As I’ve mentioned before, I’m tired of seeing headless women on royal book covers, and so is Mandy from The Royal Representative: Royal book cover review

I thought maybe I should occasionally post current royalty book covers featuring women with heads. However, the headless/faceless trend is so prevalent that I’m having trouble finding popular-history books or historical novels with covers that don’t look like this:

 

 

The cover of Sandra Gulland’s novel Mistress of the Sun, about Louis XIV’s mistress Louise de la Valliére, does show the heroine from the neck up. Quite a novelty these days.

 

 

Royal Weddings, edited by Friederike Haedecke and Julia Melchior, takes a look at the pageantry of royal weddings in such countries as Sweden, Japan, and Spain. The text is in English and German.

The book includes 125 color and 57 black-and-white illustrations, including wedding invitations and little-known photos capturing private moments. It also has a very nice cover, which unfortunately isn’t being shown on Amazon.com yet, but Friederike Haedecke sent it to me so Royalty.nu visitors could see it. Here it is:

Thank you to Friederike for this image!

This post on Catherine Delors’ very entertaining blog led me to two interesting posts about historical fiction book covers on writer Julianne Douglas’s Writing the Renaissance blog:

Knowing a book by its cover
Dream covers

Personally, I hate the “headless woman” cover craze. You can read my earlier comments on the subject here:
Perkin Warbeck’s chin

I like to see portraits or old paintings on book covers, and it annoys me to see them cut off in weird places, or with the faces (usually female) unnecessarily obscured.

As Catherine Delors mentions in her post, Sheramy from the blog Van Gogh’s Chair commented on Julianne Douglas’s original post, “The point of much historical fiction is to give faces and voices to women of the past, and then the covers take their faces away.” Exactly!

For example, the cover of Sena Jeter Naslund’s novel Abundance, which is about Marie Antoinette:

This illustration doesn’t say “French court” or “Marie Antoinette” to me. It says “anonymous woman holding ugly fan at strange angle.”

What a wasted opportunity, when the cover could have looked like this:

Now, that says Marie Antoinette to me, probably because it IS Marie Antoinette (public domain image from Wikimedia).

I would love to see that on the cover of a book because, as I said before, I like looking at historical portraits. And a portrait isn’t a portrait without a face.

So please, publishers, bring back the faces. You’ll sell more books that way — at least when I’m the one buying the books.

(P.S. I took the title of this post from a C.S. Lewis novel that doesn’t have anything to do with book covers — but it’s a good book.)

On the Writing With a Foreign Accent blog, author Catherine Delors explains how the cover of her recently published historical novel, Mistress of the Revolution, was created.

I don’t know exactly why — maybe it’s the subtle title — but something about this made me laugh:

As you can see, The Future King’s Pregnant Mistress by Penny Jordan is from the Royal House of Niroli series. From the cover blurb:

“It’s time for playboy prince Marco to claim his rightful place–on the throne of Niroli! Marco Fierezza is used to being obeyed– especially by the women he beds! …But what will this king-in-waiting do when he discovers his mistress is pregnant?”

My goodness, what a dilemma! But since it’s a romance novel, I think I can guess how this will end up.

All kidding aside, I’ve read a few Harlequins (although none about royalty), and I think some were by Penny Jordan. And they were not bad if you like light entertainment (I do).

There are a lot of these royalty romances around now, so someone must be reading them, despite the increasingly silly titles. Does anyone out there have an opinion, good or bad, to share about these books?

From historical fiction writer Susan Higginbotham’s blog:
Her royal cleav– er, destiny

I seem to be in the mood to complain right now, so let’s talk about a book cover that really, really annoys me:

The book is The Perfect Prince by Ann Wroe. I read it a few months ago. It’s about Perkin Warbeck, who claimed to be the lost Tudor prince Richard, Duke of York (one of the Princes in the Tower).

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would give this book a 5. It was interesting, but I didn’t find myself agreeing with the writer’s conclusions. Her style is ultra-literary, and a little of that goes a long way for me. But in places it worked, and the book did hold my attention all the way to the end, and — well, never mind the review, let’s talk about that awful cover.

What made the publisher think I wanted to see a picture of Perkin Warbeck’s chin?!

If that is his chin. Is it? It could be someone else’s chin, for all I know.

The book contains other pictures of Mr. Warbeck, but they’re not very good. That portrait on the cover looks good. I want to see that. But the publisher’s not going to show it to me, oh no. The publisher is going to show me only the chin. Because that’s more artistic!

There are many beautiful portraits of Marie Antoinette. Here is what Carrolly Erickson’s publisher put on the cover of her novel The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette:

That’s very pretty. Or it would be if I could see it. Marie Antoinette was famous for her hairstyles. So why can’t I see her hair? Why can’t I see her whole dress? I want to see a portrait of Marie Antoinette, not a portrait of her elbow!

OK, I’ve complained enough. I feel better now. I’m sure the publishers of the world will immediately take heed of my wishes and start putting full portraits on book covers, not chins and elbows. If not, I may be forced to complain again. Beware.