The cover for Venus in Blue Jeans is up, and I’m so excited I can hardly type! It’s one thing to think about what your cover might look like. It’s something else to actually know. Having seen the process for the cover creation (and having done some research to let the artist know what I wanted), I’ve developed much more definite opinions about covers than I used to have.

Take the way the characters are shown, for example. One of the things that makes most romance covers stand out from non-romances is the subject matter. Romance covers almost always feature people rather than, say, a bleak winter landscape (which seems to be a staple of literary fiction). In most cases the people bear at least a nodding resemblance to the descriptions in the book (although not always—historical covers from the nineties seemed more interested in having the heroine look like a smoldering siren than in having her look like anything the author described) . If the cover really works, you can imagine the people in the picture as the hero and heroine, but there are times when, although the people in the picture appear to be the same type as the characters, they don’t quite work. The hero’s jaw is too square or the heroine looks vapid or the dress isn’t quite the kind of thing the heroine would wear (one best-selling historical features a heroine who spends most of her time in male clothes but who shows up on the cover in an elaborate gown that appears to have been recently disarranged by the hero).

The features that invariably attract me to covers, though, are faces. There’s a tendency now to go with torsos on some romance covers, particularly erotica. The bodies are usually beautiful—spectacularly muscular men and amazingly voluptuous women. But without a face, they’re just bodies. It’s easy to poke fun at the way romance heroes usually show up without a shirt no matter what the occasion, but it’s the combination of bare chest and seductive face that attracts, not the chest alone.

I love my Venus cover because of Docia’s face. Sure she’s got a great body—that almost goes without saying (although Docia herself has a lot of doubts). But the face, the smile, the tilt of the head are the things that really make this cover work. Check it out! I hope you’ll like it as much as I do.