Oct 31 2008
The Chick Lit Cover Moral Panic
If you read magazine or blog you have probably heard the cries of horror. Our books are getting check lit covers! Think of the children! Pull out the pitchforks and burning torches! How shall we every survive?
Um, is it even true?
For a start chick lit as a genre is defined largely by cartoons or highly saturated photos of very skinny, very white girls in fun settings. And there are fated worse that being associated with it. But exactly which covers are being panned and by whom? Why is the threat considered so dire that if you Google: chick lit covers, the top results are not discussion of this type of cover but warnings of their invasion of other genres.
Radar magazine (a publication that was once so promising, but turned out to be rubbish) had a dig at trend without either explaining it or showing it. They just mocked up some satirical examples. So apparently the fact this happens is a foregone conclusion. But here is another thought: perhaps publishers have realized that modern readers (often women, but certainly including men) like a simpler, cleaner cover design with a more vigorous font. A big picture with some blocks of cover is simply more attention grabbing.
I mean let us look at the examples being derided. The Pursuit of Happiness as disdained by the Guardian books blog, and this article was ‘me too-ed’ ad nauseum across the internet. The very first comment on Amazon is: “I bought this book on the strength of its cover (I liked the shade of blue!!!), and it was one of my better impulse buys! It’s a totally compelling story” and another wrote: “Attracted at first by the beautiful cover.” One commenter didn’t like the cover but that is still 2:1. The story is strongly focused on the relationships and romances of women and I think the cover fits. It may lack the feel of the 40s era, but then with the use of phrases like ‘mid life crisis’ and ‘nanosecond’, so does the book.
The (now defunct)
New Zealand blog Page Turner illustrated the same point with the Tears of the Desert cover. It is chick lit-ty simply for picturing a woman (it is a woman’s memoir) and using a large, somewhat cursive font? Meanwhile everyone seems to look back with nostalgia to the penguin books (the cover you have when you don’t have a cover)–perhaps missing the point in the process. I think that a lot of what is being denigrated as ‘chick lit’ cover design is in fact a return to design simplicity, large font title, a simple picture and a limited-but-vivid color pallet.
Now, as it happens, I do think the cartoony, cheerful covers have been slapped on some books that actually have a much darker tone or belong to a much different genre. But the blog-meme of ‘attack of the chick lit covers’ seems to be based on examples that are just covers with a clean, feminine aesthetic, whilst simultaneously implying that being mistaken for chick lit is worse than catching an STD. In most cases they haven’t pointed to a romance being misbranded (as often happens), but expressed the horror of the literary and non-fiction ‘elite’ being tainted with a lowly genre—overlooking the fact they are simply being marketed in a way that is inclusive of the female gender.
