Yes, it appears that romance readers really do give lots of their attention to romance novel covers — even now with digital only releases, the cover remains one of the most important pieces of the marketing puzzle.

So, when I was invited to speak at the Monmouth Museum in NJ tonight and they have an exhibit featuring local artist’ James Avati’s classic cover art from the 50s and 60s, I thought I would talk about romance novel covers. In researching for the presentation, I found some really old covers, some new ones, some good ones and some. . . not-so-good (or ones that don’t hit their mark).

Now let’s step in the time machine and go back, way back to some early romance novel covers –

Ahhhh – The Flame and The Flower by Kathleen Woodiwiss — considered the FIRST modern romance novel by most and it was quite hot for its time. The cover includes both imagery and people but it’s not too suggestive – though the tagline under Kathleen’s name is rather provocative!

This Johanna Lindsey title (one of my favorites) is actually Fabio’s first romance cover! Featuring both the classic clinch and the classic heaving bosoms, it is a classic! (BTW – I’ve been told that the heaving bosom covers were originally designed to. . ahem. . . tempt the all-male sales forces who sold these to all-male distributors!! Could it be true?)

And who could forget these step-backs of Fabio? This first one was quite scandalous and a sign that covers were finally being designed to appeal to the true romance reader – the women! Did you get any of these?

Man of My Dreams?           Surrender My Love?               The Conqueror?

Moving forward, we see that women also like men in uniforms from these more recent covers — all kinds of uniforms!

Of course the main focus of the cover is to tell the reader about the type of story they will get — to set up an expectation for readers. These recent covers give some indication of their type and tone, don’t you think?

Urban Fantasy? Paranormal Romance? Funny Contemporary? And of course what discussion of romance covers would be complete without a big-sword-carrying-Highland-warrior cover, right?

Some covers have errors or don’t really hit their target audience or tone. My favorite is the famous Christina Dodd cover. I’d just read the book when I met her for the first time at the first RT convention I attended — while ‘just’ a reader. She was on the elevator carrying a very-large version of the cover under her arm. Since there was nothing she could do about it — she used it as a promotional tool and it worked. As Suzanne Brockmann did when her buffest, sexiest hero’s book showed him looking like the Pillsbury dough boy! Take a look at both of them:

So – what is your favorite type of cover? Do you like clinches, half-naked men, cartoon-characters or stepbacks? Do you expect the cover to match the story? What is wrong with the Christina Dodd cover anyway? Post a comment and I’ll choose two people to get a signed book and a wee Disney souvenir. (And yes, I am still waaaay behind in sending out prizes but you will get them! LOL!)

   Terri is recuperating from her vacation to Disney World and working hard on her requested revisions so she can move onto the next project! After surviving tropical heat and showers, she is now also recovering from her fit of the vapors at the earthquake that shook her in southern NJ yesterday. It’s always an exciting day in south Jersey – LOL! Visit her website for more info about Terri and her books and upcoming events!

It’s back to school time again and I’m not ready for it. It could be because this time my daughter is starting her second year of college and I know I shouldn’t be as concerned for her because she’s already got one successful year under her belt, but I am. I’m worried that she’ll think she’s got college all figured out and start making stupid mistakes.
I worry about this because I can vividly recall being 19 and know the kind of dumb things that I did. I have always wanted better for my kids and to be honest I still do, but I especially want more for her at this age. I think I look back on my cusp of being an adult and see all the avenues I didn’t take. I’m not someone who looks back on the past with regrets but I think I could have chosen an easier path and that’s what I truly want for her.
Plus I’ve moved and this year I will be five hours ahead of her instead of three hours behind her. I was living in California and now I’m in England…she goes to school in New York. I was lamenting to her, how will I know you are back in your dorm safely? I made her call and talk to me any time she was walking back to her dorm and she said I will text you and I will be fine.
And she will be. I just have to trust her to make all the right decisions even in the midst of those dumb mistakes that are bound to happen at her age.
The thing that I remember most about that age was that I thought I was more mature than everyone else my age and that my parents just didn’t get it. Its so sobering to see my daughter do the eye roll thing that I know I did to my mom when she was trying to give me advice at the same age. I warned her she will become me as I am slowly becoming my mom but she doesn’t believe it.

What about you? Did you know it all when you were an “adult” and maybe make a few mistakes? Or did you really know it all? If so, don’t tell me I don’t want to think I was the only one who didn’t have a clue!

Happy Reading!
Kathy

Corinne Bridges, you’ve won a signed copy of Fools Rush In! Send me your snail mail addy and I’ll pop a book in the mail to you. k.higgins@snet.net

Thanks to everyone for sharing their stories!

I love being wrong. No, I do. I mean sure, I love being right much, much more, but there’s such a relief in being wrong sometimes. Why? Because it means you don’t have to be perfect. You can screw up and live to fight another day. And more often than not, people will forgive you for not being perfect, and in fact, like you even more,

Recently, Dearest Son, who is going into seventh grade, spoke to me in an impudent manner (gasp!). I chastised him for it and suspended dessert for the rest of the summer. And then, you know, I realized that was pretty dopey. Summer had weeks left to it. In our dessert-addicted family, it was a pretty harsh punishment for anything less than, oh…first degree breaking and entering, let’s say. So, after a few hours in which he contemplated his dreary, sugar-free future, I said, “Look. I overreacted. I’m sorry. The punishment didn’t fit the crime. I just didn’t like you talking to me that way, but if you do a few extra chores today, we’ll call it even.”

“Yeah, that was really over-the-top,” he said. “You were pretty crazed.”

“Stop,” I advised. “The great and powerful Oz is giving you a reprieve. The correct answer is ‘Thank you.’”

“Thank you,” he said, and I bought him a cannoli, and all was right with the world.

In My One and Only, Nick eventually says the three words Harper’s been longing to hear. “You were right.” Yep. The three sexiest words in the English language. Forget I love you.  You were right…that takes real guts.

But it’s true, isn’t it? Last week, McIrish, my sainted husband, dropped a can of paint. Did he fall off the ladder, breaking a bone? No. Did the paint slop against our house? No. Did it do any permanent damage to anything, anywhere? Nope. Yet he was cussing like cat on fire. “Excuse me,” I said. “I didn’t complain this much when I fell through the porch.” (Please see another blog on my recent injury and how it was all McIrish’s fault, as well as my reward for being a saint).

“You have a point,” he grumbled. I floated on air for the rest of the day.

In a lot of romances, one character is wrong, and the other one is right, and the book is basically about him (oops! Well, yes, it’s usually the man, isn’t it?) learning to accept his wrongness and see that the heroine was in fact RIGHT ALL ALONG and why did it take him 400 pages to figure this out? Hello! Thank you for seeing things my way, and as reward, we can now have some smokin’ alone time, if you know what I’m saying.

But even more, I love the slow, painful realization that maybe both of them were wrong. That yeah, he does keep people at arm’s length, and sure, it’s true, she tries to please everyone, even when it goes against what she knows is right.

It’s hard to be wrong. You feel dumb. That’s not a good feeling. Doing things differently is hard. Accepting facts can be painful. Acknowledging error is akin to birthing a 10 pound baby sans epidural.

But oh, the relief of not having to have all the answers, of not being the repository of right and true…the sweetness of being able to screw up.

So I think it’s give-away time, don’t you? Tell me about a time when you screwed up and admitted it, and I’ll give one of you a beautiful signed copy of the newly reissued Fools Rush In.

Jessica is the winner of Fins are Forever and Sweet Venom both by Tera Lynn Childs! Jessica, email me at shana@shanagalen.com with your address, and I’ll send you both books as soon as Sweet Venom is released (September 6).

This week, If The Ring Fits, will hit the shelves. I first introduced Mary Karen and Travis in The Doctor’s Baby (April 2010). He was the best friend of the hero in that book. She was the hero’s sister. I had no plans to give them a book of their own, but I liked them and included them in subsequent books in the RX for Love mini-series (In Love With John Doe and The Christmas Proposition). Finally, finally, finally Mary Karen and Travis get to move to center stage and get their own HEA.

Even though it’s takes some work for me to keep track of everyone (and their children!) I love to have characters return, to know their marriage is still strong, to see what kind of advice they will give the other characters.

As a reader, I also like continuing characters. Recently, I recently read an old book by Julie Quinn with Daphne Bridgerton. I loved it and was thrilled to realize there were a bunch of other books about the Bridgerton family to read.

Let me know your favorite series with common characters and I’ll enter you into a drawing for a copy of The Doctor’s Baby, the book that started this whole RX for Love series. Winner will be announced here at 9pm on Sunday!

And hey, if you’re out shopping this week, consider picking up a copy of If The Ring Fits. I think you’ll like it!

I spent most of the week with my fourteen niece and nephew. As a result, I’m feeling quite old (and wondering how much older I’ll feel when my kids are fourteen).

Okay, don’t get me wrong. I’m nearing forty and I feel it. It’s not like I didn’t know I was old. I would never expect my nephew to catch a Breakfast Club reference or my niece to sing along to Ah Ha’s “Take on Me.” But surely there are other areas were we speak a common vernacular.

For example, I sort of pride myself for being relatively edgy with the gadgets. (Okay, maybe only a tiny bit edgy.) We have two ipads! Surely that counts for something. However, I also have an old third generation ipod. Which my niece couldn’t even figure out how to use. She kept running her finger down the screen in the confusion. “I think there’s something wrong with it.” Yes. The thing that’s wrong with it is that it has buttons. Sorry. No touch screen there.

I tried to shrug off the ipod incident, but then something happened that I could not ignore. We were shopping and decided to stop for a snack. “There’s a Hagen Daz right over there,” I said.

“What’s that?” she asked innocently.

“What’s that? What’s that???” It’s …. it’s… It’s Hagen Daz! That’s what it is.”

She continued to look at me blankly.

Now, I don’t want to sound too judging here … but this is an unacceptable breach in her education. She’s fourteen. You can’t send a girl into the turbulent and troubled teenage years without an in depth knowledge of the major ice cream brands. Yes, yes, those modern frozen yogurt brands are all well and good, but there are times in a girl’s life when she needs an ice cream that’s thirty-five percent fat.

But maybe that’s just me. I’m old fashioned. I still listen to things on my ipod instead of my phone.

So what dates you?

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said that the only constant in life is change and I have to say I’m pretty much the embodiment of constant change. Barring three years in Huntsville, Texas, and five years in Springfield, Missouri, I’ve never lived in one place for more than two years. We moved regularly until I got into high school, living everywhere from San Diego to Montreal. I went to college in New York City and then transferred to Colorado. I think I’ve moved twenty-one times (not counting the three times I’ve moved to different houses in the same town). I’ve just completed my twenty-first move, leaving Stillwater, Oklahoma, for the beautiful city of Seattle, Washington. If there is anything I’ve learned from all this change is that change is good, in a lot of ways.

Change is Good for a Person
Stillness is the next closest thing to death. When we stop changing, we stop living. We stop learning, we stop growing. Change, whether it’s a change of time zone, a change of routine, or a change of pace, gives us a new perspective on the world and on our place in it. The more you know about the world, the more experiences you have, the more you understand your point of view. And, I like to think, broader experiences make you a more tolerant, understanding, and empathetic person.

Changes is Good for a Character
Every book is the story of a character on a journey. Through the twists and actions of the plot, the character grows, learns more about themselves, and becomes a slightly to very different person by the end of the book. Action-adventure heroes notwithstanding, a character who doesn’t change makes for a very boring book.

Change is Good for an Author
New York Times bestselling author Melissa Marr says, “If it’s not hard then what’s the point.” What she meant was that if, as an author, you’re writing the same book, the same story over and over, then you’re going to stop growing. My first four books were very similar. They were pretty straightforward teen romances with fantasy elements, told from a single first person point of view, and following a fairly narrow path toward a single major goal. If my revision letters are any indication, I got pretty good at writing those stories because by the time I had to face doing a revision on the fourth book my edits were pretty minor.

Then I decided to step outside the box. I came up with an idea that plays in the same mythological sandbox as my other books, but the structure and format of the storytelling is completely different. With Sweet Venom, my fifth book which comes out on September 6th, I moved from a single first person point of view to three first person points of view. I moved from a single, straightforward plot to a complicated trilogy that follows the paths of three very different girls. Plotting this trilogy is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It was like plotting ten books in one—three girls, three stories, three books plus one overarching story. It nearly killed me.

But, like most things, it made me stronger instead. Sweet Venom is by far the best book I’ve written yet, and writing it made me a better author. I could have continued writing those single-focus stories, but I would have cheated myself out the chance to be a stronger writer. Change is good.

What kind of changes have you made in your life?

One person who comments will win a signed copies of Sweet Venom and Fins are Forever by Tera Lynn Childs. But you’ll have to wait until after Sweet Venom‘s release in September for me to mail both books.

Most writers have a spot in their home (or their local coffee shop) that they call their office. I have a lovely office in my house – though I do wish the walls were painted – and I’ve written books in it. Though lately, since we got the girls, my office is also the room where the baby naps and sleeps and so I’m working elsewhere in the house most of the time. Despite this, it’s still one of my favorite rooms in the house. I’ve actually rearranged some of the furniture, and these pictures are from when we first moved in, but you’ll get the gist.

My favorite spot in my office is my big cube shelf. It contains all my research and writing craft books. I have books on all aspects of the Victorian period, other bits of English history, some Scottish books and then I have some books that are specific to the books I’ve written. I have several books about Sherlock Holmes as that was a main aspect of my book A Study in Scandal. Then I have books on chocolate factories, Atlantis, Pandora’s Box and I have an actual bound copy of the Illustrated London News from 1865 – this was the inspiration for my paper in Courting Claudia, my debut novel. The shelves are organized by category and everything is neat and tidy and I just love to sit there in the evening while I rock the baby and gaze at my books full of tidbits that someday might become a crucial plot point.

I’m going to stop before I totally geek out about all my writing craft books. On top of that shelf I keep copies of all my books, including foreign copies as well as the awards I’ve won. It’s a great place to come for inspiration when I’m feeling down about my career or I’m stuck in a certain story.

I also have my TBR shelves in here – for you hard-core readers, you know that’s my to-be-read pile which translates to two bookshelves stacked double on each shelf. And this doesn’t even include the mounting list on my Kindle. I’m so far behind it’s scary, but hey at this rate I don’t think I’ll ever run out.

Hidden in the closet of my office are my scrapbook supplies – I have tons. Colored paper and alphabet stickers and templates and oh, the list goes on. I don’t get to scrapbook as much as I used to, but given the opportunity I love to pull out my supplies and make pretty pages. So I guess technically this room could simply be called my creativity cave. Well, and part-time baby sleeping room these days.

In any case, do any of you have a home office or a cubby where you do crafts? What’s your favorite part of your house? Tell me about your special spot and I’ll pick one lucky reader to win a copy of my e-novella, Her Gentleman Thief.

I have four Special Editions coming out in 2012. All of them are set in Texas: three are in a
fictional town outside of Dallas (I’m calling it Celebration, Texas). The other one is part of the popular Fortunes of Texas series and it’s set in the fictional town of Red Rock,Texas, which is supposedly 20 miles east of San Antonio.

It’s the first time I’m writing about Texas. I’m excited to be spending so much virtual time there because a have quite a bit of family in the Dallas area. I’m vaguely familiar with the state – enough to know it’s flavor, and, of course, I can call on my family with any questions.

In the past, I’ve set books in Orlando and Paris because I’m familiar with those cities.  The only real place I’ve written about that I’m not familiar with is Boston. It was part of a Special Edition continuity (I was one of six authors writing books for this series).  I actually visited before I finished the book so I could make sure I captured the essence of the city.

I’ve heard of authors writing on a wing and prayer, setting books in regions they’ve never visited. But I shy away from doing that because I strive to get everything exactly right. So, if I make up the city – it might even be a fictitious city based on an actual city – I feel better about taking artistic license and not being bound by maps and facts.

I have two questions for you: do you like reading books set in fictional places or imaginary worlds?   If you prefer actual cities, how much leeway to you give an author to fictionalize neighborhoods and the texture of the area?