Adventures in Marketing

[meganbmoore]

So, I'm reading L.J. Smith's Dark Visions series and am kinda simultaneously amused and annoyed by the cover.

I mean, on the one hand, it's clearly meant to jump on the Twilight bandwagon with the cover design (this trend makes it so hard to browse the YA section for paranormal/gothic stuff without ending up ith Random Schmoopy Vampire Teen Series, let me tell ya...) which annoys me because, all else aside, it's more a gothicky action-adventure 90s series about psychic kids on the run, with a love triangle?  I mean, it emphasizes vampire and kinda implies the typical vampire/beautiful girl romance?  But the "vampire" character isn't even a vampire (he's a vampire allegory, pretty much, but not a vampire) and isn't her love interest, but the Angsty Bad Boy Doomed To Be Rejected, so it's kind of "wow, misrepresentation much?"

On the flipside, I don't know if this was released before or after Nina Dobrev was cast as Elena for The Vampire Diaries, but if it was before, that was kind of an interesting coincidence.  Because the girl they have as Kaitlyn (who looks nothing like Kaitlyn, but that's another matter...) doesn't actually look like Dobrev, but she basically has the same hair and is the same kind of pretty, so it'd be really easy to make the mistake with  it propped nect to VD on the bookshelf, and the design and blurb only adds to it.  Though, if it did come out after TVD came out, then I'm glad they tried to lure people in with an Elena resemblance, and not an Ian Somerhalder-ish looking guy withthe same blurb, which basically would have been selling it as Gabriel's story instead of Kaitlyn's.

(Fear not!  L. J. Smith only has so many books, and reads quickly, and I must move on once I run out!