Wednesday 7 July 2010

You can't judge a chick lit from its cover

Aggh, lots of chick lit read but less written by me about it. This will change, I hope. After all, I'm now going to be 30 in less than a month - my official cut-off point for this project - and I still feel I've just gently caressed the surface of chick lit. So something of a slight filler post here, directly related to the surface of chick lit - their covers.

Right at the start of this blog part of my definition of what made a chick lit novel was the pastel cover and the swirly writing. It wasn't something I ever wanted to be seen carrying around (incidentally all my tube based shame has vanished - I've been proudly waving around a bright pink, sparkly copy of Divas Las Vegas all week). Anyway, the Bookseller a couple of weeks ago featured a write-up of a 'cover design conference' at which Fiona Curran, design director at Williams Murry Hamm, criticised the covers of chick lit for being overly formulaic: pink script type, pastel colours and a girlie illustration. In her honour you may have noticed I've changed the colours of this blog to her stated combo (anyone want to draw a picture of me, martini glass in one hand, pink book in the other to go with it?). Here's the example she used:


Twenties Girl by Sophie Kinsella


Encore Valentine by Adriana Trigiani

You can see her point. Oh look, pink + pastel + pretty woman on the front in a dress = GIRLS book. It's quite boring and depressing and patronising. 

The instance that really annoyed me is when a while back they decided to remarket Jane Austen as chick lit. Here's Persuasion. Spot the difference, eh? 



When they first did this what really annoyed me was that I felt they had reduced Austen to chick lit turf. That was what lots of people dismissed her as and this new cover merely shoved her further into that genre. It gave no clue to how witty, clever or interesting she really is. Now, after my explorations into chick lit, what annoys me is that they do that with all the books. Here are the covers of three different authors, three different stories and yet they are all marketed the same. 

At the same conference, David Wardle, founder of Designbydavid, said of a different genre 'To design them in such a unified format seems to devalue the content and the individual form.'

Exactly. The truth is that people do judge a book by its cover, so can we have a more diverse and range of chick lit designs please? It's just possible the readership might follow and get a bit more diverse too...

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