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Butt Covers


This post is not about pants, it's about Butt Covers. That is, book covers that feature a young woman's butt and, usually a weapon and a tramp stamp of some kind. Like this one:




Juno Books has a post about these covers here, including a bunch other covers.* These covers are really striking and unusual, and a lot of them are very beautiful, but...they all seem very similar.

Some of the commenters to the Juno post indicate that that's sort of what they like about the covers--they know what they're going to get when they pick up a book like this. But the commenters also indicate that they sometimes think because the covers are so similar that the stories are all basically the same as well, which I can say from experience is SOOOO not true. Just like, for a while, all the chick lit covers were pink and had shoes on them, but the stories inside varied greatly in terms of appeal, so too with the Butt Covers. At least Butt Covers imply that, if you don't like the girl's butt, she'll kick yours. :)

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* To be clear, I'm not suggesting anything about the quality of the books underneath these covers, especially not The Devil Inside by Jenna Black. As I'm sure most of you know already, authors don't have a whole lot of power over what the covers of their books look like. Lynn Viehl talks about a recent problem she had with one of her covers here. This is just a comment on the elements contained on the covers.
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Comments

Anonymous said…
Hmmmm, I was completely unaware of this phenomenon. No surprise as this isn't really my genre of reading material.

Perhaps we need to take the butt cover to a higher level and apply it to the literary greats? A Hemingway butt cover? A Faulkner butt cover? And, if you'll excuse the really bad, bad (quite awful, I know) sexual entendre, could anybody top a Dickens butt cover?

OK, I'll stop now. But it's a funny phenomenon, kind of like DVD covers in rental stores. The worse the movie, the more sexed up the box is, have you noticed? The worst part is that this does work on most men. That's exactly how shallow most of us are. (I exempt myself because I won't pay $4.00 or $5.25 or whatever it is for an awful movie simple because an attractive woman is sprawled on the cover.
Sunday, January 11, 2009 at 12:21:00 PM CST
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