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.

[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."

[zamaxfield.livejournal.com]

I pick 'or this'. (Hand fetish)

[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.

[cassiopaya.livejournal.com]

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

[mongrelheart.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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).

[annebrooke.livejournal.com]

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

A
xxx

[mylodon.livejournal.com]

I agree with you entirely.

[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.

[aunty_marion]

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

[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.

[katjak.livejournal.com]

Eep, where are those uniform pictures from?

[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]

Oh yes, I'm so with you there!

[erastes.livejournal.com]

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

[erastes.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

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

[erastes.livejournal.com]

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