If I asked you to go into a bookstore and pick out a book marketed to a female audience from only glancing at the front cover, could you do it? Of course you could. And without giving it much thought either. Let’s face it, neither the bookstore nor the publisher expect a male reader to pick up a Faith Hunter-penned Jane Yellowrock book.
There are various ways to pick out a book aimed at women – they will often be coloured in pinks, purples, and reds, feature half naked men with intense eyes (I mean, eyes don’t get more ‘bedroom’ than on the cover of Allegiance of Honour by Nalini Singh), with the titles typeset in ornate fonts (like The Contrary Tale of the Butterfly Girl by Ishbelle Bee). If it is YA published in the UK, it will also likely feature a young woman’s face, often superimposed over a broody image or trees or intricate patterns (such as Liz de Jager’s Blackhart Legacy).
Smart marketing
Covers are designed intelligently – publishers know, from experience, what sells and what doesn’t. But I have to ask, have they defined the female readership’s expectations? What does it say about publishers, readers, and the SFF fandom in general that books still need to be pitched to certain genders?
Of course targeting the cover design to the tastes of the markets is both necessarily and intelligent if publishers want a book to do well. But why are we so determined that readers of SFF read along gendered lines? Studies indicate that roughly half the SFF readers are women, and the same goes for the number of female writers being published. I certainly don’t only read books written by women and I’d hope men would be similarly un-biased in their picks.
The trends in cover design, however, suggest that publishers, at least, believe that men and women have very different reading habits and respond to very different visual cues, which they are happy to reinforce. For instance, if a woman appears on the cover (notably, with her face – Den Patrick’s novels don’t fall into this category as the woman’s face never appears), the book is most likely to be YA or paranormal romance. Women’s faces, it seems, don’t belong on more ‘serious’ SFF novels. Earlier this year, Mishell Baker’s debut novel Borderline featured the face of a woman, but it too, is urban fantasy YA (even with its interesting take on ableism and faerie courts).
An interesting difference between UK and US markets is the frequency with which people feature on the covers of US SFF books. When you look at Jen Williams’ The Copper Cat trilogy, the UK cover features dragons (all the dragons!), while the US covers give us illustrations of Wydrin and Sebastian (and noticeably, not the unattractive Lord Frith). Does having both genders on the cover make it okay to have a woman’s face on the cover? The other way to feature a female face on the cover and not have it immediately equate to YA, romance, or a necessarily female target audience appears to be when the face is heavily stylized illustration, such as on the covers of Chuck Wendig’s Miriam Black novels or even certain renditions of Margaret Atwood’s works.
Books with female protagonists, even when written by men, rarely flag themselves as such in the cover image. Take Darren D. Beyer’s cover for Casimir Bridge. The book features a female protagonist but the cover portrays a non-gender specific body in a space suit, captured from behind (remember, we must never see her face!). Or what about Levi Black’s Red Right Hand? The protagonist is female but with a gender neutral first name (Charlie) and depicted on the cover with short dark hair and fairly androgynous clothes. Is this so that the casual observer might not notice the breasts?
Science fiction vs fantasy
There are big differences in the covers of fantasy and science fiction. One of my favourite examples is to compare the covers of Emma Newman’s novels Between Two Thorns and Planetfall. If you knew nothing about either of those novels, in just one glance you could tell which genre they were… and that the Split World novels are marketed at women. Look at that curly effete font and those sultry hues! And while the statistics show women are half the audience for science fiction as well as fantasy, the prevailing attitude that SF is predominantly a male genre clearly lingers when it comes to cover design.
Where female-penned fantasy likes to invoke intricate graphical designs and prissy typefaces (Leigh Bardugo’s Shadow and Bone or Belzhar by Meg Wolitzer, for instance), the men prefer to have a brooding masculine figure shrouded by a cloak on their covers. Come on, you know exactly what I mean: The Floating City by Craig Cormick, The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, Traitor’s Blade by Sebastian De Castell…
Science fiction, in the UK at least, tends to err on the side of gender-neutral designs. If the covers don’t feature space ships (which, let’s be honest, a good number of them still do), they will have a stylised design often invoking some kind of tech, regardless of the author’s gender. Just look at Malka Older’s Infomocracy and Jon Wallace’s Barricade to see this in action. These covers also typify the colour palette of SF covers vs fantasy: blues, yellows, and sometimes orange, while fantasy likes to stick with red, purple, and green.
Cover design is an important part of marketing and targeting those designs to the relevant audience is, generally speaking, a good idea. Covers can establish the content of the book in clever and quick ways. But I don’t think that means we should turn a blind eye when standards of covers are ill-serving us on an industrial scale.
If books by and about women are only being dressed up to be sold to women, doesn’t that undermine our attempts to reach out and make genre fiction the fair and accessible literary community it should be? Why, when we prize our books for their rich, intelligent insight and particularly SFF’s ability to look towards progress, are we relying on cheap and unhelpful pigeonholes? Many of these covers are good, some are even great, but as a community and readership I think we need to address how we, as readers, are letting ourselves be perceived and appealed to.
Megan Leigh is an SFF writer, blogger, and podcaster. You can find her musings at Pop Verse or on Twitter @m_leigh_g.
Along with fellow writers Lucy Hounsom and Charlotte Bond, Megan runs Breaking the Glass Slipper, a podcast focused on women in science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Listen and subscribe at iTunes, SoundCloud, and most other podcasting apps.
Very good discussion of an important topic – thanks!
I agree. Lots to think about here. On the same token, there’s also this thought: what’s wrong with pink and curly font? Why is it a ‘bad’ thing, even if they are only solely associated with the feminine?
I wouldn’t say pink and curly font is ‘bad’, but it certainly does define the target audience before someone even picks up the book to read the blurb. What I would suggest is that such things are problematic when used for almost every title either written by a woman or featuring a female protagonist, as it is suggesting that men won’t be interested in such books – is this a reflection of actual reading habits or reinforcing a stereotype?
It’s interesting. I’ve never considered whether a book I was considering reading had been marketed to a male or female audience by what was on the cover nor do I buy books because they are written by one gender or the other. Because their are so many choices out there I do admit to starting with the cover, but I gotl for the quality of the artwork. I will look at some covers and think, they really couldn’t find a decent artist for this one. Ayer that it is the title and whatever descriptive text is featured. One of my favorite series if not the favorite is, “The Order” by Philippa Ballantine. I also like the Ministry series she is involved in with another author. Emma Jame Holloway is another favorite and her Evelina Cooper character, niece to Sherlock Holmes and knows magic. Love her adventures. I have several books by females with female leads I’ve purchased and have on my reading list. I may read slower than most but I’ll get to them for sure. I’ll have to take a closer look at covers. This new to me. I was going purely on the artist’s quality of work.