There seems to be an eternal debate amongst romance readers about book covers. I started reading romance in college—around 2015—and at that time I felt like covers gave you a pretty clear picture of what to expect.
- Shirtless torso with some rippling abs? Contemporary romance with high spice.
- Regency lady in a pretty dress? Historical romance with medium steam.
- Illustrated cover? Happily-ever-after women’s fiction, probably lower spice or closed-door.
Romance books have absolutely exploded in popularity since 2020, and in that time we’ve also seen a big shift in the popularity of certain kinds of covers. Specifically, illustrated covers—the kind I used to associate with women’s fiction—have become wildly popular. I was walking through the romance section in Barnes and Noble recently, and it seemed like almost every single paperback I saw had an illustrated cover.
This feels like a huge shift from where the market was even just a couple of years ago. I can’t verify this, but I suspect that there were at least two reasons for this pendulum swing. First: with so many people picking up romance for the first time during the pandemic, these covers may have been designed to feel more accessible than those featuring half-naked people. And second, readers may also have felt more comfortable reading these in public once that was safe to do again.
(This second reason, at least, was all but confirmed by a publicity director at Berkley. In an article for Refinery29 in 2018—before the pandemic, but around the time the publisher started making the shift to these illustrated covers—the director said, “while these book images weren’t designed with that thought in mind, it didn’t go unnoticed that we were creating images that no one would be fearful of displaying in public.”)
Pushback on the illustrated cover boom
Some people love these illustrated covers. I personally adore the cover for You Had Me At Hola (illustrated by Bo Feng Lin) and love basically everything by Leni Kauffman, who illustrates for popular authors like Olivia Dade. But one of the main complaints I’ve heard about the absolute inescapability of this trend, is that it’s made it harder to know what kind of book you’re getting.
Why is this a problem? Well, one of the primary jobs of a book cover is to set the reader’s expectations. Illustrated covers can be beautiful, but many of them could easily pass for a romcom or YA book. This makes it hard to know whether you’re getting a cute teen romance with a happily-ever-after, or a book with multiple explicit sex scenes.
As a quick test, for example: here are four sports romances. Two of them have explicit sex on-page; one is a romance for adults where the characters wait until marriage and no sex is shown; and one is a YA. Can you guess which is which?
(The answer: Behind the Net and Only When It’s Us are steamy romances, The Cheat Sheet is closed-door, and It’s All in How You Fall is YA.)
I also hear people complaining that the illustrated covers mean books start to blend together. It’s harder to choose between books that feel identical; in one rant about this from the r/romancebooks subreddit (one of my favorite places on the internet) a reader wrote:
What is the deal with all of the generic, nondescript illustrated book covers?… I cannot differentiate between any of the authors!
The emergence of a new trend
Recently, though, I’ve noticed a new cover trend emerging. It may have been brewing for a while, but I saw it first with Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree, a cozy fantasy romance. The cover, illustrated by Carson Daniel Lowmiller, feels painted and very evocative of D&D.
Shortly after, I saw the covers for Katee Roberts’ new series. These covers (illustrated by Anna Moshak) are beautiful and also look like paintings, but they combine the fantasy style of the above example with the nostalgic feeling of clinch covers from the 80s and 90s.
And then, most recently, I saw that cult favorite C. M. Nascosta’s Morning Glory Milking Farm got a new cover—also fantasy inspired, also with a visible call-back to clinch covers. In researching for this post, I even came across the redesigned covers for Kimberly Lemming’s books, which are also in this style (art by Mike Pape—unfortunately I couldn’t find the artist for MGMF).
Now, you know what they say. Twice is a coincidence; three times is a pattern. Four? I think this may be the new romance cover trend. Or, at least, specifically for monster romance.
Why is this happening?
I have my suspicions about why this is the new emerging style for romance covers.
Less shame around romance
First: it feels like there’s less cultural stigma around reading romance now than a few years ago. Readers who were nervous to pick up their first romance during the pandemic have now been reading the genre for years. BookTok has normalized not only reading romance but lusting after characters (and sometimes real people, to disastrous effect).
I think this also plays into a larger shift in the way we collectively make space for women’s desire and the female gaze. This genre has always had its passionate defenders (and I love you for it!), but more recently I also hear everyday people openly defending romance, and calling out our society’s tendency to mock things that bring women joy. (This is not to say, of course, that all romance readers are women—just that it’s a genre that has historically been associated with women.)
With romance feeling less taboo and more widely accepted, it wouldn’t surprise me if these covers—which feel not only like they scream “THIS IS A ROMANCE!”, but also celebrate the genre and its history, if in a tongue-in-cheek way—are becoming more popular because fewer people feel the need to hide the stories they love behind more nondescript covers.
A faster trend cycle
Second: trends change, and with TikTok, it feels they change faster than ever. We see this with microtrends in fashion, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s having the same effect on other markets, including books. Especially with the role BookTok plays in marketing books and making even older releases hugely successful, it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of readers are bored of the same style of illustrated covers, and are craving something fresh and new.
A new way of thinking about (physical) books
And third and finally, I think our relationship to books as physical objects is changing. With the huge shift towards digital reading in the last 10+ years—especially for romance readers, who often read through a program like Kindle Unlimited or Scribd—I see people treating beautiful editions of books as collectibles.
Take, for example, the recent marketing for Fourth Wing, where early purchasers got a special edition hardback with “the pretty pages” (a design stamped on the edges)—a marketing decision I’ve heard its publishing imprint, Entangled Publishing, plans to do for all their future big releases. Commenters on C.M. Nascosta’s announcement of the new cover of MGMF also shared that this would prompt them to buy a physical copy of the book, even if they’d already bought the previous edition or read the book digitally. With physical books no longer being the primary way many people consume stories, when we do buy a paperback or hardcover, we want it to be a keepsake—something worthy of displaying a story we may have read before, and already know we love.
Why do I care?
Well, mostly because I love romance, but also because I’m really interested in seeing how this market adapts and changes. Romance readers are exceptional—both in how much we read and how resilient our subgenres are to the trend cycle—and with the surge in popularity since 2020, and I feel like I’m watching the market adapt in real-time.
And, secretly, because I have skin in the game. I’m starting to release a trilogy of romances next year, so I’m actively thinking about what kind of cover style I want for those books. As I look for an artist for my covers, I’m thinking about these trends, which books they’re for, and what that means. (If you’re interested in learning more about the history of romance book covers, by the way, I can highly recommend the episode of 99% Invisible “The Clinch“.)
Right now I’m only seeing this with fantasy and monster romance, and I think that has its own reasons (at least one of which is that the tongue-and-cheek twist on the classic romance cover only works if there’s, well, a twist). I’m curious, though, whether this trend towards richer illustration will start to make its way other sub-genres. And I want to know: what do you think of this new cover style?