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We’ve talked about covers on Squawk before, so you know just how authors feel when the Art Department hands them a picture of their heroine and she has three arms, or your hero turns out to be pumpkin shaped.  I’ve been thinking a lot about covers lately because the cover of Pleasure for Pleasure, my December book, keeps changing.

To begin with, I had a rather scantily clad young woman who appeared to be wearing some sort of a buttonless dress.  Here’s the cover.  Think about it:  when that pink-armed man wasn’t holding it up for her, how the heck did it stay over her shoulders?

Then the Power that Be decided to repaint the cover.  Now it’s definitely a sexier picture.  Her dress looks less like an odd flower petal and more like a chemise.  Plus we see more of her partner, which is always a good thing (*g*).  Here it is:

The only problem is that she has no resemblance to my heroine, Josie.  Josie is curvacious.  Plump.  And she has BREASTS!  But this little discrepancy is one that authors and readers face all the time because no one visualizes people exactly the same as another might do. 

Take the Earl of Mayne, for example.  I first introduced Mayne back in Your Wicked Ways.  Here’s my description from that book:  “He looked the epitome of a London buck:  his hair brushed into a perfect tumble of curls, his pantaloons sleekly following the line of his muscled thighs, his eyes alive with a wicked combination of laughter and desire.” Now here he is from Pleasure for Pleasure:  “He was so—so adorably beautiful, in a rakish, French kind of way.  All that exquisitely tumbled black hair, falling precisely in the most popular of windswept styles.  And cheekbones you could cut with.”

Four books after Your Wicked Ways, Mayne finally gets his own story.  I’m running a special contest on my website at the moment in which twenty readers will receive a signed book and a picture of Mayne in a Venetian glass frame, to put by their bedside (hey, I can’t give you the real thing, so this is my best shot).  At any rate, I was signing books on Saturday night and the wonderful Squawkette Elsie appeared—with a picture of MAYNE IN A FRAME! 

But it wasn’t the Art Department’s Mayne—it was Elsie’s Mayne, who comes to us courtesy of Ralph Lauren: 

I started thinking about it.  We probably all (at least those of us who’ve read one of my last four books) have our individual idea of Mayne.  I know I do.  So...let’s share Maynes!  If you haven’t encountered Mayne in a book, just go off the description above…
If you can find a picture of someone on the web who resembles your idea of Mayne, send me the link.  I’m going to check my email throughout the day and post more Maynes as we find them. 

I can’t wait to finally meet MAYNE!

One particularly beautiful Mayne is going to be sent a copy of his very first book, YOUR WICKED WAYS! (I’ll choose a Mayne randomly, because I’m sure they’re all going to be gorgeous.)