When I was a kid, I loved superheroes. My brother and I would go to my mom and have her pin towels around our necks, and then we’d fly around the backyard and fight bad guys.

At first, we thought all superheroes could fly, and that the cape was the device which made this possible. (Yes, I can hear Edna from “The Incredibles” scoffing at me!)

When we were old enough to actually read comic books, we learned that there were many kinds of superheroes, with many kinds of powers.

Some of these, if you think about it, couldn’t have been all that useful. Okay, so “Triplicate Girl” could split into three versions of herself — but so what? Sure, she, could date three guys at once, but how could she save the world?

And some heroes weren’t even “super”, but had talents and gadgets — like Batman, and Green Arrow, and Black Canary.

On the other hand, some heroes were so powerful — Superman, Captain Marvel, The Green Lantern, Wonder Woman — that I imagine it was hard for the writers not to have them win on page 2.

And so, you say — what does all this have to do with the Regency?

Does it ever seem to you like there are Regency superheroes? The dandy who never attracts lint, the rake who always knows how to please a lady (any lady), the gorgon who has memorized the family trees of everyone in Europe?

So — if you were creating a Regency superhero (or, even better, a whole group of superheroes with different powers, like the X-Men and their foes), who would you create? What would their powers be?

And what would their costumes and names be?

All responses welcome!

Cara
Cara King, author of MY LADY GAMESTER
starring Super Atalanta and her sidekick Tom

This cover discussion begun by our Janet Mullany on Jan 25 is still intriguing me! I know that what makes a good cover is all really personal preference, but I thought it would be fun to continue the discussion

My position is that a handsome man on a romance cover is going to attract more attention than a cover without a handsome man, even if that cover has beautiful flowers on it.

Now, the handsome man does not have to be without half or all his clothes–those covers, I agree can be embarrassing. (So I guess I’m not really fond of “mantitty” covers, as Janet so cleverly called them), but if I am browsing the romance shelves, not in the market for any specific book, the books I’m going to pick up first are the ones with a handsome man on the cover.

This is why I LOVED my cover for A Reputable Rake. I could not have asked for a better cover, by far my favorite. The Rake is just so handsome and his expression perfectly represents the hero of the book.

My Mills & Boon cover for The Mysterious Miss M comes in a close second, because it had a handsome man in a very romantic pose. As my first book cover ever, I was over the moon about this cover and I still love it.

Now I prefer both of these covers to my cover of Innocence and Impropriety, arriving in bookstores March 2007. This cover has both the handsome man and the romantic pose, but it is a tad too sweet for me, and the book is not quite that sweet. Still, I like this cover. I love the setting of Covent Garden in the background. If it were on the shelf right next to A Reputable Rake, I’d bet A Reputable Rake would be picked up first.

I browsed the All About Romance Cover contest archives for examples. Take a look at these two beautiful Jo Beverley covers (the double image means they are “step back” covers).

They are both wonderful covers, but which would I pick up first? The one with that very handsome man.

My cover for The Wagering Widow was nice because it was provokative and hinted at that handsome man by showing his hand. The black and white image is what you would see just inside the cover, so there was a handsome man and the romantic pose if you opened the book.

The same image appeared on Louise Allen’s Jan 2007 Mills & Boon, Not Quite a Lady.

I cannot be objective, though. I don’t know which I would pick up first, if they were side by side, Not Quite a Lady, with its handsome man in a romantic pose, or the provokative, A Wagering Widow?

What do you all think?
Does a handsome man on the cover influence whether you will pick it up, at least to read the back cover copy?

Do you want to vote for a favorite cover? Cover Cafe has a contest, formerly sponsored by All About Romance!

Speaking of handsome men on romance covers, in March, the cover model for The Wagering Widow and Not Quite a Lady, Richard Cerqueira, will be doing a guest interview with Risky Regencies. So let me know if there is anything you would like me to ask Richard about what it is like in a romance cover shoot.

Cheers!
Diane

I meant to do this earlier in the day. Megan could not do the blog today so I volunteered but then I spent the day FINALLY finishing the revisions to The Vanishing Viscountess.

I promised my system for naming characters.

The Regency period was a more formal time than nowadays when everyone from salesclerks to telemarketers want to use your first name. First names were rarely used in the Regency era, except among family or schoolmates. Even so, a little boy with a title would be called by his title, even if he was a mere toddler. Think of it, in Pride & Prejudice no one ever called Darcy Fitzwilliam! and Mr. and Mrs. Bennet addressed themselves as Mr. and Mrs. Bennet.

I’ve tried to adapt to this style in my books, so I pay attention first to title names and surnames. I make sure my male characters have title names or surnames that will sound comfortable as what we modern folk would think of as given names. So in my March book, Innocence & Impropriety, the hero is Jameson Flynn, but he is “Flynn” throughout the book. His employer is the Marquess of Tannerton or “Tanner” to everyone. (Tanner is the hero of The Vanishing Viscountess)

I often create title names by using The Incomplete Peerage . But I mix up the title names, taking the stem from one of them and putting on a different ending, so “Cornwall” may become “Cornworth.” Then I google “Lord Cornworth” to make certain there isn’t a real one.

My heroines are much more apt to get a first name. Have you noticed how my heroine names mostly start with “M”? My daughter’s name starts with M.

For first names I go to a baby naming site and look up English or Scottish or Irish or Welsh first names, whatever I need. Or I go to a census of the time period and see what names are there. I do this for surnames as well.

I try not to repeat a letter of the alphabet in the book, so if the hero is Tanner, then his butler would not be Turner.

That’s it. That’s my naming style. And if that doesn’t work, I just take a name from a reader–Right Mallory? Mallory Pickerloy is my heroine in The Vanishing Viscountess.

Diane

A month or so ago I blogged about the agony and ecstasy of finding a title.

Little did I know then, but the title search was to go on… and on. Because the marketing department changed its mind about the one they’d chosen, and took it upon themselves to find one. I was all titled out and happy to turn it over to them. And today, we finally settled on one–Pride and Prejudice. No, just kidding. It’s The Rules of Gentility. Long ago I suggested Gentility Rules, which might be the sort of thing you’d find spray-painted on a wall in Highbury. (Another favorite was The Lady Vanquishes, apparently lost on a generation who didn’t grow up watching Hitchcock.)

In all of this long, long process, I discovered I knew virtually nothing about how books are titled and the relationship of cover to contents, and now I think I know even less. I thought, for instance, that the cover had to reflect what was inside. Well, yes, sort of. I pulled some Jane Austen covers off the web to illustrate what may or may not be my point. Above left, Penguin Classics. The portrait is a detail of Double Portraits of the Fullerton Sisters by Sir Thomas Lawrence, and very nice too. The period is correct, but…wait. Aren’t there six sisters? And if the one on the left is holding a drawing board, I thought the Bennett sisters were remarkably unaccomplished by Miss Bingley’s or Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s high standards.

Our next entry is the movie tie in edition. Or, the book of the film. You mean, there was a book first? You could read the whole thing before getting to the scene where Mr. Darcy appears with, gasp, coat unbuttoned and cravat discarded. In fact, that scene is missing from every edition I’ve ever owned.
The next two I found are even more puzzling. At left, I believe the original is a painting by Degas. Only about a century too late, and which one is supposed to be Elizabeth? Is the other one Miss Bingley? Is there a scene where they sat at a balcony together?

And the final one is of an interior with two characters in Victorian dress. Inexplicably, the gentleman is sitting while the woman is standing. My first thought, when looking at this, was that they were servants. It certainly doesn’t look like any sort of courtship scene. It rather looks as though the woman is receiving a scolding. “Rats in the soup again, Cook, and not nearly enough of them…”

One thing I did learn from my experience was that the cover does not necessarily relate to the contents. The other realization was that we, as book buyers, are fooled and deceived when buying a book. The marketing strategy seems to be that if a sort of book cover has worked well, it will continue to do so until…look at all the trends we’ve seen in romance–clinches, Fabio, mantitty, cartoons, more mantitty, pink and shiny, bumpy bits (those last two are not related to mantitty), photos. Why does the public fall out of love with a particular style? I’ve no idea. My book is a funny book but its cover will not suggest that because readers of historicals don’t like funny. The back cover copy will suggest it’s funny, but probably will not declare A laugh on every page! The first Regency-set with a fart joke! So the buyer, fooled into thinking they’re on familiar territory, will buy it.

None of the Jane Austen covers suggest that P&P is one of the wittiest books in the English language either. So it’s a mystery of the publishing business.

What makes you buy a book? And have you ever chosen one based entirely on the cover and been bitterly disappointed? Or found a gem with a totally unsuitable cover?

Janet