A Question of Covers

On Wednesday, the UK newspaper The Guardian ran this article:

Ad agency St Luke's is set to redesign Mills & Boon covers. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/Guardian
Romantic fiction publisher Mills & Boon is planning its first new advertising campaign in six years to "ignite passion" in younger readers.
The publisher, which celebrated its 100th birthday this year, has appointed ad agency St Luke's to develop a new campaign for its novels.
St Luke's, which won a pitch for the account against two other unnamed agencies, will launch the campaign next summer, and will also redesign the covers of Mills & Boon's books.
Mills & Boon said the aim of the ad campaign is to "ignite a passion for the brand among a new target audience of younger readers while continuing to fuel love and loyalty among its very sizeable fanbase".
The company said that more than 7 million Mills & Boon books are sold in the UK each year.
"It is not every day that you get to work with a client listed in the Oxford English Dictionary," said the St Luke's business development director, Liz Little.

Now this intrigued me. In the almost 25 years I've been writing for Mills & Boon, I, and my books, have been through heavens knows how many changes in the design of the covers. There were the original covers with different coloured bands at the top. (The bands were supposed to be dark or pastel depending on the sensuality of the covers, but in my own books it seemed more that they picked up colours in the actual cover art work)

Then there were the 'half a heart'covers. Covers where the different halves of a heart, one facing right, one facing left, were meant to be displayed so that on the shelves they made up one whole heart. They never were displayed that way - at least, I never saw them.

Then the lines were split into Romance and - then it was Mills & Boon Presents - and there was the solid band of blue. The band of blue became a blue swirl with - oh dear - photographs that so often made the heroes look about 3 years old and often very gay. The heroines were too frequently emaciated too.

The photographs disappeared. We went back to art work. But it was still a matter of luck if you got a good cover or not. You could describe your hero and heroine till you were blu in the face, send in magazine pictures that were meant to show what your characters looked like. Sometimes it seemed that the artwork department listened - sometimes . . . NOT! I once foolishly said that my hero was an actor, a film star - Robert Redford type.

What I got was this. RR's older, fatter, less handsome cousin maybe - but Redford himself??

I'm intrigued by this Guardian article in two ways.

One is that the covers tend to be matters of fashion. And luck. Sometimes you get a great one. Other times you get ones that have you wincing and crying 'No!'

Who could forget the glory of 'The Blob' that was the cover of Desert Affair - though you had to see it in the pink hardback library version to see it in it's true horror.

And my other point is that 'younger readers' bit. How young? I've met readers of romances who range in age from 16 to 86 . And none of them buys the book solely because of the cover.

If we design covers for younger readers do we need to use - say Zac Efron - as a cover model as opposed to H-I-A-T?

Well, Zac's pretty but he's not my Greek Billionaire or my hard-bitten, brooding Santos Cordero in my next book.

And what do you want on a cover? The hero and heroine? A clinch? Flowers? Hearts and flowers? It seems to me that you can't please all of the people all of the time - and unless we go down the Harry Potter route, with one cover for the adult version and one for the younger market, we will struggle to create a cover image that appeals to everyone.

So what do you think? Are you a 'younger reader'? Do you think romance appeals to you and your age group? Is it anything to do with the covers that appeals/puts you off? Would a change in covers make you want to pick up a book or would one of those The Amnesiac Greek Billionaire's Secret Mistress's Secret Baby titles make you put it straight back down again?

And what does everyone think? No matter what your age or how long you've been reading romance. Do you buy because of the appeal of a cover image? Or is it the title (is it really??) or the author's name . . .

I'm interested - and I'm pretty sure St Luke's ad agency is too.