Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

my recommendation would be to hire an actual designer and to stop letting their five year come up with them. mehehe.

as a designer myself it pains me to no end when I see some of those covers, especially the new wave that looks more like cheap porn covers.

whoever said pictures where better than paintings?! not if they are used and abused the way they are in the romance industry lol

Uh… pretty much EVERYTHING by Loretta Chase has bad covers.

And she writes good stories, too, goldurnit!

Ditto on Loretta Chase--what were they THINKING with the cover of LORD PERFECT?

A couple others, off the top of my head:

CELTIC FIRE, by Joy Nash

DEDICATION, by Janet Mullany (NSM an offputting cover as a really bland one that doesn’t fit the contents at all)

Interesting question - I’d also be hip to know about books with AMAZING covers, but seriously bad in between.

I confess, I’ve bought books because they had fabulous covers, then discovered the book fell way short.

True nirvana is finding a great book with a great cover.

I’m not a fan of Eloisa James’ covers (although they’re not heinous, particularly because several of them are step-backs with rather uninspired paintings of houses and landscape), but the books are good.

Well, I can’t recall the book or the author, but there was a Civil War brunette on the cover of a Regency redhead story.

Ok, they fixed the cover in the newer reprints of the book but FLOWERS FROM THE STORM had an awesome one in the older versions. :-)

The cover cracks me up. It’s sort of a romance novel cover cliche to have Fabio on the cover with his shirt somehow unbuttoned and tucked in at the same time, and usually, it has nothing to do with the content of the book. What makes me laugh is that in this case, there actually IS a scene in the book where the hero is wandering around outside in his shirt, unbuttoned and tucked in, clutching a bouquet of wildflowers. So, aside from his stupid grin, the cover is actually pretty accurate. Whodathunk?

I read this book on the recommendation of some people in a writing group I’m in who said they loved it but it was on their never-read-again list because it was just so intense. It was definitely intense. It had a lot to do with religion, and, I think, even more to do with the choice between your background and family and the man you love. I think that theme strikes home with a lot of people, especially women, because it’s something a lot of us have had to deal with: Marry the man your family wants you to marry, or marry the man you love. Even in modern times, it’s a powerful question.

I really enjoyed the story and the characterizations, and might even be convinced to read it again someday. I also liked the symbolism. There were several great symbolic moments, the “flowers from the storm” scene being one. I love it when authors, particularly romance authors, do that sort of thing. It means they trust me (the reader) enough to include it, and not spell everything out. Good stuff.

Very enjoyable read!

ETA: I remembered another one.
Ginger Hanson’s “Ransom’s Bride.”
I don’t recall much other than the cover art features a girl in a shocking pink glorified nightgown sans corset but clearly thinks this is daywear. She’s also got reddish-brown curly hair, while the heroine of the novel behind the cover is part Cherokee and has dark skin and long black hair that then gets chopped off a few chapters in to make her look like a boy. In either case, it was random and confusing.
This redhead needs to go chill on the cover of the other book, and maybe we could get the brunette over here because it’s closer to black hair and it actually is post-Civil War in Ransom’s Bride.

Candice Hern gets my vote for worst covers slapped onto fabulous books. Her AVON covers just plain SUCKED. They were clinches, the art itself is badly rendered, the costumes are WRONG, the men all have mullets. Bad Bad Bad:

Once a Gentleman

Her Scandalous Affair

Thank god NAL is taking better care of her!

Jenny Crusie had an interesting discussion of when bad covers happen to good authors on her blog…

The Anne Stuarts already mentioned were good.  She’s the queen of dark dangerous heroes who actually are dark and dangerous…

Thanks for fixing my ugly links!

I know you hate the Kinsale Fabio covers, but Laura loves them because they sold so tremendously well.  FFTS was the first romance cover to ever have just the hero on it (her idea, but she was thinking silhouette, not Fabio), and it hit the NYT bestseller list because of it.  I couldn’t call it a bad cover if it sold like crazy…

Susan Squires’ earthy covers were...dorky.  And I’ve hated almost all of Loretta Chase’s, too.  Judith Ivory’s have been weird and bland or dorky and clenchy wih only a few exceptions.

I can’t agree enough about Flowers from the Storm.  I debated about buying it for months because I hated the cover so much...even though I loved Kinsale.

Finally succumbed and loved the book, but hid the cover while reading!

Second nomination would be for a Silhouette called “Get Lucky”.  I think it was by Suzanne Brockmann.  It was one of a series of Navy Seal books—the hero in this one was supposed to be drop dead gorgeous. 

So they put a picture of a weird, pudgy guy in dress whites on the cover. 

Viewable on Amazon.

Suz Brockmann’s Get Lucky is justly famous.  Suz calls it the Pillsbury Doughboy cover and will actually send you a yellow smiley-face sticker to stick over his face if you send her an explanation and a SASE.  She was soooo mad!

I have to say that Laura Kinsale’s Seize the Fire cover that Candy called pink-laced ass-rape drew me in before I knew who she was.  I loved it and read the book because of it, thank God.  So, it takes all kinds.

I kinda like the lone male covers, truth be told.  Please don’t throw me from the Bitchery midsts.  I don’t know what I’d do with myself.e

I can’t agree enough about Flowers from the Storm.  I debated about buying it for months because I hated the cover so much...even though I loved Kinsale.

Actually, I would put the Bare-chested Beckoning Fabio (with the lovely posies!) cover from “Flowers From the Storm” into the “So Bad That It’s Good” category.  It has incredible camp appeal, IMO.  I saw it at my local UBS and *had to have it*, even though I already own a copy of FFTS with a more subdued and dignified cover (the one with the house and tree beneath a stormy sky.) But I can relate to the need to hide the cover when reading the book in public.  My Fabio version is for home reading only.

Is it just me of does the dork on Get Lucky look a lot like the sweet underling from that TV show Jag?

Ok, while checking out just how awful Get Lucky is I found a list of DeSalvo covers that someone loves:  HERE

Am I the only woman in the world that just doesn’t GROK this guy?

Ooooooooooo, I have mastered the HTML link. Bow bitches. BOW!

Ok, I was having an Invader Zim moment there . . . but I’m better now. I swear.

>(I also think Kinsale may be selling herself short on the role her storytelling ability played in the book’s bestselling status.)

Well, considering that that book sold several TIMES what any of her previous ones did, I think she’s right to give the art dept. its credit.  *g* Before then, she’d been going up steadily, but the kind of leap that book made was much greater.

However, her writing KEPT her on the lists after the Fabio-alone newness wore off on her her later covers.

I came to romance after the craze had worn off.  I, too, hate the cover.  But she loves it, still.

I don’t like DeSalvo.  He looks more like a greasy mobster cliche than a romance hero to me.

My favorite “worst covers for best books” are for Janis Reams Hudson’s Apache series, which features six novels about the same family. The covers are 98% ridiculous and embarrassing. 

First up: Travis and Daniella, the founders of this family. Fat Fabio! Also note the dayglow pink eyeshadow, cheap artfair jewelry, and the Heartfire logo (in case the picture didn’t tell you it was a romance). Apache Magic

Next up is Travis’s son, Matt, and his lady love, Angela. Unspeakably bad. Apache Promise

Third in the series is the rarest of all storylines: Angela from Book #2 is killed in the first few pages, so Matt takes up with Serena, his half-Apache, non-related step sister and gets to extra extra prove his manhood by deflowering a second virgin! Sounds EWWWW, I know, but it is one of the best I’ve ever read. The artist was remarkably consistent in rendering Matt so very mulletish and felt obligated to carry on the theme of terrible jewelry. Apache Temptation

Number four is little sister Jesse who, poor thing, married a man whose forearm-to-GIGANTIC-head proportions must be considered a birth defect. Apache Legacy

The fifth book is a fantastic cover – really. However, it irks me because the hero is a pasty whiteboy doctor and the heroine is a fullblood Apache – no half-breed here. I think the publishers shirked from having a white man with a truly dark-skinned woman on the cover. Is that what it takes to get something veering gently toward tasteful? Apache Heartsong

And lastly, some proper man tittie tinted by the glow of sunset and purple taffeta (although it’s obvious Hudson got better artists as the series progressed). Apache Flame

Although, in light of seeing Get Lucky - that just turned my stomach!

Ahh, the Windflower - I freakin’ LOVED that book. I’ll throw another Brockmann in - the original cover for Taylor’s Temptation (one of the Silhouettes) is pretty bad, and the freaky angular people who used to pose on Johanna Lindsey’s books tainted some pretty decent books.

“Am I the only woman in the world that just doesn’t GROK this guy?”

Not in the least.  He’s boring to look at, IMO. 

Then again, the only romance where I’ve ever taken breaks from reading to stare at the hot guy on the cover was Jo Beverley’s A Most Unsuitable Man. None of the standard cover models do anything for me.

Total classic circa 1980:  Jennifer Wilde’s Love’s Tender Fury, Love Me Marietta, and When Love Commands.  Majorly good stuff, especially for the time.

I could be recalling a rumour, but I think Jennifer Wilde was a pseudonym for a guy.

I can’t believe no one has mentioned the fantastically bad covers on Emma Holly’s regency romances, Beyond Seduction and Beyond Innocence.

Also, the big brain fart in the art dept. on Michelle(Albert)Jerott’s book, All Night Long. The hero is a farmer named Magnusson with red hair, and they put a black haired guy in a tux(see a farmer in a tux much?)on the cover.

Yep, Jennifer Wilde was a dude. And I thought I was the only one who liked Once More Miranda, lol.

At least some of these that we’re talking about are old covers...But Lord Perfect? There’s just no excuse. I was afraid his grease was going to come off on my hand. And put that pit down!

Here I am trying to convince non-romance readers of how great some books are - like Lord Perfect, which I just read and reviewed - and they cannot forgive the god-awful cover.  It’s 2006 - c’mon people!  Some of us have public transportation and offices to brave with these things!!

I have to chime in simply because it chaffs my butt so much. 

Whose kitten did Loretta Chase kill to get stuck with such godawful covers?  The last one, Captives of the Night has an incredible hero/villain and yet the coverboy looks like a gay art director’s idea of “What Women Want"--the brush cut hair, the scruffy facial hair...Euuuuwww!

Someone who’s been getting good covers, in my opinion, is Mary Balogh.  And Amanda Quick’s doing well too.

A couple that come to mind for me (and I know you snarked about them) were Lord of the Storm and Skypirate by Justine Dare.  I loved the insides but uuuggghhh are the covers bad!!!

As usual one man’s (bitches) trash is anothers treasure, cause when I see that Most Unsuitable Man cover I just think Hercules.

Candy,

Windflower is one of my all time favorites.  What happend to M/M Curtis?  Gone or writing under a different name?

Suzanne Brockman - generally boring covers for generally enjoyable reads,

Almost passed up Gail Dayton books because the covers appeared sagaish.

Susan Kearney - eye catching covers on boring.

Wouldn’t have read Carol Berg without first noticing the covers.

Laural K. Hamilton - an author who’s new works have eye catching covers with...polarizing stories.

>> Then again, the only romance where I’ve ever taken breaks from reading to stare at the hot guy on the cover was Jo Beverley’s A Most Unsuitable Man. None of the standard cover models do anything for me. <<

I agree with that assessment.  “A Most Unsuitable Man” has one of the few male romance cover models that has ever caught my eye in a positive way. 

But my absolute *favorite* cover model is the guy on the stepback of my copy of Laura Kinsale’s “The Dream Hunter”.  *SIGH* OK, so he needs a shave and has a strategically placed pistol, but he’s actually fully clothed and *looks* like an aristocrat.  I like his horse too.

“Is it just me of does the dork on Get Lucky look a lot like the sweet underling from that TV show Jag?”

actually, to me he looks exactly like Costello when some femme fatale was stroking his face before growing fangs… he’s even got his hands all twisted up like him! lol i can just hear him saying “mmm hmmmmmm” while twisting side to side. i’m cracking myself up here.

(did i mention i love abbot & costello? except for Africa Screams *shudder*. but i digress.)

i sure do wish Pino was still doing covers. or is he? i love his old Amanda Quick art. he has a website at http://www.pinoart.com/showcase.htm & i’d buy “The Professor”, if i could afford it. he reminds me of Liam Neeson; not my typical hottie, but he’s got Wessonality.

On the cover of Mary Jo Putney’s “The Spiral Path,” the hero and heroine are actually levitating on the grass.

I don’t know where 9 out of 10 romance publishers are finding their blind-ass cover artists, but kudos to them for not actually wasting money on such trivialities.

Going over to the romantic SF side of the genre, Lois McMaster Bujold had some incredible bad luck with covers on the early Vorkosigan series books. Even worse, she’s had international bad luck with her covers. Some of the German ones...well, ack.

I hate romance covers almost universally. I wouldn’t read them for years because I thought they’d be crap. I like covers like Jenny Crusie’s with little dogs and cup cakes and erotic books with artfull black and white body parts. Lord Perfect was just an embarrassment on a great book.

I can’t believe no one’s touched the ‘Pull My Finger’ Viking on the cover of Sandra Hill’s The Bewitched Viking (Umm...unlike Tonda, I don’t have a freakin’ clue how to put in HTML links, but you can see the cover here: http://www.ereader.com/files/products/000/00/51/61/cover/large.jpg

Anyways, fun little book, really really laughable cover.

You asked me which Edith Layton should you read? I think Love in Disguise is the first I read, and I promptly went in search of her back list. Plus the bonus for this title--the cover is super cheesy.

Lady of Spirit, a trad regency, is also on my keeper shelf.

“the only romance where I’ve ever taken breaks from reading to stare at the hot guy on the cover was Jo Beverley’s A Most Unsuitable Man”

Wow. Just, Wow.

Robin Schone’s first cover on A Lady’s Tutor was very good, IMHO. Suggestive, but not a lot of bare skin. That cover made me buy the book without even looking inside first. The reissue is public transportation safe, but not nearly as sexy…

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0821769820/ref=ase_artandlies-20/002-5681523-4145657?s=books&v=glance&n=283155&tagActionCode=artandlies-20

Julia Quinn’s “The Duke and I” ... ok, the front cover is fine.  It’s a bit minimalist, with flowers and a placecard?  Invitation?  It works for the book.

But turn to the back cover, and you get this nightmare:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-images/0380800829/ref=cm_ciu_pdp_images_0/002-0654894-6507212?%5Fencoding=UTF8&s=books&index=0#gallery

You’ve got the male cover model with mantitty, uneven washboard abs, and a lack of proportion not seen since “The Incredible Hulk.” Hello.  Top-heavy much?

Then the woman is wearing a gown in a shade of pink only found on top of a lox & bagel sandwich.  And… style?  Is it the offspring of a US Civil War era southern bell dress and a Mexican peasant dress?  Lets not even mention how it seems to be about to fall off her impossibly long torso. 

Violet Bridgerton would never let her daughter out of the house in that.

Hands down the winner is Hope’s Captive by Kate Lyon.  Seriously.  The hero is a WHITE army major and the cover model is wearing buckskin for cripes sake.  Also, he has bigger titties than the female cover model does.

Great, great book.  Gave me a small glimmer of hope that the historical romance genre hasn’t gone to hell....

Julia Quinn’s “The Duke and I” ... ok, the front cover is fine.  It’s a bit minimalist, with flowers and a placecard?  Invitation?  It works for the book.

But turn to the back cover, and you get this nightmare:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-images/0380800829/ref=cm_ciu_pdp_images_0/002-0654894-6507212?%5Fencoding=UTF8&s=books&index=0#gallery

You’ve got the male cover model with mantitty, uneven washboard abs, and a lack of proportion not seen since “The Incredible Hulk.” Hello.  Top-heavy much?

And, WTF, his left man-titty is completely missing! I agree with this being a great book. I loved it, too.

Sorry, I thought Karen’s comments would be automatically put in quotes. My comments are only the bottom paragraph.

Robin Schone’s first cover on A Lady’s Tutor was very good,

Expect for the fact that the corset is on backwards! I laugh my ass off everytime I see this book.

So close, and yet . . . so far.

Hey, Bella, thanks for reminding me of how much I liked those Pino covers on the old Amanda Quicks.  The step-backs were the right combination of tasteful front cover and nice art inside.

I confess, I like the cover for Shannon Drake’s Bride of the Wind.  ::hangs head in shame::  It’s Fabio, all man-tittylicious and hair-blowy, and the woman is in a dress that probably makes Tonda cry, and the pose is more than a little suggestive of bondage, but…

Sometimes the sum of something is more than the parts.

(Huh. The same art was reused on the cover of Jude Deveraux’s La Heredera, which is the Spanish edition of something I can’t identify as I don’t speak any Spanish beyond “Yo no habla Espanol.”

---------
Then there’s a book that has the most unintentionally hilarious cover, and I cannot remember the title… It was an Avon book from the mid-90s, a Western historical. The woman is sitting with her back to the reader, looking over her shoulder at us, and looking pissed off. The dress is unzipped (zipper!). The guy, with long flowing locks and massive, tanned mantitty is gazing down at her as if he’s never seen boobs before.

Her dress is yellow. The primary colors on the cover are yellow and red. Can anyone identify this?

--E

“Heredera” means heiress.  And for a Fabio cover, that one is (shhhhh) kinda hot.  At least she’s looking him straight in the eye, refusing to fall asleep in the midst of his bondage armhold like some cover ladies are prone to do.  Here’s the link.

So maybe that’s a different topic altogether: cheesy, cliched, horrible covers that - for some reason - you like anyway :)

lovelysalome
Duchess Huntinne-Muffine

I find that I don’t like the covers of most of the Black Lace books.  Some of the them are just plain weird. 

The women on the cover of Emma Holly’s Menage with the bowl cut bangs and playtex bra would have prevented me had I not read a review about it.

Also bad any DiSalvo cover. It almost ruins the stories for me.

OK, admittedly I haven’t read this one, but could someone please tell me what the hell is up with the cover of White Vengeance? Amazon tried to sell it to me when I clicked on the link for Hope’s Captive. Not only is the cover itself just a whole WORLD of wrong, but the title is just… festive. My first thought when I read it was “Ahh, obviously members of the Klu Klux Klan enjoy a bodice ripper now and then!”

The guy on the cover seriously looks like a reject from an Olivia Newton John video. And which member of the Corleone family did they piss off enough to have that poor horse beheaded and stuck up in the sky like that? Poor horsie… it’s always the innocent who suffer. No, I take that back, because I’m not very innocent and this cover is seriously making me suffer.

Blimey, Sanachan. Thank you so much for sharing that lovely image of a traditional meeting between a woman of the Authentic Native American Goh-Goh-Boutte tribe and her spiritual adviser of the Loyn-Klahth clan. So tasteful. Especially those burning flames behind the title. Nice reviews, too.

Okay, I’m going to do this in reverse and mention a book I didn’t like with a cover I did (and FWIW, count me as one of the crazies who loved The Windflower AND its original cover).

Book I didn’t like:  Adele Ashworth’s Duke of Scandal http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0060528419.01._SS500_SCLZZZZZZZ_V54591000_.jpg

Cover worth checking out:  on the cover there is a document that is actually an article from the New York Daily News on the war in Iraq:  http://www.nydailynews.com/news/wn_report/v-pfriendly/story/359230p-306075c.html

Has anyone ever seen anything like this before?  Or was the art department at Avon making a little war commentary?

Angie, I agree, Emma Holly is a great writer. Most of her covers are pretty good but that one kind of sits out odd amongst the rest and just did not do the book justice.

DeSalvo--what is it with DeSalvo? He looks so damned bored most of the time. And when he smiles? It reminds me of the Addam’s Family Values movie where Wednesday finally smiles at camp (after being suppossedly brainwashed by Disney movies) and everyone backs away, frightened. There’s this hint of craziness there that makes you wonder if maybe he performs weird experiments on small animals.

Aww, Edith Layton gave the Bitches a shout out over on her new group blog http://www.wordwenches.com where they’re discussing covers too.

Well well well! I do think that the bridgerton series seem to be cursed with weird covers. Take this:http://g-images.amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/3a/8d/866cd250fca0c189813f5010.L.jpg
Apparently, the Hero is a stick figure with weird hulking bigness on top and none on the bottom. The heroine is wearing a non-regency dress, and apparently is related to rudolph. she really needs to get some of the lotion tissues, instead of using the scratchy kind. Also, Arabella by Georgette Heyer is a great book, but the cover of the seventies is horrible. I think the heroine has reached the world record for eye makeup worn at one time. And her pink dress is blinding. It looks like a flamingo.