For decades, the romance novel has been defined by the “clinch” (think handsome hero; his brawny arms around a bountifully buxom damsel) on its cover. But with the success of subgenres like paranormal and an up-and-coming generation of young readers, has the classic clinch become passé?
No, says Borders romance buyer Sue Grimshaw. “A clinch is never passé, but it is always evolving,” and she adds, “ A tastefully done clinch is a must-have for debut authors.”
“We're pro-clinch at Avon,” reports v-p and editorial director Carrie Feron. “Clinches are important when readers don't recognize the name of the author, but it doesn't have to be the clinch of 20 years ago.” St. Martin's Press v-p and associate publisher Jennifer Enderlin agrees the clinch should change with the times and “be done in a modern way. If you feature a hero and heroine together on a cover, it needs to reflect some equality between the two.” And, cautions Enderlin, “avoid at all cost poses where the heroine is bent so far backward she'll be in need of a chiropractor.” At Pocket, executive v-p and publisher Louise Burke reports they are also proponents of updating the clinch cover. “While we still use the clinch to indicate a sexy romance, we always try and make it fresh with color and type.”
While no one has done a recent poll of readers to solicit their vote on clinch or no clinch, the question has elicited some lively discussions on romance blogs. Sarah Wendell, cofounder of www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com, is not shy about weighing in with her readers' opinion. “Many readers,” she says, “hate it. Hate it. At best, the clinch can be a visual exercise in Technicolor hilarity, or at worst a complete and total embarrassment for the reader. But clinch covers will probably never go away: they sell.”
It should be noted that when it came time to decide how Wendell and Candy Tan's upcoming book, Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels (Touchstone/Fireside, Apr.), should be packaged, “the decision was obvious: clinch cover. Even if it's a parody, it's still a clinch, which is the iconic image of a romance novel.”
Kate Smith, founder of www.romancingtheblog.com, believes that while the clinch is “definitely old-fashioned, it exists for a reason. A clinch identifies the genre in a way that leaves no question about what you're getting between the covers.” But according to some of her blog's readers, it also “provides fuel to the naysayers, the critics of romance who dismiss the genre as fluff... or worse.”
So is there a future for the clinch? Can it really compete with covers sporting an impossibly sexy tattooed young man? Perhaps the question is best answered by a reader of Romancing the Blog who responded to a discussion of clinch covers by writing: “I've been reading romance for 30 years. The clinch cover is like an old friend. It's comforting and warm in a way new covers aren't. With a clinch cover on a historical, I know exactly what I'm getting. I'm getting transported back in time to a faraway place by the kind of book that hasn't disappointed me in decades.”
As times goes by, it's still the same old story.
