that then about the time I found out the entire series was ghostwritten.)

[jhetley]

One current "hot button" item -- I know an author who is battling with a publisher over "whitewashing" a cover.

[conuly]

That's an enormous problem, I absolutely agree, and I hope the author - all the authors! - wins.

[kengr]

I have the first edition paperback of Steve Barnes' "Streetlethal". The protagonist is black. The guy on the cover is white.

Barnes (being black himself) was *not* happy. But the publisher trotted out the usual "it won't sell as well with a black guy on the cover".

Good news is that it sold well enough that the *next* printing had a new cover with the hero being black.

[conuly]

> Barnes (being black himself) was *not* happy. But the publisher trotted out the usual "it won't sell as well with a black guy on the cover".

And those people who won't buy books with black protagonists are just going to be ecstatic about the bait-and-switch, right?

[moon_custafer]

Presumably any publishers willing to pull a bait-and-switch are also willing to assume that once they’ve got the customer’s money, nothing else matters...


I’ve seen some older mystery novels in which the covers appeared to have been pulled from a file of Generic Mystery Covers, and featured scenes, characters and/or items that didn’t match to *anything* in the story at all.

[fred_mouse]

From listening to artists who do book covers, that last doesn't seem surprising at all -- there are times that the artist doesn't see more than a synopsis, and sometimes not even that amount of detail! Given that you are talking older books, it wouldn't surprise me if artists were commissioned to provide x number of covers per time period, and then the publishers would just grab the next one.

[nodrog]

And you can find collections of such “recycled” art online.  Sometimes there are minor cosmetic changes; often none whatever.

[kengr]

I suspect that they're hoping (correctly in many cases) that the folks who aren't rabid about it will get caught up in the action before they react to the protagonist's race.

[adrian_turtle]

Publishers of will sometimes slap seductive covers on non-romance novels, in hope of attracting more attention. Just for instance, Lois McMaster Bujold had published 3 books when I first started reading her work. One was a m/f romance and one was a m/m romance, but you'd never guess from the covers. The only cover that LOOKED like a romance was the other one (which really really wasn't.) Later editions had cover pictures that indicated genre more accurately...how many books have only one edition?

[greghousesgf]

very true, especially with science fiction. It's a very common practice with paperback sf publishers to just buy up weird looking art cheap and stick it on the cover without it having anything to do with the actual contents of the book. there's a very funny website called good show, sir that has a lot of examples of this. here's a link:

http://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/

[chelseagirl]

With my first novel -- a historical romance -- coming out this summer, I am already anticipating cover art with both fear and glee . . .

[conuly]

Fingers crossed.

[movingfinger]

On the retirement home for dogs, I am minded how many retirement homes for humans forbid pets, and how happy having some retired dogs around might make the residents.

[conuly]

Also: Homeless and/or domestic violence shelters.

[spikethemuffin]

It's one of the many stick-out moments for me in Being Mortal, an essential meditation on the role of agency in proper elder care.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I'm waiting for them to start using shirtless and bare shouldered models to move political science and economics books. After they practice there they can try the history books but they'll be judged on being in period.

[conuly]

YES.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

"Came for the eye candy, stayed for the mathematical regression."

Darcy approves this message. "They spent so much time staring at my tracts of land I started writing footnotes on my boobs."

[fred_mouse]

And now I have an image of her with formulae relevant to economics tattooed across her breasts, so that people can use that as cramming notes.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Tied together with "I'm the Supply, I make the Demands"?

[chanter1944]

... Would if I could? :P

[spikethemuffin]

Pfft. About time they acknowledged how much of history stems from fucking or the desire therefore, and this is an ace/ aro lesbian saying this.

[author_by_night]

I actually resisted CC for a long time despite being hard of hearing. I don't think I was thinking of it as being appropriation, but there was certainly a subconscious "well, I don't really deserve to use it" thing going on. I think it was when online videos started being more popular than text articles and posts that I started using CC, because I'd really want to watch but be in a place where that wasn't optional.

Also, it bothers me when videos about disabilities don't have CC. That seems incredibly hypocritical. Just saying.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

My mom's tv has CC as a switch on/off (used to be you needed an add on iirc) and boy are they atrociously inaccurate or misspelled to distraction.

[reynardo]

Admittedly, I got into Roberta Gellis after a shirtless-man-swooning-female romance cover on a novel that actually bears my name! It then turned out to be political historical fiction with just a nice layer of romance - and completely justifiable too. I have now devoured the whole series, most of which have similar covers and similar levels of cultural workings, political history and courtly machinations. Much more satisfying.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Must remember this rec!

I seem to recall it being a toss away used in entertainments that if a woman wanted to read Most Any Subject and not have men come out of the aether as reading police, it needed a Harlequinesque cover.

[conuly]

Noted.

Re: “Bilingual”

[nodrog]

Other than being a (presumably) unpaid advertisement for a California special-interest advocacy group, that article was completely useless.  You’d think he would at least answer his own question, but he was too busy shilling for them to bother.

What’s our problem?  The answer is simple:  We’re a former British colony.  The British bull-headed refusal to assimilate to their host countries (sneeringly referred to as “going native”) extended to language.  Like Latin in its day, and for the same reason, the equally convoluted mess called “English” was enforced at bayonet-point:  Speak Angrezi or shut up.

This carried straight across to our own version, the “Ugly American”:  “How much is that in real money?” &c.  World War II put us on top of the world, and we told the world where to stick their stupid languages.

“But what about Canada?” you ask.  One, not so many Canadians are blissfully multi-culti as we’re told, on either side of the fence.  If you don’t speak French you’ll have a problem in Quebec, and out westward the same is true in reverse.  Two, there were enough French Canadians from Day One to make it stick.  If the USA had annexed Mexico you might have seen the same result here.  As is, no.

This is why Esperanto, Mirad &c. have got nowhere:  There’s no market for such.  In India, a good third of Hindu vocabulary is English words, and English itself is the universal language across all those hundreds of tongues and dialects, because it’s value-neutral; no one can claim “cultural imperialism” as they would with, say, Hindu or Arabic.


[Oh, and the reason why the “Seal of Biliteracy” is so “under the radar” is because no one wants it but the thoroughly PC education-majors who put it together.  Immigrant parents are usually adamant that their children learn English, because they’ll need it to succeed!  How many times I’ve seen Hispanic families at Wal-Mart whose grade-school children act as interpreters!  Sure, it’s useful to speak several languages; any practical education is useful.  But it’s not an official requirement - yet.]

Re: “Bilingual”

[conuly]

If immigrant parents want their children to speak English, and those children already speak another language, then they perforce want those children to be bilingual. Certainly if nobody *wanted* the seal then they'd all know about it and campaign for it to be removed from diplomas post haste.