Monday, January 21, 2008

Can we retire this stock photo, please?

Yesterday, I made up for lost time and posted a number of new titles to the HNS forthcoming books page, in particular a couple dozen entries from the various Random House summer catalogs, which arrived last Friday. Lots of great books coming out - please take a look.

I'm also pleased to note that the cover for the reissue of Robert Goddard's Past Caring, if I'm to believe the Random House website, no longer features the same ghostly woman as currently appears on Joel Rose's The Blackest Bird, John Crowley's Little, Big, and two other historical novels not published in the USA - see towards the bottom of the reusable cover art page. The website presents a different photo than the one in the Bantam Dell catalog.

Right below that set in the gallery, however, we see another set of covers using the same stock art you'll find gracing the forthcoming historical novel on the left (a love story set in Europe during World War II; out from Crown in May). It previously appeared on historical novels by Marie Bostwick and Lorna Landvik during 2006, in addition to two other novels (one non-US historical, and a novel of mainstream women's fiction).

Nice enough cover art, but I'm hoping this will be the last we see of it (perhaps we should be grateful that we're not seeing Emma Hamilton again?). I'm looking forward to the novel, yet can't help but wish it had a more unique cover.

3 comments:

  1. Oh yes, please let that woman put her hands down and get off her feet! She must be getting tired by now.

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  2. Dear Sarah:

    Just today, I stumbled across your Reusable Cover Art site. I couldn't help but be interested, because I've been collecting examples of this same trend for The Rap Sheet, a crime-fiction-oriented blog:

    http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/
    search/label/Copycat%20Covers

    A few of the copycat covers you feature are included in my own sets, but there are also many others that you haven't referenced on your site. If you'd like, please feel free to pick up the examples I showcase. And it would be great if, in the course of it, you could provide a link to The Rap Sheet.

    Keep up the hunt! And please let me know if you run across any of these duplicate covers on crime novels. I'd like to continue mentioning them in The Rap Sheet.

    Cheers,
    J. (Jeff) Kingston Pierce
    Editor, The Rap Sheet (http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/)
    Senior Editor, January Magazine (http://www.januarymagazine.com/)

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  3. Hi Jeff,

    Just found your comment - I was on vacation for the last week, out of the country, and not checking email regularly till today. I've just gone and added a link to the Rap Sheet to the bottom of my reusable cover art site. Funny, I got the same ARC of the Goddard the other day, and am hoping that the cover image really has been changed, as I suspected. But I agree, we're sure to see the beskirted woman on another cover at some point.

    You're welcome to reference any of the copycat covers on my page, too, and if you could link back to my site, that'd be terrific.

    Sarah

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