Here’s a question for you. Should a character from your novel appear on the cover of your book?
A lot of MM Romance books show topless men on the cover. So do a lot of straight romance books, come to that. When I see a guy on a cover, he’s invariably a hunk, put there to attract the eye and draw it towards the blurb, or sometimes, just to draw the viewer to the ‘buy now’ link. The chap can be dressed as a hockey player (yawn), or whatever the subject of the story happens to be, or it might be a couple of guys, but it’s usually an image to represent the main character(s) of the story. Fine. We all do it. I’ve done it a lot, and if they say a face on the cover is what you need to draw a reader to a purchase, then it’s done me well.
But I was wondering, ‘Does seeing the author’s idea of the main character spoil the reader’s enjoyment?’ Does it take away something from their imagination? You are showing them what your main man looks like, and shouldn’t that be up to the writing, and up to the reader to form their own picture from your story?
Let me introduce you to someone else’s view of my main character, Joe Webster, a 20-year-old blacksmith’s apprentice from a small Kent village, in 1895. When I say someone else’s view, I am referring to the free AI, ChatGPT. Before I go further, I want to make it perfectly clear that I only use AI search engines for research, as I’ve stated before. In this case, I used it out of interest to see how my description of a character was interpreted by the AI thing. This image will not appear in or on the books, and this may not be your interpretation of the character(s) when you come to read the book. It’s not exactly my interpretation, either, because all I did was put in some character details such as age, ambition, skills, manner, attitude, etc, and not physical attributes. Here’s what it came up with for my two leads, the main character, Joe Webster, and the impact character, Harvey Cade.
To be fair, seeing this interpretation did give me some inspiration for other physical details, such as pose, attitude and costume, but later, after playing around with other characters and their images, I soon realised that AI is limited, and very often the same character interpretation can have exactly the same attitude about them and be in the same pose. They often have the same facial features too, but changed slightly; so the AI thing is pretty limited in that respect.
But the point of this was to satisfy my curiosity and see my characters ‘brought to life’ in images. It was interesting and even fun, and has been useful, but only to make me question if he really looked like that in my imagination. Should I change my descriptions to fit the image? (No.) Should I give the AI more info and see what happens? (Very similar image, same pose, nothing much changed.) And, should I use this for the cover? (No, because that would take work away from Adnjela, and she is a trained designer.)
I’ve wandered from the point a little, but the questions remain.
Does showing your MC on the cover hamper the reader’s imagination or enhance it?
Has this ‘topless hunk on the cover’ been overdone?
Does it still work for you?
There are plenty of questions on this subject, and I’m only thinking aloud, but while I am doing it, I must confess to finding naughty pleasure in seeing the dreaded AI interpret my descriptions.
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