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on the subject of covers…

6 Comments


here’s my cover! It’s really, really pretty, but… they’re too young, too scrubbed-looking, and almost certainly too well-behaved. I asked for Harrison Ford with a bigger nose and Juliet Binoche. Personally I think it’s a mistake having people on covers, period, particularly on romances and particularly particularly on historicals where they get the costumes all wrong. (A red neckcloth???!)

If I could have the same art, but without the people, and with a stocking and a book lying on the sofa, that would have been fab. The worrisome thing about this cover is that it doesn’t deliver. It looks like a really sweet regency and it isn’t.

Janet

When I think of risky Regencies….

7 Comments
Hello! This is Laurie Bishop. Great cover, Cara!
I’ve been reading everyone else’s comments and trying to decide how I would qualify what makes a Regency risky. I find it isn’t as easy as I thought it would be. But since I have to come up with something 😉 , to me a risky Regency is one in which the heroine, and/or the hero, do something extraordinary for their sex/time/station—or must act in an unexpected way to address their dilemma. Also, in addition to this, they must do or be in this way without violating the attitudes of the time.Hence the trickiness.Let us say that I want my heroine to be courageous and able to take command to save the family estate. She might come to the traumatic conclusion that she must ruin herself by becoming the mistress of Snidely Whiplash; and she can acknowledge this by having all of the appropriate thoughts and feelings about what she feels forced to do. But…she will not use language that a gently reared young lady does not use, and she will otherwise behave with all the decorum within her power that she has been raised to use. And she will not know something that a gently reared young lady does not know.

Of course, if she is not a gently reared young lady, we have a different bucket of peas. She will have the perspective of a farmer’s daughter, a soldier’s daughter, or what have you. And that can be quite different. Even middle class daughters were different than the daughters of the highest peers. In PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, the Bennett daughters walked to town alone. Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s daughter would never been allowed to do such a thing.

In my first Regency, THE BEST LAID PLANS, the heroine was a very independent-thinking American heiress who was not raised in high English society. She was therefore allowed to be a little outrageous—and was a ball to write!

Laurie

WHEN HORSES FLY Oct. 2005
LORD RYBURN’S APPRENTICE Jan. 2006

Cara’s Cover!

17 Comments

Here’s my cover! Hmm…does anyone want to talk about covers? Good covers? Bad covers? How you can have a cover that all your author friends tell you is really good, and you should be really grateful, but somehow you still whine about it? (Aw, come on, don’t say I’m the only one!) 🙂

Cara
Cara King, www.caraking.com
MY LADY GAMESTER — Signet Regency, 11/05

Risk-taking…and a few mistakes

9 Comments

Risk-taking . . . and a few mistakes

Hi, it’s Megan Frampton, another dangerous risk-taker here. I have many, many theories about what makes a traditional Regency different from a Regency-set historical (not all of which I’ll share, thank your lucky stars), and when I wrote A Singular Lady (which comes out October 4, mark it on your calendars), I thought I was writing a Regency-set historical. I have since figured out I did not, not least of which is because Signet bought my book to publish it as a trad.
What makes my Regency different from the pelisse-and-Almack’s crowd? Well, first of all, my heroine is out to marry for money. Her father’s reputation means she is not allowed into Almack’s, she is not classically beautiful, and she swears on occasion. My hero wears scuffed boots, worn clothes, and hates the social scene. Plus they have sex before they’re married, and she doesn’t yelp about how much it hurts the first time.
Oh, and I screwed up my hero’s title, big-time, which means I’ll be getting plenty of finger-wagging mail from folks who know a lot more about titles than I do. But I hope people enjoy the story, because it’s fiction, after all.
I’m looking forward to meeting my fellow risky Authors, and whomever stumbles across our blog. Enjoy, post, share, discuss!

Megan

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