There are a thousand blog posts to be written about the paucity of stock photography of women and men of colour, even fewer that are in any way emotional and sweet enough to be used as covers for romance. Rather than reiterating what more eloquent voices than mine have said, I’ll jump to what I’m doing, in my own small way, to make a contribution.
At the beginning of the year, I partnered with Mosaic Stock Photography to design a custom photo shoot for the cover of the next Treading The Boards story, That Potent Alchemy. TPA stars Grace, whom we fell in love with in She Whom I Love, and her suitor Isaac, a mechanist and special-effects expert at the Surrey Theatre in London, 1811.
Finding black women and men for romance covers is one problem; finding a couple where the heroine is dark skinned and the pair are in reasonably-accurate-ish Regency clothing is another disaster entirely. It simply wasn’t going to happen with the photos available out there. In a handful of weeks, though, Mosaic Stock booked my first choice of models, found the costuming we needed, and arranged for a shoot that blew my mind.
Here’s a teaser sample of the (proofs) photos we shot two weeks ago, and I’ll do a cover reveal for That Potent Alchemy when we get closer to the release date this fall!
Models: Christa and Brian, Photos by Mosaic Stock,
All rights reserved to Tess Bowery & Samhain Publishing