Jason Aaron Baca is good-looking, not handsome like the Ryans (Gosling and Reynolds) or rugged like Daniel Craig, who is fetching in a tailored Tom Ford suit. But when Mr. Baca, 42, slipped on a pair of dark aviator glasses recently, he looked remarkably like Tom Cruise in “Top Gun.”
He was dressed for work in a khaki military jumpsuit. And even though it was barely noon, he had already stopped by the gym to make sure his biceps and legs looked combat-strong. His assignment: To be a military helicopter pilot saved in a crash by a female rescuer with whom he once had a torrid affair. Reunited, their passions have flared.
Mr. Baca is a cover model for romance novels. He has been on nearly 500 book covers, by his own account — one of scores of men like him vying to be heroic heartthrobs. Not since the flaxen-haired Fabio Lanzoni dominated drugstore book racks in the 1980s and 1990s, with his lion’s mane and bulging biceps, have cover models been in such demand.
After a few more clicks of the shutter, he and Ms. Shao paused to examine his work on a 2-by-4-foot television screen. “It looks good because it has everything,” Mr. Baca said. The smoldering gaze. A glimpse of his six-pack abs. Mr. Baca had even thrust his pelvis forward, a trick he learned to make his stomach appear flatter and ensure the ladies looked, well, you know, there.
Romance writers and publishers, as it happens, are among publishing’s most innovative participants. They were early to digital serialization. Book sellers, too, now crowdsource ideas to find fresh writers. And if you want to explore a virtual relationship, you can try a romance-novel app.
How hot are romance novels? Over all, annual sales totaled $1.08 billion in 2013, according to the Romance Writers of America, which tracks sales. And their popularity is expected to grow. Last year Scribd, an e-book subscription service, sharply reduced the number of romance and erotica novels it offered because it couldn’t afford to keep up with readers’ appetites. (Scribd pays publishers every time a book is read and loses money if a book is too popular.)
Despite the perception that blockbusters like “Fifty Shades of Grey” drive sales, self-publishing has proved a boon for this particular genre. E-books make up nearly 40 percent of all purchases, according to the writers group. And there are categories for every reader’s taste, among them, adventure, Christian, multicultural, L.G.B.T. and paranormal.
Enter Mr. Baca. Authors and publishers require a revolving door of new faces, which, while hard to estimate, tally somewhere in the hundreds each year.
“I never thought I would say this,” said Liz Pelletier, the chief executive of the romance novel company Entangled Publishing. “But I am so tired of looking at men’s abs. I don’t know if these ones are sexier than those other ones.”
“It used to be that everyone wanted Fabio,” she added. Today, though, individualism prevails. “Readers don’t want every book to have the same face.”
It was January and Ms. Pelletier was bemoaning how tough the search for a perfect cover model can be. Entangled Publishing is five years old, one of the newer entrants to an industry whose identity is synonymous with Harlequin, the Canadian publisher, which in the early 1950s started publishing chaste romance stories set in hospitals and medical offices.
Harlequin reached its zenith in the United States in the 1970s when reader appetite shifted to more sexually explicit fare, known as “bodice rippers” or “sweet and savages.”
Sexy still sells. At Brazen, Entangled’s more risqué fiction line, Ms. Pelletier said book covers with male models sold three times more than with a woman alone. And for new authors in particular, “the cover is really critical,” said Dianne Moggy, vice president for romance fiction at Harlequin.
Written:By LAURA M. HOLSON
Source New York Times
No comments:
Post a Comment