At this month’s Devon HNS meeting we talked about, among other things, book covers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I go into my local bookshop the first thing I see is tables with books piled on them. I can see at a glance a profusion of covers. Many have two people on the front and I can be pretty sure that they are some kind of romance. It doesn’t matter if they are looking at each other lovingly or are back-to-back with stony expressions, or even if they are of the same sex. The way they are dressed will give away the historical period in which the book is set and there may be further clues in the background. Not all romance covers look like this, but, if you are trying to design a cover for your romance, this seems a way of making your book immediately recognisable as a romance to your potential readers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If your setting is the Roman Empire, a three-quarter length gladiator or legionary, branding a gladius or pilum, seems to be de rigueur<\/em>. The major exception to this seems to be Lindsey Davis, whose Roman era mystery\/crime novels do not have a person on the cover at all, except for the US covers of the Flavia Alba series.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So what are the necessities of a cover for a historical novel?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let me state my prejudices here: for me it’s not a historical novel if the setting is less than a hundred years ago. In this case, clothing is a good way to indicate period, though that does depend on your reader being able to tell that your hero on the cover is wearing mid 17th century clothes, rather than Elizabethan or Georgian. Of course, you may want to make the period a bit more vague, so as to draw in the widest range of browsers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many established and traditionally published authors use more abstract designs for their covers, with perhaps a small Tudor rose to give a hint of period, but they <\/em>can probably rely on the author’s name in large letters to sell their books.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At this month’s Devon HNS meeting we talked about, among other things, book covers. When I go into my local bookshop the first thing I see is tables with books piled on them. I can see at a glance a profusion of covers. Many have two people on the front and I can be pretty […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/daparsons.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/daparsons.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/daparsons.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daparsons.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daparsons.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=197"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/daparsons.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":201,"href":"https:\/\/daparsons.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions\/201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/daparsons.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daparsons.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daparsons.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}