Stock Photography Hell

Enemy Embrace was exclusive to the Crave the Night anthology for six months, but now that time is up and I went in search of royalty-free photos for a cover. I've lamented before about trying to find cover images and it hasn't gotten any better. Most of the pictures out there simply won't work.

• Smiling people? No. Not for the kinds of stories I write.
• Scrawny men. A lot of the men in these pictures are either scrawny or unattractive or both. Why can't stock photographers grasp that both the man and the woman need to be good looking?
• Poses too staid or poses too explicit. Some of these pictures look like portraits that people would put up on their fireplace. Conversely, there are pictures out there with all kinds of skin showing. I don't write Erotic Romance, but even if I did, the book sellers aren't going to show a cover that might offend customers.

These issues leave a handful of photos out there and authors are using and reusing them, which gets kind of old. The problem is there's nothing better and there's little choice.

But me? I have an extra layer of difficulty. You see, I frequently write multicultural characters and Enemy Embrace has one of them. My heroine is Latina.

I find it oddly ironic that just last week someone blogged at Heroes and Heartbreakers about how white romance is. It left me sputtering because of the 14 stories I've had published, 6 of them have had a hero or heroine who has a multicultural background. A quick use of a calculator says that's 43% of my published work.

Anyway, considering the hell I've had to go through to find stock images for these couples, I'm exceedingly aware that photographers who shoot photos I can use are few and far between. After hours of searching, I found 3 pictures that might, possibly work for this story, but none of them are optimal. It's frustrating.

For those curious about my multicultural characters:

The Power of Two - Cai is 1/4 Vietnamese
Through a Crimson Veil - Mika is 1/2 Japanese
Dark Awakening - Kimi is all Japanese-American
The Troll Bridge - Troll is part Filipino and part African-Caribbean and part Hawaiian
Demon Kissed - Bree is part Latina
Enemy Embrace - Nicole is part Latina

It's a Small World

I accomplished a lot this weekend, unfortunately my synopsis wasn't one of those things I made much progress on. I did make more notes about the book and I have a lot of the pieces, but for some reason, I can't seem to put them together to form an interesting/coherent synopsis. I'm not sure why. It's as if I'm walking into a brick wall and can't quite turn the corner. Very frustrating.

I did, however, find a picture of a really hot Asian actor. From what I read, he's half Japanese and half Chinese and he was definitely a stop-and-stare-at-him guy. :-) I've wanted to write an Asian hero, but I haven't had a character show up that's had that ethnicity. At least, I'm not sure that I have. There's a possibility that the hero from the second (or maybe third) book in my paranormal trilogy idea is of Asian descent, but he hasn't said enough to me yet to know for sure.

The closest I've gotten (that I know for certain) is with one of Wyatt's men in Eternal Nights. He wasn't mentioned by name in the book, but he would have been in the proposal I was putting together for Flare's story. His nickname is Troll because he's the best looking guy on the teams--heck, even on the planet of Jarved Nine--and he's got a very multi-cultural background. Name an ethnicity and has it. I did write a scene which included Troll for Flare's proposal and the man is fast with the ladies. :-) Of course, when you're drop-dead gorgeous like he his, I guess that's not too surprising.

What I liked best about him was that he had a great sense of humor and an almost sheepishness about how many women he's been involved with. I couldn't wait to meet his heroine and see what kind of woman it was going to take to pin him down and make him monogamous. Ah, well, maybe at some point in the future. I'm focusing on my paranormal romances right now.

I like writing characters with multi-cultural backgrounds. My first was Cai from The Power of Two--she was 1/4 Vietnamese. Next was Mika (Through a Crimson Veil) who was 1/2 Japanese-American and half demon and my third was Kimi (Dark Awakening in the Shards of Crimson anthology) who is 100% Japanese-American. I also have a few proposals in the works with characters from different backgrounds, I just need more time and a clearer vision of their stories so that I can get them finished.