What's Up with Contemporary Romance Book Covers?
Rant time
I know you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but let’s be real, everyone does. Or at least they’re more likely to pick up a book because of its cover. So why do modern-day romance books—one of the most popular genres—not have the best covers right now?
What am I talking about exactly? Behold! some examples:
(No offense meant to the cover artists; I’m sure they did their best.)
I dunno what’s up with the aqua backgrounds. Let’s continue.
Do you see what I mean? But wait, there’s more:
I’ll admit that I hate all of Emily Henry’s covers. I also don’t like her books. Look at this:
It’s an eyesore.
Anyway, all those books look the same and their sameness is unfortunate because they chose to pick a bad style to perpetuate.
Personally, I hate how blocky and texture-less everything is. I hate the harsh, monochrome colors and the faces that have little to no humanity. It’s like the absolute minimum was done to make semi-real shapes; these covers have no spark or soul. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were all AI generated/assisted.
Why is this the popular style? Who thought it was a good idea? Do readers really like these covers? Seriously, do you like any of those covers?
I know I would be very angry if a book I wrote got a cover like any of those.
But perhaps this is just what it means to be a romance cover. I’ve never been impressed with romance covers. No matter if they’re contemporary, Regency, or some other historical time, they don’t do anything for me. It’s strange because women are the biggest buyers of romance books and women like pretty things. At least, I thought we did.
So what do you think? Am I crazy? Or do these covers kinda suck?
And one more for the road:
I don’t know what’s worse: flat cartoons or Shirtless Model No. 8,742.
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Not that I read romance, but think they’re cute. They’re probably perfect for the target demographic, which I imagine is women who grew up reading stuff like The Princess Diaries.
Something else that probably plays into this is that a lot of the trends for contemporary romance are heavily fan-fic driven. Ali Hazelwood got her start writing Reylo (Rey + Kylo Ren) fanfic. All the hockey romances that are becoming a thing? Hockey fanfic was a huge trend a couple of years ago. They’re wanting to highlight the bright, cutesy, wish-fulfillment aspect of it.
Yeah, these have been taking over more and more of the displays at my local library...
I suppose a good thing I can say about them is that they immediately telegraph the plot setup to a casual browser. They might not literally be subtitled "contemporary rivals to lovers nurse/athlete romance at a ski resort", but that's what you get from this level of cover illustration. My guess is it's very good at driving online/ebook sales on impulse, or getting a reader to look something up after spotting the cover, without requiring them to click through further and read the blurb. As a 100% digital writer right now, I get it and think it's clever (if that's really why it works). As somebody just there to pick up the kids' books, I wonder how you'd ever know if you had read that one already.