I once edited a romance author who would not describe characters. She mostly wrote tight third person on the heroine (that is, reader in the heroine’s head), and never had her heroine itemise her looks in a mirror, so her heroines were entirely featureless, and her heroes were given the absolute minimum of ‘tall,dark and handsome’. Asked to fill in character description sheets for the art form, she would refuse point blank and demand a landscape cover. She insisted that the reader should be able to physically identify with the heroine, to become the heroine, and that description just got in the way.
Obviously this makes a huge and rude assumption about the motives of romance readers (I don’t need to imagine a different life for me, thanks), not to mention their gender and race. Also, it meant her characters were fairly indistinguishable. And mostly, romances with landscape covers never sell. So I politely attempted to suggest that she might just fill in the goddamn cover form and stop bitching already, and got an email in return informing me that she would not tolerate a cliched, trite stock image on the cover that looked nothing like the characters in her head.
Which is, I suspect, what the ‘no description’ thing was about. She had a long career, she had written many books back in the days of illustrated covers where you could dictate what the characters looked like rather than having to sacrifice your firstborn to the Stock Photography Gods in the hope of someone roughly the same species as your hero, and she couldn’t handle having the person on the cover be different to the one in her imagination.
(Incidentally, the designer did a cover with a random guy in a jumper, safe in the knowledge that the author didn’t have his phone number. She went ballistic.)
Ask any author and you are likely to get wails of agony about cover models. The grossly overused ones (there is a whole blog series about this), the ones that look nothing like the character. Ask a cover artist and you’ll get wails about authors doing ludicrously specific descriptions and the difficulty of finding anything halfway decent on Shutterstock. Ask a reader and they’ll probably complain that the cover doesn’t look anything like the person in their head, who is not the same as the person in the book anyway.
No, not kidding. Stephen in A Charm of Magpie series is 5’0 tall, a fact which is repeatedly made clear. Yet I’ve seen readers insist, point blank, that he’s taller, or at least fight against it.
In The Magpie Lord, my inclination was to make Stephen taller. Unfortunately, the text kept reminding me that he was not tall. (Kaetrin, romance reviewer)
Equally, Jake in the Adrien English series by Josh Lanyon is a dark-haired cop, unless you read what the author actually wrote, which is that he’s blond. I have to tell you, this is wrong: Jake is dark, dammit. I am not alone in this opinion, so much that Lanyon has commented with bewilderment on it. The books do actually make it clear he’s blond. But…well…not in my head, he’s not.
I quoted Kaetrin above, from her blog post on the default hero and heroine. She says she has a tendency to ‘reset’ her mental image of heroes to a particular physical default (e.g. dark-haired six-foot white guy) unless the writing prevents her.
Do other people have their own default characters? Might this explain (at least in part) why, when two people read the same book, they might see something completely different in the characters?
Certainly, two people can read a book and come out with a totally different mental image of the main characters. I was browsing reviews of a book I liked recently, one with both heroes on the cover, and came across a string of reviews which said:
- the cover was perfect for both characters
- the cover had a good Hero A but Hero B was nothing like the character
- the cover had a good Hero B but Hero A was completely wrong
- the cover was totally wrong for both characters
- the cover was just a routine stock image thing with no effort put into it
(The last of which…I feel for the designer.)
I have, to date been incredibly lucky with my covers. If they aren’t the people in my head, they are at least in the same postcode. The one I had the most trouble with is the model used for Stephen. He’s not bad, I like him, he just isn’t how I see Stephen. Interestingly, he’s also the one for which I have had the most reader comments…and they have all been how lucky I am to have such a perfect model for the character.
Obviously, I want to howl He doesn’t look like that! But I’m wrong. Because if the reader thinks he looks like that, then he does. The reader’s Stephen is an intersection of their brain and my book and the character himself and possibly the cover image. That will always be the case, and it’s why my author was absurd to refuse description to ward off anyone seeing her characters in the way she didn’t want. The readers were never going to see what she saw anyway. They were going to make their own characters. All that her anti-description stance did was to ensure that they saw a default stock image.
Did I “create” Mr. and Ms. Default in response to a certain… blandness in characterisation in my reading? In other words, was there a vacuum and Mr/Ms. Default was created by my imagination (aided perhaps, by pop culture) merely to fill it? (Kaetrin)
***
I have been musing on this because I received an epic compliment this weekend. Reader Lydmila Tsapaeva sent me a drawing she did of the main characters of Flight of Magpies (and if you’re thinking this whole post is just an excuse to share it, ssshh).
Obviously, I love this, and the fact that she did it, and just everything about this. I have rarely felt so thrilled. But what’s fascinating for me is, here are my characters visually mediated through a reader’s mind. I can see how she sees them. The Magpies cover designer, Lou Harper, is outstanding but she’s still stuck with finding and using existing photos of actual people*; Lydmila is going from my imagination via her own to the page, putting in characterisation and movement and interaction and life. This is as close to me seeing someone’s experience of reading me as it’s going to get.
For the record: Crane (the arrogant blond) and Jonah (the dark-haired pest) have been teleported from my brain here: we are in full agreement. Crane is quiveringly perfect for me. Lydmila’s Stephen (short redhead) is more, ooh, manic, less vulnerable than mine (though a lot closer than the cover photo model), and my Merrick (gentleman’s gentleman) is a lot rougher than hers. Which isn’t to say they’re ‘wrong’. They can’t be wrong: they’re how she sees the characters. But it’s fascinating to see how they work against (with? alongside?) how I see them, to consider the elements in what I wrote that may have led to her interpretation, from book character to image. And if you’re a Magpie reader, I’d love to know how they stack up against your version.
(Here, for comparison, are the photo versions of Crane, Stephen and Jonah (on the right of Jackdaw). For me, Crane is 8/10, Stephen 5/10 and Jonah 9/10 if he was a bit skinnier. I told you I was lucky.)
*Let us all take a minute to consider that the Magpie Lord cover model actually exists as a human being. My God.
________________________________
Give me cover art complaints, criticism, funny stories or an explanation of why I’m wrong about Stephen in the comments!
Flight of Magpies is out now. Jackdaw is out in February. Huge, huge thanks to Lydmila Tsapaeva for the glorious art.
KJ Charles 
Funny, whenever I see your book covers, I think, “That’s not what Crane looks like. At all.”
Hee!
Ha, that’s interesting! He’s a bit too young but pretty good for me (though I prefer Lydmila’s version, for definite…)
I agree. Lydmila’s version is amazing!
Whenever i read Stephen is five foot… i must admit I am like *nope, he’s not, he’s cutely small but he’s not actually that small”… nods.. then Crane lifts him… (I just need a minute – Crane lifts Stephen… Crane is lifting and doing all kinds of… okay, back. So yeah. Apparently Riley in my Texas series has dark hair according to quite a few people, even though I write him as blond. That fascinates me. 🙂
Is there anyone dark who gets seen as blond, I wonder? I don’t think I default to dark usually but it does seem to go that way.
The fan art’s Crane also is pretty close to mine, and the Jonah is good too! The fan art Stephen is too cute/young-looking, though; the Stephen in my head is delicate but stubborn and too reserved to have the body language in the fan art (body language is enormous; when I draw, I often find myself thinking about how people’s carriage/mannerisms reflect who they are). And my internal Merrick is a bruiser, not a butler!
Your covers have always struck me as lucky as well, in that they’re not horrendously off from how you describe the characters. But honestly, I don’t really like the stock photography covers on most romance novels precisely because I don’t like having my internal image replaced.
I fear covers. I take hours to pluck up the nerve to open them in case of Stock Photo Hell. One day my luck will run out…
I’m not 100% crazy about the Crane on the covers, but I like the fanart version. And Stephen on the covers fit how I see him. He looks like a pre-teen in the fanart though lol. A little too “Peter Pan”
And funny how you mention Jake from Andrien English. I KNOW he was blond, but I could NEVER imagine him as blond. He was always tall dark and handsome and when I would read “blond” ugh!
And as for as the non-described heroine, I believe Sophie Kinsella went that way in her Confessions of a Shopaholic series. Drove me crazy that I could not figure out what she looked like…until I read online somewhere that it was intentional.
You know what, I think I hate the ‘everywoman’ idea of not describing characters. If I want to read a book that makes me the main character, I’ll get a Choose Your Own Adventure. Otherwise I want the author to create a character I can get to know, including appearance.
Also I hate with a passion that idea of not describing characters because readers need placeholder protagonists. I’ve had a conversation with an author recently who was shocked to realise that all romance readers were not projecting themselves into the stories, that placeholding is only one way of reading. It isn’t how I read for one. I’m also fairly visual so when I’m reading I am thinking of how people look, of the way a room is laid out, what a gesture might actually be… by the end of a book I haven’t just followed a series of events I’ve seen the people living them and through them their world.
Me too, because it implies that our appearance has no bearing on our personality, which is patently not true, because what a person looks like affects the way other people treat them and therefore the way they feel about themselves. Good looking people are treated differently than average people, fat people differently than thin people, etc. And it starts in childhood, so the effect is deep and permanent.
This. Exactly. And *particularly* with ref to race. To suggest that you can just tint the skin tone in your head and have a POC hero/ine is such a spectacular expression of white privilege.
Ooh, great post KJ! Haha, I don’t think I’d ever want just a landscape cover for a theoretical book I wrote, but it really would bug the heck out of me to have people who didn’t look the least bit how I imagined them. I typically prefer artwork of people on covers rather than actual photos also. For some reason I can’t ever accept people from photos as the characters, they seem too jarringly real to me, somehow, compared to my mental image of a character which really is more like a drawing or painting, I think. Sort of like a person from a dream. In a way it reminds of the difference, in the old days, between watching videotaped TV movies as opposed to movies on film. I disliked the video ones because they looked & felt “too real”, which is very strange actually.
With some books, like your Magpie Lord series, the cover images make such an impression that it *creates* the image I see of the character. But then there are covers like the one for Alexis Hall’s Glitterland. That cover picture created this weird dissonance for me, though most of that wasn’t due to the cover itself but to me not paying attention. Before I started reading the book I thought (pretty stupidly given how he looks) that he was supposed to be Ash! Possibly due to his expression & the fact I knew from the blurb that Ash was the main character. As I read I realized the cover was supposed to be Darian. But I could not make Darian look like that in my head. At the same time, Darian persisted in being a blond in my head, which I kept trying to correct but could not. Ash, on the other hand, I finally got Alexis to give me a vague-ish description that sounded (to me) slightly like a young Jeremy Irons. Which totally works, but now my mind tries to make him a bizarre cross between Jeremy Irons & that cover model – arrgh! And also, in the Adrien English novels, I absolutely saw Jake as blond, & Adrien as looking like an even-better-looking version of Montgomery Clift 😉 my image was totally based on the description in the books.
I definitely don’t default to a type in how I imagine book characters, but maybe that’s because I don’t have a default type in life. But sometimes my view of a character is influenced by their personality. Your cover photo for “Think of England” is sort of similar but not quite how I picture Archie, for example. Also, in your fan-art picture here, the one most off from how I imagine him is Merrick, as you say I also picture him a lot rougher than that.
Anyway, it’s all quite fascinating 🙂
I agree on Archie! Great cover, not Archie but really as good as it normally gets, and certainly not *wrong”. I don’t love the Glitterland cover for Darian though I think it’s a good cover for the book, if that makes sense…
Your covers are pretty close – at least I can really see Crane in the model but not Stephan som much. I was just reading Kaetrin’s review of ‘Rogue Spy’ and the blonde guy on the cover is much closer to my image of Crane – on your current covers he is too young and bland for me http://www.kaetrinsmusings.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Rogue-Spy.jpg I will give your cover models cheekbones a sigh in passing though. Also I imagine Tom Redmayne when I think of Stephen http://thefilmstage.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/eddie-redmayne-620×347.jpg and Merrick is definitely a big bruiser.
The Rogue Spy guy is good, though I like a bit more chilly aristocracy. Edward Fox style.
I agree Rogue Spy guy isn’t completely it but his build and more mature face come closer for me. I agree about Edward Fox (except he isn’t pretty enough) because Crane is a very menacing man and he is willing to use himself and so has the body to back up that intention. I could also see Ben Whishaw as Stephen http://images-2.drive.com.au/2014/03/19/5275656/kq_ben-whishaw_wide-620×349.jpg (he did play Keats)
Oooooooooh.
Edward Fox has a nephew, Laurence, who fits the bill nicely for Crane: https://www.google.ca/search?q=laurence+fox&biw=1518&bih=748&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=eB5hVJzQOI6lyASz1ICwDg&sqi=2&ved=0CIgBEIke&dpr=0.9
I was thinking of Hathaway as I was reading this thread I didn’t know he was kin to Edward Fox. There is some sweet Lewis/Hathaway slash fanfic on AO3
So interesting Merrian because the cover model on Rogue Spy doesn’t look much like Pax to me. Pax is described as being tall and skinny/lanky with white blond hair. 🙂
I’m not really a placeholder reader either. Generally I’m more of a voyeur and a book will play out in my mind like a movie.
My original post was eaten by the work internet gremlins 😦 so I’ll try gain later at home. for now I’ll just say that I adore the artwork both fan art and book covers. No they don’t match my very strong mental images but I don’t expect them to. Hell, I’ve tried to draw some of your characters, and mine and everyone elses and my own drawings don’t match up [talent, it must be nice to have it]. Book covers are objects of beauty in their own right and can’t really be compare to a written description any more than a book and a film can be compared. They are two different acts of creativity.
Absolutely! And of course the cover isn’t just there to show the characters, it’s got to sell the book and be an attractive thing in its own right.
Jake is so not blond ;). I mostly just wanted to say that fan art is fantastic and yes sometimes what I see in my head does not quite match to what’s in the book or on the cover. Great post.
Loving all the agreement on Jake!
🙂 As the designer of said covers, I was grinning madly at how much love Stephen got. It’s that blush on the cheeks, I tell you. 😛
As someone who stubbornly imagines Lanyon’s Jake with dark hair, I totally see your point. In case of books the creative process doesn’t end with the author (or the editor), but the reader. And every reader brings something different with them, a different lens through which to see the story, and of course the characters. Imo, in cover design it’s more important to hit the right mood/atmosphere than the physical resemblance to the figure in the author’s head. The readers will make up their own, anyway, and no matter what you do, you can’t make everyone happy.
(Aside: the much maligned headless torsos have a big plus in this respect.)
Oh, and can you post the fan art in larger size? It’s hard to see.
I think the cover model for Crane is too fine-featured and pretty to be my mental image of Crane. The cover model is almost too striking too, I kind of imaged Crane to be good looking in a deceptively normal way if that makes any sense.
While in my head I image Stephen to be small, slight and sharp featured but not nessisarily as young or baby faced as either the covers or the fanart (although it is amazing). I don’t know, I always imaged Stephen to be to small to be handsome but to severe to be pretty.
I like this. He’s an acquired taste if he’s anything. 🙂
don’t get me wrong I love Stephen and I think he’s hot stuff ❤
I was going to comment with how I saw the characters, but E’s pretty much read my mind here. 🙂 The drawing is also pretty much perfectly in line with how I see them. (except Merrick, who I picture as short and stocky with a buzz cut and a square, scarred face.) Stephen is definitely much closer to how I see him than on the covers, though I can imagine the difficulty of finding a stock photo of someone who looks like him.
I never have any trouble picturing Stephen as small btw, because I’m dating a guy who’s 5’2″. And let me tell you, it’s a thing of mine, haha. If anything I picture him as even smaller for effect.
“I never have any trouble picturing Stephen as small btw, because I’m dating a guy who’s 5’2″.” Similarly I don’t have any problem with Stephen being 5’0 or imagining him that small because I am in fact shorter than he is in real life.
I’m with you about Merrick as well.
Thirded. 🙂 And here’s to shorter heroes. Especially in historicals!
I think I must have default characters as well. It completely explains why I have trouble when casting actors for a role based on a book. They never actually look like the characters are described in the book. Maybe you should do a separate blog about seeing the characters in your head in a movie??? I noticed you mentioned Michael Fassbinder for Crane, any ideas for Stephen???
I have no idea for Stephen though Tom Redmayne as linked above is pretty good. That said, Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher ruined fantasy movie casting for me forever with the prospect of it going horribly wrong. ‘You want to cast Toby Jones and Mackenzie Crook as Stephen and Crane…right…’
If we have Fassbender for Crane, can we have James McAvoy for Stephen and it can be like the Xmen First Class that never was?
I’m shuddering at that last suggestion, KJ. Shuddering in my bones.
I’m just going to be over here thinking about James McAvoy as Stephen. Don’t mind me.
I’ve really enjoyed this post. 🙂 I will admit to a love/hate relationship with many covers and cover styles in use today. As to having default characters, I’m not sure that I do. Not in the way you describe them at any rate. It’s something I’m going to look for going forward though. 🙂
As for Crane… well… I have a picture of him in mind that is partly because of the description, partly because of Lou’s cover work and partly because his name is Crane. *LOL* In my mind’s eye, I see the actor/director Peter Horton from his days WAY BACK WHEN, when he played Crane McFadden on “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers”. Picture here (I hope it works) – http://i.imgur.com/HOtNkqG.jpg He’s been one of my man crushes for decades. 🙂
And Archie from “Think of England”? You’re gonna laugh, but in my mind’s eye I saw someone very similar to Prince Harry. *LOL* I guess I was thinking of England. 😉
Prince Harry has come up twice now in this conversation. I’m not even a royalist. /gives work the side eye/ But there’s something of the, I don’t know, thelacking the smarts to be deceitful and a basic decency that may not always be well expressed because of lack of smarts, sort of thing, I see that.
All of the covers and Ludmilla’s fan art are mostly close enough to my pictures of them that they work for me, except for Merrick! My Merrick is burlier, always with a five o’clock shadow, some scars, looking far more like an ex-brawler than a butler. 🙂 But I still love Ludmilla’s drawing! It’s brilliant.
Yep, he talks like Lydmila’s art but he is more the Cockney hard man for me.
One of my favorite things to do is play ‘the casting game’ with M/M book series, i.e. plug actors into the theoretical movie version of the book. I haven’t done this with all of them–I read far too many–but I’ve been toying with casting the Adrien English characters for months now because I just cannot come up with an actor for Jake who isn’t either, 1) unattractive, or 2) way too young. But the biggest obstacle is that he’s blond, so perhaps I’ll just take a page from you and pretend he was always written as dark-haired. (Matt Bomer is 100% Adrien, especially because he looks so much like Montgomery Clift.)
I love this post! So much to dissect. I personally hate the stock photos on romance covers. Give me a headless torso, some scenery, whatever, but don’t put an idea of what the character looks like into my head. I guess I’m one of those readers. But I definitely want to hear what the author thinks they look like! And certainly their physical attributes are the last thing that make me relate to any of them.
I would agree that the covers of your novels, while beautiful, don’t really reflect the characters I see in my head. I confess I had a hard time picturing Stephen while reading. But I loooooove that he’s a redhead. Maybe it’s just that he’s magic, but I always picture him with these pale, almost translucent green eyes, kind of like mood rings. And yes more vulnerable. I was impressed that the bloke on the cover is actually in the ballpark of what he’s supposed to look like, because so often it’s just totally wrong (based on the author’s description).
The image of Crane influenced me more, but I basically never imagine anyone with a ponytail since I despise them. I have this idea that his face is a bit more weathered and his eyes kinder. And I too imagine Merrick as a brute!
Lydmila’s version may be my go-to from now on (except I will age Stephen up from adolescence). What a stellar picture! This must be so fun for you!
-S. ;D
I sometimes cast my characters, too! Mainly if one comes immediately to mind, but other times I go looking. I always cast before I write.
It may be the most fun bit of authorship to date. I keep hopping back to look at it and feeling like a superstar. 🙂
I love the fan art… A Charm of Magpies: The Graphic Novel — can someone, somehow, make this happen? *ohgodplease*
Yes please!!
Funnily enough I’ve just read the second in the Adrien English series and Jake is definitely a honey blond cowboy type to me. If I had to cast him, I’d be looking at a young Ed Harris.
I spend a lot of time visualising. I think it’s why I’m a slow reader. In your Magpie series, I can just about deal with Crane on the cover. Again, my mental image is Julian Sands. As for Stephen, the cover doesn’t meld with my mental image at all. I think of him as more angular, tough but vulnerable. Jamie Bell with redder hair.
I’m thrilled for you with the fan art. How amazing and all credit to you, to have inspired a reader that way. She has very much captured the vibe, I think, especially Crane. But I agree with you on Merrick. I’d have him stockier and much more weather-beaten. Stephen would be more restrained, I think, and smaller. Jonah is spot on.
I literally read the writer’s character descriptions over and over. I really take every visual cue and try to assimilate it while I’m reading. I don’t have a default male or female, and perhaps that’s why the generic muscular ‘bloke’ puts me off in a lot of romances. I really love characters who don’t fit that mould, and seek them out.
Yes, Julian Sands! Definitely. Gorgeous but not as pretty as the model. Interestingly, in all the original pics he has his shirt off, and he is extraordinarily muscular, which brings down the prettiness somewhat and sends the OMG JAW ON FLOOR level skyrocketing.
For me, personally, the bookcover version of Crane is a little too posh. When I think of Crane, I automatically recall his time spent living in the slums of China, and rubbing elbows with all walks of life. That’s the impression that stuck with me the strongest. So in my head, he’s someone very broad and strong and a bit rough around the edges; someone capable of holding his own in a fight. I can’t, for the life of me, imagine bookcover Crane picking up Mr. Day and fucking him over a desk. @_@ I have to constantly remind myself that other characters see him as someone very aristocratic and polished and respectable. So to deal with these conflicting impressions, oddly enough, the Crane in my head actually changes appearance according to the situation. When he’s mingling with his peers, or sneering down at someone, or putting someone in their place, then bookcover Crane would pop in my head. But when he’s working out at the gym or just hanging out with Mr. Day and Merrick, then a version of Crane similar to Lydmila’s drawing would pop in my head. Weird, I know, but this works for me. Is anyone else the same?
I know exactly what you mean! And that sort of duality was exactly what I was going for. Clothes and voice are his superpowers in a rulebound society, but he has the added advantage of not being bound by those rules. So yes, he has to be simultaneously polished and impeccable, but with a lot of muscle and tattoo underneath the well cut coat, and that gives very different appearance.
Jake from Adrien English looks exactly like Daniel Craig in my head, dammit.
I usually don’t attach faces to characters I read, but sometimes I have such a clear picture of how are they looking it’s unbelievable…
And that drawing is gorgeous. Well done Lydmila!
The fan art is lush. I think because it’s not simply portraits of the characters, it’s an interpretation of who they are, not just what they look like. It’s as much about what’s inside as outside.
I love you having Stephen be only 5ft. In the forest of 6 foot tall guys that swarm all over Romance land that makes him stand out. And given that people were shorter than they are now in the Victorian era then he’s short, but not as noticably short as he would be if walking around London now. And Crane would be considered just as much out of the ordinary the other way, as there wouldn’t be as many six-footers around.
I’ve learned not to expect the cover models to look all that close to the characters, mine or other people’s. As long as they are right physical type generally and they are hot, I’m happy. I’ve only objected 2 times out of 9 on my own that they didn’t work and the publisher changed them. Most of them I have been very happy with. A couple, positively ecstatic and totally adopted that as what they definitely look like.
I do have a clear picture in my head of my own characters. I don’t get the idea of not thinking it’s important – especially in a romance when they is going to be plenty of appreciation of the other person’s looks. I don’t get down to the detail about the arch of their brows or the exact shape of their nose (well except Zach front Higher Ground. His nose got a few mentions.) But I could give you the exact shade of hair colour for any of them, and the style they wear it. Hair is sexy.
Count me as on the side of “of course Jake is blond”. But also on the side of “Wait, what do you mean, J.X. Moriarity isn’t black?”
I try to resist casting my own characters with specific actors, because it means the cover models are always going to be unsatisfying. Though Cal in Patient Z is definitely played by Typer Hoechlin. 😀 And there’s a screen grab I have of Tom Hiddleston in a show called Wallender that almost perfectly matches a character I’m writing just now. Just needs to be shorter and more ginger. On the other hand he doesn’t resemble TH playing Loki.So it is literally that specific, that hair, that look, in that one picture. But I will sometimes use pictures either of actors or models that even if the face isn’t right, the picture catches a certain look, a vibe, that the character embodies. Again, more about the outside than the inside.
That’s TYLER Hoechlin, for heaven’s sake. Gah!
/flails/ I thought JX was black too!
I never write with picture models. I’m not hugely visual myself, it’s a collage of impressions rather than an image, so a picture model would overrule the person. Also, Lou Harper told me once the best way to brief a cover designer was vibe and feel, rather than specific picture ref. ‘Like Bruce Banner in the first Avengers film’, not ‘looks like Mark Ruffalo’, if you see the difference.
When it comes to characters, I’m always thankful for a rich, detailed physical description because I try very very hard not to look at the people on the cover and risk accidentally commiting them to memory. I worry it would clash with my own interpretation of the book’s description.
On a side note, Ms. Charles… I recently read a m/f romance novel where the hero is described to be massive 7′ tall, winged creature, and the heroine is a 5’2″ shortie… and yet when he’s fucking her, somehow, he’s able to not only kiss her, but suckle her breasts, as well. And normally, I would have thought nothing of it (having no experience with tall men to compare with); but in this instance, I immediately thought back to Crane’s comment about how, because of their height difference, there were no positions in the world that would allow him and Stephen to kiss while they’re fucking—and I felt totally SMUG to have realized how silly that whole scene with the mf couple was. Lol. So thanks for that. I’ve become a more informed reader now because of you.
Ahahaha! Injecting reality into 7’2 alien sex, one reader at a time. 🙂 But yes, without a very flexible spine that ain’t happening.
As a reader and not an author I’m very thankful I don’t have to go through the process of choosing/designing a cover. I can see how it can be challenging since I see the same model/pose on multiple covers and find myself occasionally saying “wait, that’s not so-and-so, that’s him book x…” The fan art you shared is amazing. I love the Magpie covers. I can easily see Crane looking like that, though I image him slightly rougher and older based on all of his experiences. My imagination makes Stephen rougher as well due to all of his experiences.
I have some small issues with Stephens height as I am 5′ myself, but only because I tend to make everyone else taller! For Crane do maneuver Stephen as he does, he’s either ridiculously strong or Stephens short. As for blond vs brunette, my personal default is dark and I occasionally find myself going huh? in some books. Not with Crane though. Your characters as described in the book have stuck with me 🙂
You describe Stephens perception of his environment quite well. Authors with short characters tend to forget to describe the world from the height of your average 13-14 year old. Covers with short people just don’t look right, a short person can’t lay their head on the tall person’s should while standing (or other activities if their waists line up). To much height difference. Also, most people don’t seem to realize where your eye level ends up – a 5′ tall person does not have a 5′ eye level, it’s a few inches lower. I once had a 6′ colleague ask why I just didn’t look over the cube wall (also 6′). In spite being friends and sharing a cube for years, he didn’t realize that my eye level was mid chest on him.
May you continue to have great luck in your cover art!
Thank you! I did try to keep Stephen’s height in the forefront, like Archie’s missing fingers in Think of England – it does annoy me when you have a physical issue with a character that’s like a costume aid and it doesn’t affect their daily life. Crane is uncomfortably tall sometimes and Stephen has to hop to get on furniture.
Re existing covers, when we were doing Think of England I was sent the pic of the model for Murdo in Joanna Chambers Enlightenment series and I just vetoed it on the spot. Sorry, no, That’s Murdo and always will be.
The cover isn’t Darian for me, either — ironic, that. I’m not sure I could tell you what Darian does look like, though. Jeremy Irons works for Ash.
Archie would surely be bigger, and perhaps not quite so elegant? The guy who was Murdo would work for him… nice big guy! Though I can see why you wouldn’t want to reuse him.
I love this post–when I was a student of English Literature, one lecture a Prof gave was on famously inaccurate interpretations of characters that readers experienced all the time, Belinda in The Rape of the Lock and Daisy of The Great Gatsby-Belinda being fair haired while Daisy is dark haired.
I never pictured Jake as a dark fellow because Adrienne is so much the Montgomery Clift and it’s referenced again and again and they didn’t read like same coloring men to me. There seemed to be quite a lot of contrast between those two.
As for Lord Crane and Stephen Day, I like the cover art as a jumping off point–they are not quite exactly what I picture from the author’s descriptions, but they are a reasonable facsimile. For me, Lord Crane is most definitely actor Julian Sands in his heyday. Mmm, Stephen, is for me, more like a Prince Harry , but yeah, very short and bit thin and more serious–not quite as ingenue-ish as he appears on the covers. Though readers have trouble with Stephen’s height, I was reminded that statistically, a person who is very short will receive x amount of comments on their height throughout life while exceedingly tall persons will receive order of magnitude greater than x.
I love love the fan art! How very cool!
Yes, that’s funny, isn’t it? I’d have Belinda fair, it’s just a blonde sort of name, somehow.
Another vote for Julian Sands!
And this is why I so seldom put recognizable people (most of mine have someone walking away in the distance [wry g] or are in silhouette) on my covers (I self-publish, and I’ve done all mine except for one). For the record, Stephen on the covers looks too young. I always think of him as looking older and more world-weary.
The balance between making sure it looks appealing to readers, with enough humanity, and making the cover images as good as possible must send designers to an early grave. When I worked at a romance publisher, the clinches and two person shots *always* sold most.
My only two-person clinch cover (and my only pro-designed cover) sells the worst of all of my six books so far. I guess I’m the exception who proves the rule [wry g].
Just wanted to say, I checked out your site, and your covers are absolutely gorgeous, and very well done!
Thank you so much!
Interesting post. Jake clicked as a blond for me so no problems there. The cover Crane is more pretty and slim than the way I picture him and the Stephen is a little too boyish. But they’re pretty good compared to some covers that seem to make no effort to match the written descriptions. Sometimes I wonder if the cover artist even got to read the book! I don’t rely too much on the cover image to visualize the characters though. And I often disregard the author’s description too. I see them how I want to see them.
I don’t think a lot of cover artists do read the books. It would pile on the time per job. Usually the author or sometimes editor does a cover form with description and maybe image refs and the designer goes off that. Not easy!
My experience of cover art / “seeing” the characters in my head is probably a bit different than most, because I have no visual imagination whatsoever, and no ability to “picture” things in my head. I do sometimes notice if the cover actively conflicts with the description of the character, but only sometimes.
Thinking about this, my mind immediately went to those racist fans of the Hunger Games trilogy who were shocked and enraged when a black actress was chosen to play Rue, even though the books mention her skin colour at least three times. The comments made were disgusting, but it seems like an extreme(ly awful) version of the same thing—readers’ brains hang onto impressions, and will just skim past contradictory descriptions like they’re not even there.
Yes, that’s a very interesting case, isn’t it? Hanging on to the default character in the teeth of the evidence.
Interesting post, and interesting comments. Hmm, I don’t have a very clear picture of Jake at all, but for some time I thought Adrien had white hair (not as though he were old, just white, like an anime character or something). I fixed my mental image after awhile, mostly, because that is obviously wrong from the text. And J.X. definitely seems as though he should be black, or Hispanic. Maybe because he wears black and reading quickly gives the wrong impression? I generally try to keep reasonably close to the description given in the book. (If a proper description is given, that is—comparing them to actors in the text doesn’t help, because I don’t watch enough movies to know what anyone looks like, and it breaks the mood to have to do a Google image search in the middle of reading, even assuming I am near a computer.)
Your cover model Crane seems spot-on to me; he looks arrogant and upper-class, and it seems that he could look rougher than that under different circumstances. And I can’t tell how tall or broad-shouldered the model is, from those pictures. I agree with E. about the Stephen model, although the hair is good. He isn’t supposed to be that pretty. As for his being short, I think that is awesome, and there are guys who are that short around. (Especially in the military, for some reason.)
Crane on the covers has just exactly the cheekbones – and the surface hauteur – sported by the Crane in my head (and miraculous things those cheekbones are, too). Oddly, he’s too young for me – I read him as twenty-something, about the age Stephen actually is in The Magpie Lord, and as the disparity in their chronological ages plays a part in their dynamic, that seems a bit off to me.
Cover Stephen’s coloring fits right up against what I have in my head, but he’s too frelling tall as pictured next to Crane – as though he’s up on a literal soapbox as well as the occasional marvelous metaphorical one. I keep wanting to tell him to get off the stepladder.
🙂 Those cheekbones. It shouldn’t be legal.
It’s quite probably not. Where would be the fun in it otherwise?
Also: your books are MARVELOUS, soup to nuts and everything in between (and the chocolate at the end as well). I’m ashamed of myself for not having said that first and unequivocally; I got sucked in by the discussion of cover art and momentarily lost my way, for which I do apologize. I stumbled across The Magpie Lord somewhere recently, inhaled it nearly whole, and promptly went out and got everything else I could find you’d written. I’m sailing a sea change; your writing and the world you build with it are helping me keep hold of my navigational tools. Many thanks.
Wow. Thank you! That’s pretty amazing to hear, and I’m really happy if I’ve helped at all. Thanks for telling me…and bon voyage. 🙂
First of all, I just want to say how much I’ve enjoyed ToE. I read it based on a recommendation I saw online and have already reread it twice in this last month. There’s just something so touching about Archie’s discovery of his own inclinations and acceptance of his love for Daniel. I also find the way he reflects on his experiences to assess his sexuality and the discussion of a sort of a spectrum of “queerness” fascinating. I’ve also since read the Charm of Magpies series and Butterflies and have thoroughly enjoyed those as well.
I find this thread about covers and picturing characters in you head so interesting. I generally don’t pay attention to the covers unless they seem very close to the descriptions in the book. In any case, I just had to put in my two cents regarding “casting” for the cover of Magpies and ToE. I agree that Julian Sands (circa late 80s) and Eddie Redmayne seem right for Crane and Stephen. For Archie, as Daniel calls him his Viking, I see Chris Hemsworth, not as Thor ironically enough, but as he was as George Kirk (Captain James Kirk’s father) in the reboot of Star Trek — very stoic and heroic! As for Daniel, he wasn’t on the cover, but he’s in my head of course. I can’t really think of the right actor, but a younger Robert Downey Jr comes close, not quite right physically, but he does tormented and snark so well!
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Erm… I’m a little late to the game here, but … seeing as the Crane model is (OMG) real… does anyone know if he has a fan page somewhere or something? I think I would give my firstborn to see him sans shirt…
Haha, am grinning about Jake and I must say I have had to ‘force’ myself to see him as blond, somehow he seemed reddish in my mind. Not bright red, a darker red. And if I manage to make him blond in my mind, it’s still blond with a reddish tinge.
I absolutely adore the art by Lyudmila Tsapaeva, especially the ‘Remnant’ poster.
And now that I’m here, commenting on this old post, I must say that I am completely in love with ‘The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal.’ Gosh. Blimey.
Oh, thank you! How nice. But Jake…redhead?!
OK so i’m nine thousand percent in love with your books
mostly because stephens so darn tiny, me being a little under 5 feet tall makes me the smallest senior boy in my school I CAN FINALLY RELATE lol we’re both short bossy and gay . ANYWAYS i love his sassy huge attitude. i actually cried in excitement when i found fan art of him and the other characters. any fan art i find is eaten up and saved to a slideshow on my laptop so it becomes a changing background lol