One reason for the frustrating mis-matches between story details and cover in the mass market genre fiction industry is that cover art is much more about conveying "brand" and sub-genre information than intended to be illustration. The idea is to build a (somewhat arbitrary) symbolic vocabulary that answers the buyers questions of: What general setting does this story have? What general plot will it have? In the case of romance, what level of sexual content will it have? And sometimes down to the level of: what specific writing style can I expect.
The cover is intended to stop the eye of a casual bookstore browser and communicate to them "This book is going to be similar to those other books you liked that had covers with the same 'vocabulary' elements. Consider: the average romance buyer isn't looking for a cover that says something like "1480s Burgundy, lower nobility" but a cover that says something like "middle ages, no time-travel or supernatural elements, passionate courtship but probably little explicit sex". Heather Rose Jones > _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list h-costume@mail.indra.com http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
