Jennifer Crusie's Blog: Argh Ink

Here’s the Korean cover for Strange Bedpersons. They got it mostly right, the cat, the red hair. I don’t remember the raking leaves part, but I still like it:

But the real reason I put up another post was to give you the full size good quality jpg for Tentacion (you’ll have to click on the thumbnail to open the full jpg). I still don’t see any dots:

Speaking of foreign bookcovers, here’s Welcome to Temptation in Spain. She’s thin, but she’s not bony. Of course, she’s not Sophie, either, except for the red dress. I wish I could find the French Canadian version of WTT. It had the red dress, too. A red chiffon prom dress with a poufy skirt. Sophie was wearing it, climbing out of a dumpster. It was a gorgeous cover, but there was a lot of Huh? there.

This one is really beautiful, too. Wonder what people think when they open it and it’s about a small town in Ohio where nobody tangos?

[Comments are continued on the next post: “Another Country Heard From.”)

This post is to continue the discussion on the previous one, but it was also inspired by the bookcover I got in the mail today for the Spanish edition of Bet Me:

Min has hips. Not skinny, mudflap girl, cartoon romance heroine non-hips, but HIPS. Okay, they could have been even bigger, probably should have been, but I love them anyway. They make me think of Sandra Cisneros’ chapter called “Hips” in The House on Mango Street, where Esperanza realizes she has hips and they have power (and if I could find my copy, I’d give you a taste, it’s a wonderful piece of writing), and of Lucille Clifton’s poem that Eric quoted in the comments to the last post (“these hips are mighty hips/these hips are magic hips”). There’s such a celebration of power and sexuality in all of this. Almost makes me wonder if society’s insistence on narrow, childlike hips and its condemnation of the sexual aspects of romance novels don’t stem from the same place: a real fear of the uncontrolled power of women’s sexuality, especially of older women’s sexuality, women who have been around the block a few times and know things.

If that’s it, give up, society. You’re toast.

Dove has just brought out a new line of products and I’m going to be buying them, probably by the case. The line is called “Pro-Age” in a reaction to the implied criticism in “anti-age” products, which pretty much tells you that age is bad, tough luck for you that you can’t avoid it unless you drop big bucks on their miracle gunk. (Well, there’s another way, but it’s death.) The ad is here, but for those of you who have dial-ups and can’t see it (it was deemed too racy for television so you won’t be seeing it there, either), it’s a series of four nudes, carefully posed so that none of the interesting bits are showing, all of whom are over fifty. One is softly, lusciously zaftig in the way older women are. There are wrinkles and age spots. They are the antithesis of the women that every anti-aging skin care line flashes on the screen, a fact Dove reinforces by running type across each woman toward the end of her segment that says, “Too old to be in an anti-age ad.” Then they end the ad by saying, “But this isn’t anti-age, this is pro-age . . . Beauty has no age limit . . . Dove is Pro-Age, not Anti-Age.”

Okay, this is freaking brilliant marketing for several reasons, not the least of which they’ve just made every product out there labeled “anti-age” the bad guy. I am stunned by the genius behind this concept. But it’s not just neutering the competition that makes this campaign so great; this ad is positive in the way it sells the product and the brand. I’m fifty-seven, and after watching the commercial, I’m loving Dove. And it’s not even the company that makes the chocolate.

But that’s not the end of the marketing genius here. Before they play the commercial, there’s a line on the screen: “Watch what we couldn’t show you on TV and then tell us what you think.” And then inside the website there’s a montage labeled “hear the reaction to the commercial.” It’s wonderful to watch because of all the smiling women who are obviously delighted to see naked peers in television commercials, but there are two women in there who, I swear to God, are the cousins of the Church Lady. They’re both tense as piano wire and they both say the same thing, “The American public is not ready to see that, or probably doesn’t want to” and “I don’t think that American women are as willing to be that out there with their bodies over fifty years of age.” I wanted to grab them by throats and say, “Well, aren’t you SPECIAL.”

But then I started to wonder if they were ringers. Because you really do not like them. And because you do not like them, you want to prove to them that women do want to see that. You want them to find out that their narrow ideas of beauty for women are criminally wrong. You want to show them so much, you just want to go out and . . .

Buy a lot of Dove Pro-Age.

Really, you do. Because if this ad campaign fails, we’ll be back to some airbrushed thirty-five-year-old telling us about how she’s worried about wrinkles. I’ve got a neck like a Shar-pei, but she’s worried about “fine lines.” Bite me, cookie. Now show me that Pro-Age commericial again. Damn, I love those women.

So I’m wondering if the geniuses behind this campaign didn’t set up some antagonists for me so that I’d side with Dove, clearly the good guys here. I wonder if I’m being manipulated. I’m not sure because if these piano-wire women are real, then aging must be making them miserable–they’re essentially saying, “Nobody wants to see me naked”–and their unhappiness may be showing in their rigid body language and tight faces. Or they could be really good actresses and Dove is just manipulating me.

But here’s the kicker: I don’t care. I don’t even care if the ProAge products are lousy. I’m going to buy them because I want to see more commercials. Basically, they had me at “Too many people think beauty has an age limit.” The four fantastic naked chicks over fifty were just gravy, and I have strong feelings about gravy.

Dove Pro-Age. Buy it so we can keep watching the commercials.

[Comments for this post are continued on the next post, "Magic Hips."]

This is a fast post because this is really just a continuation of the previous post, but I do want to ask this:

A cover should reflect the book so a buyer knows what she or he is buying. In anything.

We already have a shorthand of kind because publishers put the same kind of cover on the same kind of book–those cartoon covers on chick lit, for example. After The Firm came out, all legal novels had marble on the cover. It’s a shorthand way of saying, “This book is like other books you like” and it’s smart marketing until they all start to look alike, but I digress.

Let’s assume we are not going to bar rape from romance because we’re not. The marketplace determines what’s going in a book; it sells what readers buy. But it’s a damn good argument that people should know what they’re getting into when they open a book.

So what cover elements are we talking about here? Warning labels? (I changed my mind on that back to no, but I’m interested in the discussion.) What’s shorthand for “there’s rape in here”? And does that shorthand also work on books like To Have and To Hold?

Basically, how do we tell readers what’s going on inside the book by what we put on the cover?

And also whatever you wanted to say about the previous discussion. This could have been a comment on the last post, so treat it that way, please.