Adventures in the Wrong Cover
A major premise of this blog is that I humiliate myself so you don’t have to.
An ongoing problem I’ve had has been marketing The Price of Desire. The book that, according to whom you ask, is either brilliant or the worst drivel ever written. It’s certainly not…easy to categorize. When it first came out it sold well, but then we discovered that the average science fiction fan was really turned off by a) the romantic sub-plot and b) the inclusion of so many non-white people. POD being, you see, essentially the British Raj in space.
I’ve talked about the alienating problem of romance here and here. Some readers prove more resistant to romance than others, but the question of whether it “belongs” is universal. Which in turn begs the question, is it because romance itself is seen as so revolting or because readers balk at the necessary inclusion of a female protagonist? Most of the time, women are acceptable in this genre only if they’re a) pretending to be men, b) indistinguishable from men, or c) providing window dressing. The inclusion of Aria as both a) a protagonist and b) a woman, who is perfectly content to be a woman and who, indeed, expresses disgust with the patriarchy is…problematic to many.
Our first reboot was from spaceships to abs. And, in so doing, traded one problem for another. The first group thought there were too many abs in their spaceships; the second group thought there were too many spaceships in their abs. They wanted less, you know, world building and more relationship.
And more traditional relationship. Bringing me to the second, really entirely different axis of problem: while there is a strong romantic sub-plot, this is not a romance. At least, certainly not according to the accepted definition. It’s not one-dimensional. It’s not escapist. It’s not glorifying a the kind of simple, formulaic “relationship” that currently seems so fashionable.
People who want romance, as it turns out, do not want politics. Or despair. Or deep seated issues. Or a navigation of the in’s and out’s of polyamory. They want, well…abs.
What to do?
We settled on this.
Convey the gravitas of the series (and this is no light reading), and let the blurbs speak for themselves. As for where to shelve it, that’s another matter entirely! I think though, that in the end, if one can’t fit squarely into a genre then it’s best not to attempt to do so at all. And really, for the most parts, covers are–or usually seem to function as, at least–advertisements in that fashion. There are “romance covers” and “space opera covers” and so forth…none of which may be any good but I’m not sure that that’s really their function. Successful advertising is, after all, connecting the right audience with the right product. Whatever that product may be.
