Jenny Grigg is the talented book designer behind The Luminaries and Gerald Murnane’s last book. We asked her to explain how covers communicate – and how they can fall short.
I place the blame squarely on booksellers (mostly Amazon) for this. By refusing to have any sort of consistency or transparency about what kinds of cover content will result in authors being "dungeoned" on their platforms, it essentially forces explicit content to have cover imagery and blurbs that obfuscate the content to such a degree that misunderstandings like this can happen.
Words like "sweltering", "sizzling", "swoonworthy" in combination with "romance" are meant to be a clue that there is sex in the writing, but the cover simply can not be obvious about that without risking the book (and the author's entire account) being unlisted without communication or recourse.
I place the blame squarely on booksellers (mostly Amazon) for this. By refusing to have any sort of consistency or transparency about what kinds of cover content will result in authors being "dungeoned" on their platforms, it essentially forces explicit content to have cover imagery and blurbs that obfuscate the content to such a degree that misunderstandings like this can happen.
Words like "sweltering", "sizzling", "swoonworthy" in combination with "romance" are meant to be a clue that there is sex in the writing, but the cover simply can not be obvious about that without risking the book (and the author's entire account) being unlisted without communication or recourse.