Butt Glut
In a manifestation of what I noted in an earlier post; that if your romantic paranormal fantasy is filed on the romance shelf you get a hunk on the cover, on the fantasy shelf you get a babe on the cover in short:
Fantasy:
Romance:
Now there's a blog post on the Juno Books blog that's warning of yet another subclassing of paranormal cover art-- The Butt Cover. Apparently, if you have an ass-kicking heroine in a paranormal urban fantasy, we need to see some ass. Consider yourself warned.
![[Book Cover]](http://www.sff.net/people/saswann/graphics/covers_thumbnail/rust.jpg)
3 comments:
You realize now that tonight, instead of doing everything that I need to be doing, I'll be going through all my bookcases confirming this?
Always glad to be of service :)
But you know you wanted to organize your shelves by cover art, didn't you?
Having read the Briggs novels in question, I feel it should be pointed out that they really aren't "romantic fiction" at all. It takes the main character nearly three books before she even gets involved in anything resembling a romantic relationship. Mostly she just kicks ass, takes names, and occassionally strips naked...but usually only as a prelude to turning into a coyote. Sometimes she even skips the "strips naked" part and simply wriggles out of the clothing afterwards. And one of the few sexual encounters was actually a pretty brutal rape, though you aren't really even aware that it's happening even as you're reading through it.
But getting back to the observation at hand, it's pretty clear that the reason for this is that the straight-up romance novels are girl-trash, and the fantasy stuff usually skews more towards guy-trash. Cover art that appeals to the intended market helps sell more books.
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