Cover rant: Nora Roberts

My love affair with Nora Roberts is well-known amongst regular readers and well-documented on this blog. The recent covers for her US contemporaries have been great (Bride Quartet and Inn Boonsboro) – very dreamy and romantic – and I’ve loved them. There’s been some slight changes for a few titles for the UK versions, but they’re ones that I can live with.

NR’s books are constantly being reissued and none so more than ever for Kindle with brand new spanking covers to match. I’ve generally approved (MacKades, Dream trilogy, Stars of Mithra) because they’ve been great choices. NR has been writing since 1981, so her ‘contemporaries’ thirty years ago can’t really be called as such today, but she writes with such a timelessness that it doesn’t matter; her books could be set in the seventeenth century and you might not notice. While you can probably tell with the older books that it is slightly out-of-date, there is never enough to properly pinpoint the book to a set timeframe, and so I find myself not really caring that it is twenty years old and some practices just aren’t done anymore. This is Nora Roberts for Chrissakes: she’s The Master.

My Abhorrence of: New Book Covers

I really really hate this. Particularly where a series is reissued with new covers and the series hasn't even finished. Okay, I understand that they're doing it to market the books and boost sales; I even accept that sometimes (rarely, I've found) the new covers are nicer than the old ones, but in principle, I just hate it.

Firstly, for a purely selfish reason. Where I own the series, then it'll just mess up my entire shelf if the series is still ongoing and I'd been planning on buying the next books. Yes, I know, I shouldn't judge books by their cover, but I do and I can't help it and new covers are just a pet hate of mine.

Secondly: when they just get it completely, absolutely WRONG. At the moment, a lot of covers of YA novels targeted at teenage girls will feature a girl posing in a pretty dress. Mainly paranormal books, but other genres too. At first it was cool and I came across some awesome covers, but now it's gotten old and lots are not particularly attractive. I admit that if a book has a pretty cover, then I probably won't care too much that it's not 100% related to the content of the book itself, but when the cover is just totally wrong for the timeline in which the book is set - then I get annoyed. [There's a word for when stuff is in the wrong chronological order, but I can't remember what it is. Anyone?]

I had actually planned a post based around this, but it wasn't going to be until quite a while ahead. But I was doing stuff on Shelfari and I saw the new covers for a trilogy of books that I like, and I saw red.