Little Darlings

I’ll put it this way: this cover might have sold well back when the notorious Olympia Press was selling its banned books with plain green covers containing the title and byline and little else, but that era was well over half a century ago now, and just about nobody automatically assumes plain binding means salacious content these days. Personally, when I first saw your cover in thumbnail, I thought it was going to be another generic book of flowery poetry and/or women’s literature. If not for reading the title and tagline and your summary, I might still think it to be one of those kinds of books.

Not only is the current imagery far too subtle, but it’s hardly even there: the circle with the drawing in it at the bottom just looks like a weird decoration at any zoom level, and the pale pink flower petals are all but invisible in the thumbnail due to being set against a white background surrounded by so much pale pink border. Sure, flower petals are popular visual metaphors for various forms of sexual “innocence” and the loss thereof in certain contexts, but the rest of the cover isn’t really providing any such contextual clues. As for the tiny drawing in the circle of a gal blowing a kiss, I thought for a moment there before getting it at maximum zoom that she was holding a cup of coffee with a bit of steam rising off of it.

Without knowing exactly what kind of sexual “innocence” is being lost here, I’m not sure exactly what kind of imagery to suggest. Are these hot-and-heavy “The Incredibly Immoral Way I Destroyed My V-Card” kinds of stories, or just lighthearted slice-of-life “My Horrific Discovery That Valentine’s Day Isn’t Really About Getting Free Candy Killed My Childhood” types of tales? Wherever the stories in your collection register on that spectrum, it remains that you need to have whatever imagery is suitable to accompany them front-and-center and looming large on your cover where all your prospective readers can see it.

If you’re approaching this “loss of innocence” from the lighter side of the spectrum, of course, you’ll want something with just enough visual innuendo to make clear that the situations in these stories aren’t entirely platonic. Interestingly, something I’ve seen on the covers of a number of romances for kids in middle school (age ranging from 11 to 14, so you know they can’t get too steamy) is a picture of a young couple’s feet with the girl standing on her tiptoes. Everything’s clean and wholesome, everybody’s fully clothed, but… yeah, that’s a pretty stimulating image when you’re old enough to understand its implications.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, well… I probably don’t need to tell you much about that. Just about any kind of imagery goes, including some truly hard-R-rated stuff. Even if what you’re writing is out-and-out pornography, though, you should never go beyond the hard R; for all that Amazon and Smashwords have eased off of their restrictions since tightening them greatly in 2011, they and the other sales sites still don’t accept any covers with X-rated stuff on them.

In between these extremes is pretty much everything else, from trashy romances to “soft” erotica. The cover of Alissa Nutting’s book Tampa at the link Gwen Katz provided above, by my reckoning, would rate a hard PG-13: despite nobody’s revealing any skin or naughty parts in that shot, the meaning of its blatant symbolism is almost impossible to miss if you know your facts of life. (Moreover, the contents of that book are just plain X-rated: it’s a story told in exquisite detail from the point of view of a voluptuous sociopathic nymphomaniac teacher who’s molesting her 14-year-old male students with the intent of giving them such an intense experience that no subsequent girlfriends they may have will ever be able to satisfy them.) Ron Miller’s sample cover I’d rate PG: aside from Nabokov’s descriptive prose being far more restrained than Nutting’s, the meaning of the symbolism of the three intersecting pink strips and the heart-shaped lollipop’s placement on them takes a little longer to process even for those of us who’ve already read the book.

Getting back to your cover, I recommend assessing how your stories would rate if they were movies and then making the imagery on your cover one rating softer. After you’ve got your cover’s imagery figured out, then we can consider what font to use for your captions instead of Times New Roman. (Hitch will doubtless help you with that part whenever she gets here.) In the meantime, however, you can dump the tagline altogether; as Katz notes, if the imagery is doing its job, you shouldn’t need words to describe the content.

Yes, what I’ve just recommended is basically throwing out the whole cover and starting over from scratch, but that’s honestly just about your only option at this point.