Cover Girl or Not

Two of my favorite musket-era war movies, Master and Commander and Gettysburg, have no women roles. My first Civil War novel, Whittled Away, has a few female characters with short ancillary appearances in the war story plot.  I have long believed the best war stories stick to telling about the soldier characters and the war, and not drift away into sidebar romances and other hi-jinks.

So, while I wrote the first two-thirds of Whittled Away, I kept the ladies out of the plot, conveniently forgetting that the Patrick Sharpe series of novels about the Napoleonic Wars are also favorites of mine, and Sharpe has an eye for the ladies.

At some point in writing Whittled Away, detailing the ongoing heaviness of the war depressed me, and I decided that at least one character, and me as the writer, needed a little R and R. Hence, Chapter 28 was born.  I loved writing Chapter 28, and Lieutenant Navarro has repeatedly thanked me for putting him in the arms of Rose. 

Knowing my next novel was going to be another Civil War story, and remembering what fun it was to weave a romantic vignette into Whittled Away, I suspected that a woman character was going to be more than an afterthought and more than a temporary distraction for the new book’s main character, John McBee.

As you can see from the cover of the new novel, Tangled Honor, a woman shares the top spot. Not just any woman, but a smart and attractive woman, the dangerous sort of woman who has the capacity to hijack a war plot and turn it into a Harlequin romance. I’ve never actually read a Harlequin romance novel, but with each new chapter in Tangled Honor, I worried that I was writing one. Hell, maybe I did. I hope someone will tell me.

I did keep asking my writers circle companions if I was taking the fast lane to literary purgatory, and they assured me they were enjoying the intrigue brought about by the woman. Of course, that’s three women and a retired pastor talking.

I still worry what my reenactor friends will think about my sliding in a second plot line that is more or less independent of the war story of the Fifth Texas Infantry. These guys hold Hood’s Texas Brigade in especially high regard, bordering on reverence sometimes and may well see a woman as an unwelcome intrusion.

Regardless of those reservations, once the lady’s position in the plot was a done deal, our writers group also looked at four cover options sent to me by the graphic designer, a lady who had read the manuscript. Only one of the draft covers included an image of a woman. I called it the “Harlequin” cover.  Guess which cover garnered the most votes? Yup, she did.

We talked about whether I wanted to appeal to female prospective buyers, and I admitted that I did. I learned from feedback from people who bought Whittled Away that my writing voice seems to connect with women readers, even beyond Chapter 27.  Besides, a book sale is a book sale, and I do want my second novel to sell more copies than did Whittled Away in its first year. I was open to the idea that maybe a woman on the cover would attract more women buyers.

Men like women, and men like reading sexy scenes, I know that much. Women buy romance novels, so with those thoughts as justification, the face of dark haired beauty made the cover.

One of the writers circle ladies suggested the woman on the cover is too modern, wears too much eye liner, lip stick, cheek shadowing and has plucked eyebrows. I agreed and followed the suggestion to Google images of Civil War women in search of a more period-appropriate face.

The old photographs I found show a bunch of plain women. Even the younger women with attractive facial features were unappealing. Styles were extremely different in the 1860’s.  Women’s hair was usually parted in the middle and pulled tightly to the sides. The use of make-up was only for “soiled doves,” ladies of the night. Moreover, having one’s portrait made in the 1860’s was serious business, so all the ladies are solemn, not a smile in the bunch. There were certainly no challenging, come-hither looks on those faces. So I bypassed those images, thinking in for a penny, in for a pound. I’m not putting a homely woman on the cover of my novel.

To you, my blog reading friends, what do you think? By all means, leave a comment or shoot me an email as to whether the cover of Tangled Away is better or worse for the sweetheart in the top corner. I’m really curious if I made the right call.

By the way, the plan is for Tangled Honor to be offered on Amazon as a paperback and a Kindle e-book download by the weekend before Thanksgiving, about a month from now.

What I read this week:  Ghostoria, a collection of vintage era short stories of romance and the supernatural by Tam Francis (who is one of the ladies in our Lockhart writers circle)