Judging Books By Their Covers

This past Monday, at Lady Jane’s Salon, Laurel McKee’s editor gave a presentation on the process by which her cover reached its final form. As publishing guru Ron Hogan played Vanna White with the pictures, we got to see the gradual development from concept to final version. Some of the changes were sparked by practical concerns, such as there being too many curlicues on the cover font for easy reading across a crowded bookstore.

The other major change, however, came about when the author pointed out that the initial color of the heroine’s dress—for lack of a better term, slut red—would have been entirely inappropriate for a lady of that period and especially a lady in morning. The dress went to purple.

I was very impressed. I don’t like to think of myself as a cynic, but my general take on covers is somewhat akin to my feelings about “historical” movies: fact is honored more in the breach than the observance and you just expect that and deal with it so long as the final result is pretty.

This has been a pretty good maxim for most of my covers so far, all of which have been gorgeous (I love the Dutton art department), but most of which have featured paintings from, well, let’s just call them neighboring time periods. My first cover was spot on in that it featured a painting of a dark-haired woman with a bunch of carnations (how they found that, I’ll never know). It was less spot on in terms of the clothing. The book is set in 1803. The painting and the dress are later nineteenth century, although they look, at a quick glance, very eighteenth century.

The most obviously anachronistic of the lot was my third book, The Deception of the Emerald Ring. The girl in the painting actually looks very much as I imagined my heroine. And it’s certainly very, very green, which was the idea. But the dress is very clearly Victorian rather than Empire. I got a few snarky emails over that one.

I’ve noticed the same phenomenon with other authors’ books as well. Karen Harper’s Mistress Shakespeare, about the secret first wife of the immortal late sixteenth/early seventeenth century bard, features the exact same picture I had in poster form over my desk freshman year: My Sweet Rose, by nineteenth century Preraphaelite painter, John William Waterhouse.

Readers, does it bother you when the cover art on historical fiction reflects the wrong time period? Authors, would you rather have a pretty cover or a historically correct one? (Well, clearly both, but if you had to pick one....) Have you ever objected to a cover on historical grounds?