Jezebel: Why Chick-Lit Covers Are Pink

A blog I regularly read called Jezebel has a great article about the publishing trend of slapping a pink cover on books written by women, or even written by a man with a female protagonist.

It has been suggested that females prefer pink because of an evolutionary preference for reddish things like ripe fruits and healthy faces. We also prefer pink books. Or at least the publishing industry is so convinced of this that to cover their asses they're wantonly packaging any book written by a woman with a chick-litish cover in the desperate hopes that we'll buy it. Having cottoned on to the fact that chick lit books sell like cupcakes, publishers are now adding chick lit-style covers to any book written by a woman whether it fits the genre definition or not.

Speaking of, covers that don't reflect what's inside irritate me. I picked up The Wedding Officer thinking it was a light frothy romance but instead was a very gritty realistic view of the tragedies of WWII in Italy which included starvation, prostitution, rape, VD, and murder. Not that I didn't think it was a good book, but it's something I definitely have to be in the right frame of mind for. In the article Sadie Stein said publishers may experience a backlash over this treatment:

They are, however, likely to be disappointed when they get to the beach and find that instead of some heartwarming bit of froth they've ended up with Serious Fiction full of incest and substance abuse.

Right on sister. Read the full article here.