blergh

[erastes]

Ruddy freezing and Monsieur "too good to stay more than a month with you plebs"-Malfoy is off on one of his jaunts. This will be his fifth in a year. I've stopped worrying. At least Sevvie loves me.

I've just started "A Cold-blooded Scoundrel" by J S Cook (joannesopercook) and I'm terribly impressed, it's nicely written (very), has good early forensics (to a layman's eyes) and begins with a bang. A burnt body and a bloody thumbprint in a cold Victorian London alley.  So far it's highly recommended to those of you who like detective fiction. A nice bonus that her MC's are gay - but she didn't set out to write them that way according to this interview.  I hope she continues her Inspector Devlin for a while, because I like him, even if I want to smack his repressed arse. I'll certainly be buying more at this rate if the book continues as well as it has so far. Watch out for a full review on Speak Its Name this week.

It's been a sad kinda of weekend as everyone's either been busy or.. um... busy!  I need to find more writerly friends I can procrastinate with perhaps. or perhaps ... yanno.. write? Or get a life. Stop worrying where everyone is or something.

LindenBay have sent me a rough WIP cover for Frost Fair and it's partly what I was thinking of. I'm hoping with some tweaks we can make a lovely cover.  However their insistence on having nekkid men on every cover they do baffles me. Personally I find THIS

 or this
much sexier than THIS.



Well, not SEXIER, per se, but I'd rather have a casually unbuttoned uniform, a loose cravat, perhaps a hand creeping under the jacket on the cover of my book than nakedness. But then I'm probably just weird. 

Oh well, that's me done. Off to bed to warm up!

Comments

[lilian-cho.livejournal.com]

Same here with partially undressed men v. completely nekkid men.

But then again, I have a uniform fetish.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, I'm so with you there!

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

But any artist or lingerie specialist or photographer knows that putting a texture contrast against flesh makes the flesh stand out all the more. You often look more nekkid weaing just a little...something...than bald as an artist's model. (A cravat will do...)
And that's purely the artistic. That's not even talking about building a social context in which nekkidness has meaning and resonance and Consequences.
For instance, those uniforms make it a very Big Deal to have the pants unbuttoned at the wrong time. As any exhibitionist knows, the cost of discovery sharpens pleasure for some folks. Not everybody, of course.
It could be the art director feels their customers are just plain old tired of covers showing closeted lovers and more fully nekkid means no holding back, they've tossed out sense along with the suspenders. It may mean they're not turning people off who are afraid of historicals, or the pickies who argue about the style of braid on the jacket.
It could be simply that the more skin they show, the better the sales are--hey, everybody's got a preference for body parts, let's just show them everything.
But I think a *lot* of folks have a uniform fetish!
*G!*
I'm with you on the mood. "Don't wanna do chores, don't wanna work on the book, no budget for skating the net the way I'd like to. Bored, let's do something *eeeelse* like lookit pix of nekkie guys."

[erastes.livejournal.com]

I don't know - they just seem to have naked covers!

[zamaxfield.livejournal.com]

I pick 'or this'. (Hand fetish)

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Ditto, me too. I would have found more, but I was cold.

[adventurat.livejournal.com]

I love "or this" - so piquing! Nekkid men in a clinch just says "pr0n here"; the other hints at a great story that includes some sex.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

I agree, it's more intriguing. I'm going to do a proper poll, try and get as much coverage as possible and then point publishers to it. It's all very well when you are buying on line, it comes wrapped up but in a shop I wouldn't look at a naked book, in preference for a uniformed one. And it will come to the day when these books are in shops.

[cassiopaya.livejournal.com]

I must agree about the piccies! I find subtle sexy as well.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

It seems just about everyone is of the same opinion - amazing how the nekkid cover is still so omnipresent.

[mongrelheart.livejournal.com]

*nod* Yeah i prefer subtly suggestive too. The totally butt-nekkid stuff just kinda embarrasses me.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Gah - me too. I have to keep all my gay historicals on a shelf upstairs!

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

I pick the uniformed men. Because this is what the different covers say to me:

Men in uniform: The uniforms suggest a distinct time and place. The night connotes a clandestine meeting or affair. And the hands going toward each other's buttoned flies says so much about desire under difficult circumstances.

Nekkid men: It tells me nothing about the time, the place or the circumstances of the men in question. The two naked men tell me that this is just another male/male pairing, long on sex, short on story. I would be ashamed to order it from a library or a bookstore, and probably wouldn't.

The naked men cover says that it's all about the porn. The uniformed men cover says that it's a rattling good story with some passionate sex included.

I know which one I'd rather be seen reading.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Hear hear - lets hope we can get some good advertising for our poll when we do it and change people's minds!

[mzcalypso.livejournal.com]

The cover art at Linden Bay is formula. Then again, almost all cover art in that genre is formula. I don't think publishers in general realize that their readers have much discretion--but they're trying for as many readers as possible, not only people with taste and discrimination, and nekkid gets attention.

Great to see Joanne S-C is getting her Victorian men published--though after all her Holmes/Watson and Holmes/Lestrade slash I don't believe for a minute that she didn't set out to make them gay.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

But it's possible to have both, in my opinion. Take The Back Passage - imagine a naked man lying there with a navy blue coat with buttons. Or perhaps with his hand inside his placket? That's attention grabbing too!

I wondered about the slash too!

:)

[lovefromgirl.livejournal.com]

Oh, honey. Archie is sexier than gay porn by far.

...then again, I am a sucker for men in Napoleonic-era uniform.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Me too!!

[megleigh.livejournal.com]

I would much prefer the uniformed men with hands sneaking towards realms forbidden! I love that kinda thing. And Archie? Well, he's just one bucket of cute isn't he?

Mussed but dressed is good for me, too. Nekkid is a li'l in ya face for my liking.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

One of my favourite scenes is where Horatio carries near-dead Archie through the rain..

gah!!

[leni-jess.livejournal.com]

Have to admit I took one look at the nekkid pic and started thinking about splinters, which is not sexy. Even if I liked the porn-star look in illos, which I don't. Boring, plastic, unreal. Then I started thinking about the weather and the probable outdoor temperature, and got utterly distracted from the intent of the pic. I'm with nagasvoice on the significance of context. Implication is so much richer than in-your-face baldness.

Good luck, though it's hard to fight marketing policy.

[lee-rowan.livejournal.com]

Hear, hear. The over-buffed, boot-camp scalped look is apparently a turn-on for muscle queens, but I don't like it at all and I don't write stories about men who look like that. Most real men have normal physiques. The guys I find interesting, the characters I want to write about, have too much happening in their lives to spend time waxing their bodies.

I wonder if it'd be worthwhile for someone to run a poll among m/m readers and ask what they like. To me, the total nudity does just say porn, and I don't care what statistics say about what gets attention--I think a well-written story with an intriguing cover will get more long-term readers than something porny.

[zamaxfield.livejournal.com]

I like the nekkid men as well, just to be honest, it doesn't say porn to me, except on the cover of a book. I think pretty (when I just see the photo).

[erastes.livejournal.com]

And it's not going to make me want to pick it up. I never would have bought Ransom by the cover alone. I only got interested in it when it started to get offered on Amazon "buy Ransom with Standish" and I wondered why.

[annebrooke.livejournal.com]

I agree re the pictures - clothes are much sexier - it's the mystery of what's going on underneath!

A
xxx

[erastes.livejournal.com]

My mother always said, "always wear something in bed" - so I do - socks!

[mylodon.livejournal.com]

I agree with you entirely.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

I think most people do - it's odd isn't it?

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Yes of course I did! It's from here

http://squidge.org/~praxisters/hh/index.html

[aunty_marion]

Agreed - the naked ones are 'art' and very pretty too. But the hands-on-plackets one is much 'sexier'.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Nod nod!

[anderyn.livejournal.com]

I love the first two (the second one is more, ah, oh YES!) but the third.... eh. I wouldn't buy a book with that cover, I just wouldn't.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Well, that's not the cover they suggested, just a naked pic I found, but yes, I agree with you!

[katjak.livejournal.com]

Eep, where are those uniform pictures from?

[erastes.livejournal.com]

the first one is just a still of Archie from Hornblower, and the other one is from The Theban Band's slash art site, cropped.

[girluknow.livejournal.com]

I agree with you on the dressed v. undressed, to the point where I avoid purchasing books with covers like the ones Linden Bay produces. In fact, the only Linden Bay novel I've purchased is Ransom. It's not just that the covers aren't well-done. They're genuinely awful (and I never thought I'd say that about naked or half-naked men). I felt terrible for the author of Captain's Surrender because that is one of the most off-putting covers I've ever seen. Do these terrible covers really sell the books better? That's depressing.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

I tend to agree. The cover for Speak Its Name (the anthology which will have Lee Rowan and me and Charlie Cochrane in) is pretty nice - all three of us worked hard with the publisher to try and get it as tasteful as we could. I think it's a case of money, good cover artists like Anne Cain charge a lot more than these small publishers can afford.

[fiona-glass.livejournal.com]

I'm with you guys on the nekkid vs non-nekkid. The second 'or this' is so much more *suggestive* - your mind fills in the gaps so much more naughtily than when it's presented with two undressed bodies. And I kind of thought that's what erotica was about...

[erastes.livejournal.com]

I wonder if it's just a women thing? I need some input from the men...

[lee-rowan.livejournal.com]

Interesting.. of the top 25 in the current Amazon Gay Romance, only 9 show nudity--and 2 of those are neck/shoulder (one is the WW cover in my icon.) Many of them, including Standish--which has hit #1 in the US, the UK, and Canada--has nothing but a building.

I maintain that the most powerful sex organ is the one above the eyebrows.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

hee hee!

Buildings are the new nude!

[zamaxfield.livejournal.com]

I wanted to say, it's not nudity that bothers me so much, but the uninteresting display of blatent sex play. A kiss, such as on the cover of Walking Wounded, is pretty, and sexy, and I have that book and liked it. I thought it was sweet. I don't reject books if they have naked men on the cover, but I'm likely to hide them from the kids. Alas, Back Passage came out of a pile I was reading and shocked the little ones a tad.

I really hate books with men who have bad long hair on the cover. That's a personal pet peeve that makes me crazy. These are models, right? Can they not artfully dislodge their hair from the helmet-head? Do they not have mirrors?

Still sighing over the hands picture...