Romance Novel Covers De- and Re-constructed

Romance novels are not exactly on my radar in general but recently I've taken an interest. A Nuyorican friend of mine tells me his mother's Harlem apartment is filled with Harlequin paperbacks. My own mother was a devotee of The Days of our Lives soap opera, and my early years recall the voiceover artist recounting how our lives are like sand in the hourglass. For better or worse I go to my grave with this audio artifact from pop culture engraved into my memory and a deep sense of the futility of time's passage.

When I received a lunch invite from Random House's newish digital-only romance imprints (not sure how I got on their radar), I threw it into my digital trash. But later I thought, doesn't Metapulp, my publishing company, have a romance novel in the line-up? So, I retrieved the invite and signed up. After all, I only had to leave my front door, take the uptown A train to Columbus Circle and walk a few blocks to the New York City headquarters of Random House to pull this off. Any hopes I had that the other romance novel lunchers might prove to be old spry men or other stereotype shattering folk who banged out romance novels under pen names, was dashed against the floor like china in a, well, in a soap opera. The ladies in attendance looked like they wrote romance novels. Bright green eyeshadow and matching skirt. Check!

I feasted on my quinoa salad while the Random House editorial staff introduced themselves and basically sold the imprint to the writers. I started googling on my phone the moment they said they also had a scifi imprint named Hydra. Really? That had not been on my radar either. Right away a flurry of negative posts came up regarding the disemboweling tactics of the imprints. (Basically, these imprints are trying to snag the potential breakout indies before they go viral and the contracts pretty much steal off with the copyrights. That's if you believe what you read in blogs anyway.)

Back to my believable blog! I returned my attention to the editors in front of me. A cover "artist" was discussing how she dug through stock photo images of muscly men and nearly naked women to composite the covers, and how even the author got to play a role in choosing the final cover. Want to wrap your stud in green plaid or red? You choose! Nevermind that no one seems to be collecting these covers that all look the same.

Well, let me get on with the deconstruction part of this blog. Aren't all stories just variations on a theme anyway? The romance novel cover is the same freaking cover over and over and over again but so are our stories, no matter what the language. There's a lot of sex and bananas, if you know what I mean, in Gravity's Rainbow.


It's all a signal to a potential reader that a hot dude and chick or some combo is waiting between the pages, waiting to be discovered by you. It seems a little bit of a hellish job, placing an abdomen on a book cover format day after day, though the Random House artist seemed to relish it. Here's some from me:

Horny yet? Let's get down into the deconstruction, which is a bit like adding a halftone dot effect to a stock abdominal image in order to boil it down to its dots, which we will now connect.

If the romance novel really is a latter day roman a clef, then escaping into sexual fantasy is the foundation of the modern desire to read and to write. And what is the sexual fantasy based upon but a hormonal urge to procreate? And why the hell does life want to go on living anyway? Let me use these all important questions to segue to Metapulp's new romantic title, to the titular point.





And here is our cover, sans abdomen:

Yes, I've cowritten a romantic novel with my buddy X.Y. Zero, who has a sense of humor whereas I do not (but I'm willing to hammer out the words as he dictates). It's about the hottest woman in the world who just got lucky. Yep! Metapulp had insisted on an abdominal cover, but we settled for Puerto Rican flag colors instead, striking an agreement between the heavy drinking parties. I ended up pitching the concept to Loveswept and Flirt, Random House's imprint, and their acquisitions editor Shauna said they could brand around me, (I mean us X.Y.), that they did indeed have flexibility that print does not have. I popped a bonbon into my mouth and took a pleasant walk along Central Park West, dreaming of the cover of my latest roman a clef. Why do we write? We write so that people who aren't getting laid can pretend they are, halftone dots and all.

Thanks for stopping by, yours, salem and X.Y. Zero. More at www.metapulp.com.

And by the way Random House and everyone else, everything here is copyrighted by me, salem.  So hands off!