The author says:
In the near future, an asymptomatic and universally contagious depopulation virus engineered to accelerate the aging of human female reproductive organs soon precipitates a worldwide baby bust, leaving civilization and humanity itself in danger of extinction if people in general can’t find some way to start having more children. While various individuals and institutions all over the world bicker endlessly about this crisis, the mothers from a pair of fairly ordinary neighboring families somewhere in rural Alabama come up with a working—albeit extremely illegal—solution: since they can’t have any more babies themselves, they’ll get the children they already have to do it for them. Thanks to several rather fortuitous circumstances (e.g. an illegal teachers’ strike shutting down Alabama’s schools for months on end), their plan succeeds, but what will happen when what they’ve done is inevitably exposed to public scrutiny?
While premised on a sterility plague something like the ones in Greybeard by Brian Aldiss, Children of Men by P.D. James, and Bumped by Megan McCafferty, this is mostly just erotic fiction with a light dusting of science fiction (i.e. the titular virus) taking place in a time no more apocalyptic or dystopian or violent than our present. In other words, the vast majority of the “action” takes place between the sheets; no car chases or firefights here. Since a lot of the main characters participating in this “action” are necessarily rather underage, I also thought it best not to show any of the main characters directly on the cover, other than symbolically using that chart showing the intertwining of their family trees.
(P.S. That Impact typeface is only a placeholder. While I know some of the posters for that Jodie Foster movie The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane used it, that’s getting to be half a century ago and it’s probably rather overused these days. If you critics can suggest a better one, I’m all ears.)
Nathan says:
I assume by “underage” we’re talking about teenagers, right? Because portraying teenagers as sexy isn’t as uncommon as you think — look at all of the posters from ’80s movies about teens getting it on, or at least attempting to.
But here’s the other question: Is this comedic? Dead serious? All just sweaty humping? Whatever it is, a “sexy” novel without a sexy cover is simply a mistake. Sex sells. You’re completely burying the main attraction.
Nathan:
One comment about this, pending the submitter’s response to your questions–I do want to point out that “acceptable” underage sex, on Amazon, in erotica, is a NoFlyZone. Just mentioning this; I’ve found that any number of Erotica/Romantica authors tend not to have investigated Amazon’s rules about what is/isn’t allowed.
Aside from that, yes, if this is erotica, the cover is ALL wrong. You’ll get the wrong audience for the wrong book. And you damn sure don’t want those reviews!
It looks like a very serious Science/Medical-based or SciFi Thriller/horror/mystery.
I like the cover image, it’s intriguing but the blurb! Apart from being over long and lumpy the premise behind the book sounds illegal to me.
It’s a nice concept, but the flask totally overwhelms the cover. You should reduce the size of the flask by half, increase the size of the genetic graph coming from it and in the process make sure you leave plenty of room for the title and author name. Right now they are squeezed into the top and bottom margins.
I agree, wrong cover for the proposed story.
You need to show the sexy part, not the chemical part. you could do something ‘simple’ showing a young couple hugging/kissing in a science lab or even two bodies pressed together with the focus on a hand dropping a test tube (heads and feet off the cover), but the colors and font depend on the tone of the story. A funny story would be way different fonts than a dark one.
you arnt trying to reproduce a scene from the book but showing the overall tone of the book.
you absolutely do NOT want to market this as erotica if the protagonists are underage. Some of the books marketed for teens are very very racy but they’re never marketed as racy.
PS: If you’re dead set on the bottle you have now add the young sexy vibe by putting hearts bubbling from the bottle….lol but change the background color and use a flowery font and make the bottle smaller and centered better and remove the male/female figures as they’re just confusing.
I don’t believe this is “marketed for teens”
A steaming flask of bubbling brightly colored liquid? But that must mean… there’s SCIENCE going on here! (Sorry; I couldn’t resist.)
Yes, I dare say the premise sounds illegal, especially since the author himself says what the protagonists do is “extremely illegal” right there in his pitch! On the other hand, so is Alissa Nutting’s infamous novel Tampa, in which a budding young sexually predatory sociopath preys on her fourteen-year-old students. Likewise, while it’s mostly only mentioned in passing as part of the world building, Megan McCafferty’s Bumped (which the author also mentioned) has ten-year-old girls getting pregnant; probably not something you could just hire some really youthful-looking twenty-something actresses to portray if there were a TV or movie adaptation of it.
Note that both these books and others with similarly problematic premises besides (such as A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, which included a couple of scenes in which ten-year-old girls get raped both forcibly and statutorily; needless to say, the victims in question were aged up considerably in Stanley Kubrick’s movie adaptation) are available for sale on Amazon anyway. Their secret? All of them were traditionally published; so, I presume Mr. Idlingson here is planning to go the same route?
I further note the cover for Bumped in particular doesn’t show any teenagers getting hot-and-heavy on it, even though there’s quite a bit of that (albeit not too explicitly described since it’s a YA novel). What it does show? An egg—which is more or less appropriate, since everyone in the book is obsessed with pregnancy even more than with sex (although it also mentions a lot of the professional teen girls looking to make big bucks selling their babies have boyfriends known as “everythingbuts” presumably because they do “everything but” having potentially reproductive sex with them).
On the other hand… is a family tree—especially one using symbols that look like they belong on restroom doors—really all that sexy? Is a flask with bubbling red liquid going to get anybody’s juices flowing? They’re at least recognizable in the thumbnail, but I’m not really sure anybody’s going to look at them and think “Hey, sexy times ahead!”
On the other other hand, maybe the author is deliberately trying not to be too sexy because of how illegal everything described is? I’m not exactly an expert on age-of-consent laws and the like, but from what I turned up doing a quick internet search on Alabama’s laws, it would apparently be legal right now under that state’s existing “Romeo & Juliet” statutes for a twelve-year-old to have sex with another twelve-year-old—or with anyone up to the age of fourteen. (Anyone more than two years older, or anyone having sex with someone under the age of twelve—including even someone who’s also under the age of twelve—is automatically charged with statutory rape.) So… how illegal can the “extremely illegal” activity in this story be?
Finally, yes, Impact—like Bleeding Cowboys—is a nice font that (however) has been severely overused. I’m not sure what to recommend you use in its place. Hitch could probably give you some ideas, but—as with my trying to think what kind of imagery to recommend to you—we need some more information first.
RK:
There’s a difference, between what this publisher is selling and Tampa/Bumped.
S/he is promo’ing this to us as erotic fiction. At KDP, you can publish literary fiction including incest, underage pregnancy, rape, etc. from now until the cows come home. What you cannot do is sell erotic fiction that shows any of that as fun, or promoting that good ol’ tingly feeling.
I mean, generally speaking, in LitFic (or even Genre fic), underage, somewhat predatory sex (as is described here, the actions of the moms), with minors is shown as “bad.” Erotic fiction with it as the centerpiece would not be portraying it that way. Right?
S/he says that the vast majority of the action takes place “between the sheets.” If Amazon runs across this book, they’ll see it as erotica and if it’s all or mostly-all underage participants…well. I’m not the morality police here. I’m simply clarifying the situation. For all I know, this is only going to be published at Smashwords, where, as we all know, all bets are off.
That was the only point I was making.
Eh, even at Smashwords, no one has ever been allowed to publish erotica featuring underage characters (see section 9f of the TOS). We’re talking absolutely nothing sexual allowed involving characters so much as a day under eighteen; so, stuff from the scripts for those 1980s movies our esteemed host mentioned like Blue Lagoon, Dirty Dancing, Teen Wolf (to name just three examples)? Forget it! Not gonna happen!
I’m kinda figuring this (almost certainly male) author knows that, and is thinking to sell his erotic fiction as something else, just as those other books did. I mean, yes, Bumped and Tampa do generally indicate predatory sex with (and/or impregnation of) the underage to be “bad,” i.e. immoral; but that certainly didn’t stop them from portraying it as being “fun” and “promoting that good ol’ tingly feeling” in its participants. Heck, they’re both told from the participants’/perpetrator’s point of view!
For that matter, if we’re talking about kids under twelve in Alabama, I’m thinking the infamous “why the hell is that scene in there!?” preteen gang bang from Stephen King’s It is probably more relevant. King was—by his own admission—on drugs when he wrote that, and the reason the publishers didn’t cut it out was because he was a celebrity by then and no one could stop him. Obviously, Mr. Idlingson here is not going to be getting that same deal out of his publisher anytime soon.
Still, another reason Stephen King could get away with including that in It is because it was—in fact—a horror novel. If he’d actually tried promoting It as erotica, even if the publishers couldn’t stop him, the booksellers probably would have. (I remember something like that happening with a sexually explicit issue of DC’s Black Orchid sometime back in the 1990s; as the history book recounting this event went on to say, even though the Comics Code Authority could no longer keep publishers from putting vile stuff like that on the market, the market itself could and did, and the direct sales outlets actually managed to force DC to recall that issue and refund their money to them even though those comics were supposed to be non-returnable.)
So… maybe selling this as a “Science/Medical-based or SciFi Thriller/horror/mystery” rather than an erotic novel is the way to go? That doesn’t strike me as a very viable marketing strategy, but we’re Cover Critics, not marketing experts. Also, though the author insists this is “no more apocalyptic or dystopian or violent than our present” is, it occurs to me our time is already rather apocalyptic, dystopian, and violent; so why not “embrace the suck” and just roll with a cover for “dystopian story set twenty minutes into the future” here?
Waaahl, agreed–we’re not MarketingCritics.com. My comment was prompted solely by the submitter’s very specific statement about how he plans to market/sell it, etc. (“…this is mostly just erotic fiction with a light dusting of science fiction…”)
That’s it.
It’s been about a week since this was posted and no one is saying anything more about it, so time to respond, I guess. For the record, yes, I’m aware that Amazon and Smashwords (and Barnes & Noble and Lulu, for that matter) would never publish this. That’s why I’m working with a hybrid publisher of erotic fiction which is a successor to the infamous Olympia Press, and which provides its own sales pages for books such as this one that can’t be sold in those mainstream outlets. (That’s also why this book has no back cover: they publish only electronically these days.)
As for the general contents and tone of this story: there’s a smattering of comedy, more than a little drama, and lots of sexual tension, but the overall mood is more ponderous than anything else. The difference between erotic fiction and pornography is that erotic fiction is a full story with some explicit sex in it, whereas pornography is just explicit sex with little or no story. Though this erotic fiction novel (slightly more than 100,000 words long) has lots of mentions of various people having sex, it only has about four scenes in two chapters—out of eleven—that actually describe the “sweaty humping” (as you put it) in explicit detail; the other nine consist of a long buildup to these climactic moments and then a detailed epilogue dealing with what happens to all the main characters in the aftermath.
Get someone to model the severely underage characters on my cover? I thought my “elevator pitch” was getting a bit overlong already, but maybe I should have spelled this out: the two newly pubescent boys whose mothers convince them to impregnate each other’s little sisters in this story are each eleven years old. I don’t think even Michael J. Fox and Matthew Broderick in their prime could have played anyone that young. Maybe the British actor Jack Wild who successfully played an eleven-year-old when he was seventeen and shaving could have done it, but:
(A) He’s dead.
(B) Even if I could find a couple of adults who could fake being that young, they’d probably never agree to model for my cover.
(C) Even if they would agree, I could never afford their services.
Besides, considering my publisher (which also calls itself the Olympia Press, and sells many of its predecessor’s old books alongside its newer offerings) is coasting on its predecessor’s reputation as a purveyor of “forbidden” erotic fiction, any customers looking at this cover while browsing the site will be expecting erotic fiction already. Mostly, I just need to give them an idea of what kind of erotic fiction they’ll be getting. Hence the hint of mad science—or rather “no one ought to be allowed to have this kind of power” science—on the cover. (The villain who engineered the titular virus is actually pretty rational—which just makes him more villainous.)
That said, I’ll admit maybe boiling red fluid and family diagrams featuring symbolic male and female figures—an idea I got from a condom wrapper, by the way—won’t encourage anyone browsing through book covers online to take a closer look at mine. I’m not wedded to either of these images, but what do you suggest showing instead? I don’t think even the perverts running the re-established Olympia Press would actually allow me to show those symbolic girl and boy figures coupling on the cover in the cowgirl and missionary positions like the man and woman figures were doing on that condom wrapper.
maybe something like this will say “Kids, Taboo” and the publisher itself will inform the reader as to level of eroticism.
https://imgur.com/ucXo1GH
(if you like the font it’s Norwester free at Font Squirrel)
IDK, Syd….that looks to me, with the kids holding hands, and running, and the title “precocity” that you’re just talking about gifted, smart kids.
That’s what precocity is–intelligence ahead of the age, not sexuality ahead of the age. Yes, “flowering” early is part of it–but I think that 99% of people think of intellectual flowering, not the other kind of “budding early.”
Just my $.02, which, again, is not worth what’s being paid for it.