So I was reading this post about sexual imagery on the covers of upcoming YA releases by Simone Elkeles and Hannah Moskowitz. And it got me to thinking.

(For the record, I think it’s fine for YA covers to show characters in sexual situations, and I have no problem with either of those covers; Invincible Summer’s cover does nothing for me personally but I’m sure it will draw in plenty of teens, and I’ve always thought all the Perfect Chemistry covers are gorgeous, this one very much included.)

But all this talk made me wonder how I would feel if a cover of a book I wrote wound up featuring sexual imagery. My first thought, which is slightly embarrassing, was that my parents would be freaked. My second thought was that I would very much like to sell some books, and if my someday-publisher thinks putting sexiness on the cover will sell more of them, then that’s fine with me. I don’t think any teen will be any more likely to engage in sex because they saw it depicted on a YA cover, and if by chance they are, well, hopefully their school offers non-abstinence-only-based sex education and they know how to protect themselves.

But I don’t think this is ever likely to be an issue in my career. Because I really doubt any book of mine would ever get a sexual cover. Because I write YA books about LGBT people.

Gay YA book covers (in the U.S. at least) tend to feature hand-holding, or close-ups of the protagonist alone, or shots of multiple people standing with an acceptable distance between them, or completely generic imagery. The only LGBT YA cover I know of with sexual imagery is the original cover for Brent Hartinger’s The Order of the Poison Oak, and from what I’ve heard, its sales were not so good. Sadly, it’s now out of print (though you can get it on Kindle, yay, with a cover featuring some very nonsexual marshmallows), whereas the book that precedes it, which doesn’t feature boys stripping on its cover, is still available.

I am not complaining about these trends. Not per se. Books have to sell, first to bookstores, then to customers (which in the case of YA includes parents). Two girls kissing on a YA cover might sell, all right, but not necessarily to the book’s target audience. And then there’s the problem of kids being afraid to be seen carrying around a book with overt gayness on the cover, and that’s no small concern; I remember well the days of being afraid to be seen walking around carrying a shopping bag from Lambda Rising, and those days continued well past my high school years.

The book I have currently out on submission has a transgender main character, so I know for sure I don’t need to worry about winding up with a sexual cover for that one. In fact, books about trans characters seem to be the only YAs still clinging to the faceless-people YA cover rule of the 2000s. (Which is, I suppose, still a step up from the original covers of Luna and Parrotfish which both featured drawings of symbolic animals.)

And my current WIP has no sex in it, so a sexual cover would be very strange and misleading. So I’m safe there, too.

But most of my future books are likely to have some sexiness in them (alas, that’s just how I roll). So I suppose someday, assuming the YA LGBT market evolves a little, I can dream about having a cover as gorgeous as Chain Reaction’s.

(Although I do wonder about the scene that the cover is presumably depicting. Why are those two crazy kids wearing their clothes in the shower? Is this a thing all the cool kids are doing now? Am I out of touch with my audience? Shoot, maybe I should go add a clothed-shower scene to my WIP after all…)