A Jeb With No Name

TENDER IS RHE SRORM

I don't remember where I heard it (probably Twitter), but the reason smutty romance novels these days come with generic stock art covers has less to do with hiding the reader's shame than with the publisher trying to save money they would have otherwise paid to the one person who does the sorts of covers we associate with smutty romance novels.

How fast do we get to the anal in Becky's Burlington Bakery with the graphic of a fully clothed normie lady in heels on the cover, I wonder

With Tender Is The Storm... I don't have to wonder

I think it's part trends, and part the aspect that covers are marketing materials? Like, if I see a Leni Kauffman cover, I'm likely to at least pick it up to look at it, as I generally like the books Kauffman illustrates, but. I would see that Tender is the Storm cover and skip it completely, like not even pick it up to read the blurb, because it comes across as a different sub-genre of romance than what I'm interested in. So the publisher/author might just be trying to cast as wide an audience net as possible by being more generic? But then you have the issue of isolating your core audience. + With the internet there may also be like a "content censoring" aspect to it, as websites could be more likely to flag the Tender is the Storm cover as NSFW but not an illustrated or vector cover.

Oh hey, I know that one! That's the novel that Mike and Nancy's mom is reading by the side of the pool in season 3 of Stranger Things. Remarkably, there are thematic parallels between that book and that season of the show, vis-a-vis the male lead of the book pretending to be someone else as a loyalty test to his mail-order bride (which, beyond being gross is also baffling, but anyway), and in the show, the lifeguard that Karen Wheeler inappropriately thirsts for gets pod-person'd by an entity from the Upside Down. I don't know for sure but I don't trust that show's writers to have intentionally made that connection, rather I would sooner believe that they picked a random romance novel published in the year that the show is set in and found one with a horny enough cover to signal to the audience what sort of book Karen was reading. Which is the cover depicted in your photo there.

I hope you enjoy it. I wish it had leaned more into the "Cowboy Count of Monte Cristo" vibes it has some of, because that premise is a real winner I think.