There are highlights in the Australian romance writing community, including festivals and workshops, but one of the unmissable events, is the Romance Writers of Australia’s annual conference. This year was one of the best I’ve been to, and I want to take a moment to congratulate the committee for an incredible and memorable event.
The nature of traveling for the conference however, does mean that many of us have to leave family/work/commitments behind, and as such, those last few days in preparation are often chaos. In order to combat this, in conjunction with the RWA volunteer’s coordinator, we decided that the Cover Crush blog would be a combined August and September edition.
Looking over the covers for two months worth of new releases, gives me a greater perspective of the trends in our genre. Not only does this include the sub-genre inclinations, but the title trends, the aesthetics and even the popularity of certain type-faces. We’re seeing a trend in highlighting the cover-model’s backs, rather then focusing on their face. We are seeing a shift towards darker colors and shadowing. We are certainly seeing a movement away from the naked, headless male torso. There wasn’t a single representation of this type of cover over the two months. A surprising change.
As usual, there were many brilliant covers, but in this month’s Cover Crush, I wanted to not only discuss genre trend changes, but company changes. Escape Publishing with their recent internal changes, have offered us a cornucopia of new releases, and as such their cover-art has been in the spotlight. The artists have delivered a spectacular offering and every single one is on-trend, striking, distinctive and well, gorgeous. There were two particular standouts, the first for August with Where There is Smoke by Elisabeth Rose and September with The Landowner’s Secret by Sonya Heaney.
Congratulations to both authors and to Escape Publishing. Welcome to the Cover Crush family.
If RWA members would like to get their covers into Heart’s Talk, just log into your account on the RWA website and upload your image before the 8th of each month.
If you’re interested in reading my previous Cover Crush nominations, you can find them on the Romance Writers Australia website.
Until next month…
Annabelle