By Jane Sandwood
Within ten to fifteen seconds, the average consumer will either have moved on or be drawn in. The first few seconds interacting with anything, including books, completely shapes our impression of it. This means that the best book ever written could be passed up by millions due to a lackluster cover that failed to draw in readers, or even worse, turned them away. A fantastic illustration that draws the reader in and showcases the book’s content can be achieved in a variety of ways Illustration has relatively fallen out of popular culture, but this is actually a good thing! The lack of appearances makes those that feature illustrations pop, making those stories with illustrations more significant and notable. With this in mind, let’s consider what makes illustrations in a romance novel great.
Make Things Realistic
Novels are often lands of fantasy, but there’s such a thing as too much fantasy. The best illustrations remain realistic regardless of a fictional or fantasy setting to stop readers from reeling at the unrealistic sight in front of them. Consider the suspension of disbelief a reader holds and how much the average person is willing to let slide without losing their immersion in the novel. If the illustration has people, for example, they’re best when realistically depicted instead of ethereally beautiful individuals with muscles bulging from every cranny of their body.
Keep Things Interesting
There’s been a strange trend in the last decade or so among popular culture that has left illustrations and adaptations bland across the board. Look at the majority of AAA games, major studio movies, and many romance novels to find the same thing: A protagonist against a dramatic backdrop. Designers have kept things simple by leaving art to be a simple zoom in on a shirtless male character, or a close-up of a character’s face. An image search for “romance novel illustrations” shows dozens of books indistinguishable from one another.
Following this route does nothing to set an illustration apart from the countless others that follow it. Illustrators do what they can to make the novel and art piece pop out by breaking this trend, eschewing shirtless or revealing characters for colorful symbolism that becomes more significant as the novel unfolds. Illustrations that show the same monotonous and tired traits as so many others are bound to not make much of an impact.
But Don’t Do Too Much
There’s a healthy medium between too simple and too complicated. In an illustrator’s effort to separate yourself from the dozens of shirtless illustrations, it’s easy for them to overdo it. One way to avoid this is to keep a simple but complementary color scheme, or to use colors that meld easily with each other such as the red and yellow of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse 5”. Certainly not a romantic novel, of course, but good art is good art and the curiosity built by an illustration will more often draw the eye in than a jarringly complicated or boringly overdone counterpart.
Illustrations are an incredibly fast way to get a first impression, making it so that readers will form their first impression of the book from illustration. The illustration of a romance novel will help to clue readers in on what to expect, while also serving as a visual aid or summary of the plot at times. Proper placement of illustration can cement a novel in our minds and be just as memorable as the story itself. When looking through a stack of books, what sort of illustration draws your eye as the reader?
