Okay.. so it’s an attractive couple. I get that.
But…c’mon.
Let’s retire them already.
The good news is that all are different epubs-one is self pubbed. The bad news… I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this couple elsewhere, too. O.o The image comes from a stock photo site. I’ve actually seen it. I bypassed it when I was shopping for photos because I’ve seen the couple before. You see it too many times? Well…they all start to look the same, those books.
I have seen pictures be used over and over…One of my covers when it came out was coming up over and over…I was like come on….
Which is why I don’t judge a book by it’s cover!
I agree with Diane. Lately, there seems to be more covers which look the same than ever before. My problem is, once I read the book I identify it by the cover, if I hated the book, you can bet I will probably not buy another with the same cover.
I have a weekly blog feature called Misadventures in Stock Photography, which features multiple uses of stock photos. It is very, very widespread. 🙂
I have noticed many covers using the same stock photo. In the case of “Mistress to the Beast” the photo is also false advertising. The heroine is African-American with ebony skin & the hero is a blonde Caucasian. There must be stock photos of interracial couples. That’s just lazy on their part.
@stacie, eh, I’m sorry, but I don’t think it’s laziness. You’d be amazed at how hard it is to find the right couple with the right ‘mood’ so to speak.
The woman in the MTTB cover looks black-definitely not ebony skinned. But if you’re looking for an ebony skinned model with a blond male with the right ‘mood’, you wouldn’t believe how hard it is to find just the right feel.
You could probably find all sorts of images where one or the other models are right, but both of them? It’s harder than you’d imagine. And doing a photo shoot is very, very costly.
The cover for Beg Me, for example, I spent more than a week searching for the female cover model. You wouldn’t think a brunette woman would be that hard to find and it was impossible. Either it’s too kinky or she was bound in a way that looked like torture-porn. In the end, we had to take the image of a blond woman and the covert artist photoshopped her hair darker.