"Although target audience affects all books, I'm going to dive deeper into one genre where it is absolutely critical—Urban Fantasy . This is the genre where we most frequently show characters on the covers, and the target audience is overwhelmingly women. It's also the genre where the covers get the most abuse for stereotypically having a hot woman on the cover with a gun, a bared midriff, and a bad tramp stamp tribal tattoo. The fans roll their eyes. the authors complain. People even make fun of the covers for charity . So what's going on here? If women are the target audience, how are these books ending up with objectified covers? I think there's a lot of overlap with similar issues in how women are portrayed in comics and gaming. However, as I said, the target audience is primarily women. So it sets aside the whole aspect of comics and gaming historically being a male-dominated media for now." - Jessie

"First, Urban Fantasy is primarily a genre of wish fulfillment. There's a clearly defined hero, and you are following them through an adventure where you insert yourself into their eyes and experience their story, their feelings, their romance...and of course their run-ins with the supernatural. (Hey this is SFF, after all.) The hero should be sexy. But they should be sexual, not sexualized . This is a tough balance to really get a grip on, and I think it's even harder if the character is not your gender. Even though I do not speak for all women, I at least can fall back on my gut instinct of what is right for a female character, as a woman and as a fan of this particular genre. I think many of the tropes of the urban fantasy covers make sense seen through this lens. The checklist (sexy strong woman, weapons, tattoos) is not wrong. In fact, you need that checklist because it's the "genre checkpoints" we have to hit on the covers so that the urban fantasy fans recognize that it is, in fact, an urban fantasy. However, if those checkpoints aren't filtered through the lens of giving the hero agency, you often get an objectified cover by default.Let's flip the gender roles for a second. Urban Fantasy with a male hero is notoriously tricky. As I said, the audience is predominantly women, and women will read a book with a male hero, but the tightrope becomes even thinner and harder to walk. If you fall off the rope, you land into an endless pile of Fabio-lookalikes with bare chests. If I won't stand for cheesy for the ladies, I'm not allowing cheesy for the guys, either. Even though the male urban fantasy readership is smaller, I still want to create a cover that also speaks to their wish fulfillment. " - Jessie

"It was while working on these covers specifically (and yes, watching Supernatural doing research) when it all clicked for me. A hero character on the cover needs to be both "sexy I want to be" for the fans of that gender and also "sexy I want to $%^!#" for the fans of that sexual orientation. And the key, again, is agency. I kid about being a big Supernatural fan but that show hits this balance perfectly. Women are the dominant fanbase, but there's a lot of men who are fans as well. The main characters are cool enough for the guys, but hot enough for the ladies.I'm not here to make enemies, and I'm not here to call out colleagues and artists. So I'm only showing covers I've worked on, not trotting out the bad examples. I try to design all my cover characters with agency. The one cover above that has an objectified character is Blood Rights - and she starts the book as a blood slave to a vampire, so I portrayed her that way by choice." - Jessie

....I deeply and aggressively question the notion that the figure on the cover art needs to be "sexual" at all. - Soup in a TARDIS

I can see it being relevant if a big part of urban fantasy is the relationship between the main character and the sexy bf/gf (I don't read much urban fantasy so this is just based on the little bit I've seen). But outside of that, yeah, not really important. - Jessie

I don't read a ton of urban fantasy either, but what I have read has not led me to believe it is, as a genre, basically romance with magic or scifi thrown in. I know I am more easily annoyed by this whole everything-but-be-about-pairing-up issue than most people (this is literature people, not a fucking ark) but, ugh, it genuinely drives me batty. - Soup in a TARDIS

As a mainly e-book reader, I rarely get to see covers. But I really like the Seanan McGuire series of October Daye books. http://seananmcguire.com/toby... The covers there are nice and not overly sexualized from my POV. Buts the covers are not the reason why I read these books, its the content and story. Suggestions and referals from others gets me to read books more then anything else. - CW

The funny part to me is that there's urban fantasy and sexxxay urban fantasy, but both often end up getting lumped in together. You explore a lot of the same themes in the Dresden Files and Hollows books, but Rachel Morgan is more sexualized than Harry Dresden and there's more romance and sex as a central plot point in the Hollows books themselves. Both have them, but in one they're emphasized a lot more than the other. - Jennifer Dittrich