The cover of my book features a partial from the painting L’Odalisque (1745) by Boucher. A painting which also features in my book. It’s a beautiful painting. A true showstopper in real life, which is saying something as it hangs in the Louvre.
It’s also nearly four hundred years old. And it’s apparently a problem.
If you want to get straight to the book giveaway scroll to the bottom of this email past all the butt talk.
Book covers are tricky. With my last book, I had to do battle to get pink cake, and italics, and over-turned martini glasses (??) removed. This time, I lived in fear I was going to get a cover filled with croissant and the Eiffel Tower. When Lynn Buckley’s design for ENJOY came through I was actually in Paris with my former editor (now writer extraordinaire) Christine Pride, and we both jumped up from the table we were so excited about it.
I won’t bore you with how the cover sausage gets made stories, but suffice to say, there are a number of internal approvals any cover has to go through to make it to the actual cover. Marketing and sales need to approve. The sales people representing the indie stores weigh in. The in-house Amazon representative weighs in (yes, there is an in-house Amazon person, because that is how much power Amazon wields over book sales).
In my case everyone loved it (obviously), except the Amazon rep who warned us that Amazon policy is they won’t feature anything with nudity. Not that they won’t sell it. (They sell many terrible things.) But they won’t include it in any of their lists, or editor picks, or end of year stuff. Etc. In short, you have to know the book is there to find it.
Penguin stood by the cover, because it is great. But they said they’d leave it up to me, since not being promoted on Amazon is obviously a very big deal. As you can see, I was not interested in covering up. I love this cover so much that in my more anxious moments I worry it’s one of those rare instances when a book does not live up to its cover! (I’m assured this is not the case…but I’ve had those moments.)
This week I posted a blurb on instagram, and promptly received this warning.
This happened to Jo back in January when she first shared my cover on her feed, but it’s a first for me. And so puzzling. Is it the butt? Hard to believe when you consider, say, Emrata’s instagram account. The subject matter of women’s pleasure? Mon dieu! The combination? Who knows. Social media has been arbitrarily shifting rules around what is acceptable when it comes to women’s bodies for years. There is no transparency. There is simply an algorithm making these decisions on our behalf. This is the deal we strike for doing business on platforms we don’t pay for.
But it’s a deal many of us have little choice over making. For instance, the entirety of book marketing plans from many major publishers is: Post your book to instagram. Repeat. Yet these arbitrary algorithmic decisions directly impede my ability to make a living…using a nearly 400-year-old painting that hangs in the Louvre and actually depicts the painter’s wife. And in its own small way, contributes to how we perceive and discuss women’s bodies. Which is a very big deal, and has enormous impact, as anyone listening to the Supreme Court arguments over Idaho’s abortion ban, during which the lawyer representing Idaho acknowledged that a woman losing an organ would not qualify as an exception to the ban, knows.
I have no idea the degree to which that post may or may not have been restricted. As for Amazon, I’d encourage you to shop at your local bookstore whenever possible, and when not to order from Bookshop.org. Which brings us too….
Book Giveaway!!
I have ten paperback copies of NO ONE TELLS YOU THIS, my 2018 memoir that caused the NYT book reviewer to “underline sentences, and then entire passages.”
I will happily pop one in the mail for the first ten people to pre-order I’M MOSTLY HERE TO ENJOY MYSELF and email me their receipt plus a shipping address: glynnismacnicol@substack.com
Good Decisions:
Lauren Collins has restarted her divine newsletter. Highly recommend.
Jo and I talk about what happened when I, a person who has not had a good night’s sleep in approximately ten years, read a Goop newsletter.