We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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Question: When Will the Tramp-Stamp Urban Fantasy Novels Die?
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Anthony Stevens was kind enough to ask the following question my Google+ page:
Technically, that’s two questions, but I don’t have a life to prevent me from answering them.
First, the “tramp stamp” urban fantasy cover trend is unlikely to go away anytime soon. Why? The simplest reason: they’re selling. The best way to change the way publishers package books is to change the way the public reacts to book covers. Publishers aren’t stupid. When they have a
tried-and-tested method for selling books, they’re unlikely or unwilling to give that up just to appease someone’s sense of taste. “Tramp stamp” urban fantasy is just one set of tried-and-tested cover concepts.
And that’s the crux of the matter. Publishers don’t really care about the outliers. We’re not the primary market for their books (sad, I know).
Second, predicting trends is kind of impossible. What will replace the “tramp stamp” cover? No idea. The interesting thing for me is how women are going to influence this decision. The majority of readers are now women (depending on the study, five times more women read than men), though fantasy readers are evenly split among the sexes. All these numbers really don’t mean, much, though, since demographics are impossible to develop accurately from readers, with the exception of those statistics referring to all fiction readers. But if we take the 50/50 split seriously for a moment, then we can get a sense of how publishers have responded to the urban fantasy boom in light of traditional reading demographics. In the past, men were the readers, and so the cover trends, particularly in genre, had leaned towards supposed male sensibilities (look at some of those science fiction covers from back in the day and you’ll see what I mean). Genre has been one of the stubborn holdouts on the gender parity front — science fiction is the worst of the lot. Fantasy, however, started shifting noticeably a few decades ago. But the covers haven’t. They still feature the “tramp stamp” in urban fantasy and scantily clad ladies and damsels-in-distress in other fantasy subgenres.
All of this is an attempt to get to my main point: book covers in urban fantasy, and fantasy in general, are likely to trend towards the slow shift in readership. Unless something major happens among men to convince them to become avid readers, it is likely that the trend in fiction overall will take hold in fantasy and, eventually, science fiction. I think this will mean an artistic shift not to “girly” covers (whatever that means), but to covers which treat their subjects, particularly female characters, as individuals as opposed to stereotypes or stock imagery. What will that look like? Probably not unlike what you see elsewhere in genre, but maybe something else entirely.
Then again, I could be wrong.
What do you think will be the new trends in urban fantasy covers? Or do you see the “tramp stamp” trend continuing indefinitely?
Note: There are publishers who don’t fit the mold I’ve presented here. Most, however, use covers primarily to sell product.
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A Reading List of Dystopian Fiction and Relevant Texts (Apropos of Nothing in Particular)
Why would someone make a list of important and interesting works of dystopian fiction? Or a suggested reading list of works that are relevant to those dystopian works? There is absolutely no reason other than raw interest. There’s nothing going on to compel this. There is nothing in particular one making such a list would hope you’d learn. The lists below are not an exhaustive list. There are bound to be texts I have forgotten or texts you think folks should read that are not listed. Feel free to make your own list and tell me about it OR leave a comment. I’ll add things I’ve missed! Anywhoodles. Here goes:
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Duke’s Best EDM Tracks of 2024
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2025: The Year of Something
We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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