Clinch cover legends: Sharon Spiak & Shirley Green
An interview with the greats
This interview is a collaboration with the Reformed Rakes podcast. Tune in on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to listen to the extended version. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
We’re living in an interesting and frankly, fraught time for a lot of artists, where the value of their labor is called into question. That’s why I think now, more than ever, is the perfect time to peel back the curtain. What goes into the making of a clinch cover?
A clinch, if you’re unfamiliar, is the type of romance novel cover where the couple is embracing, seemingly in flagrante delicto. Gowns are hiked up, cravats are discarded, and hair billows from some unseen force. They’re beauty, they’re camp, they’re my absolute favorite thing in the world.
I’m thrilled to share a conversation I had with Sharon Spiak and Shirley Green, two industry veterans who helped me fill in the gaps around what, exactly, happens behind the scenes in the creation of your favorite romance covers.
Sharon Spiak’s mother was a seamstress, so she took up sewing at an early age. After getting a degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, she was prepared to work in costuming, but was instead immersed in the publishing world after apprenticing for famed romance illustrator, Pino Daeni, in 1980.
Sharon’s romance covers, painted in oil, are visually arresting, and include iconic works such as The Hawk and Dove and The Dragon and the Jewel by Virginia Henley, Nightfire by Valerie Vayle, and hundreds more. She provided costumes for her own cover shoots, making for a seamless transition into styling when Sharon retired from painting romance covers around the year 2000.
Shirley Green's love of photography was solidified when she studied Children’s Psychology. After providing the kids that she worked with disposable cameras and noting their enthusiasm, the project scaled to renting darkrooms and watching them develop their own work. It was there that Shirley realized she was in the wrong field.
After transferring to NYU to study in film, she was hired as an assistant to two photographers, one of whom was Franco Accornero, who, among other achievements, was well-known as a romance illustrator.
Shirley eventually started running the studio, buying it when print and slide went completely out of fashion (to be replaced with digital) in the early 2000s. In her decades in the business, she’s shot nearly every type of book cover: from Lisa Kleypas’ Marrying Winterborne, to John Stewart’s political satire Earth: A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race, to the modernized cover of V.C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic.
When I emailed Sharon to ask for a meeting, I sent her some links, including the interview I did with Sarah at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. During the interview, after I told Sarah how much I loved clinch covers, she showed me one of her favorites: For the Love of the Pirate by Edith Layton. Little did I know, this was a cover that was shot by Shirley and styled by Sharon. They’ve been working together for over thirty years and, with thousands of covers under their belt, this was much less of a coincidence than I initially assumed.
Green: I listened to your podcast with regards to the pirate shoot where it looks like they're actually doing it on the rock. That was Nathan and Suzanne, that was one of the last shoots that we did that was Edith Layton's.
We would get some kind of detail from the art director and then Sharon and I would get together, and I would choose models that I thought would be appropriate, especially if it’s a really raunchy shoot. You don't want somebody who's a newbie because it's gonna be a disaster. So you need to get models who’re—
Spiak: Experienced!
Green: And they're comfortable and they know each other. And so that's where the psychology aspect of it came in for me that I was able to actually work with the models. You have an hour to do a shoot. So you literally by the time Sharon would get them dressed, get the hair and the makeup done and then literally have them in front of my camera. Ready to shoot. Sometimes we would have what, 40 minutes if we were lucky?
Spiak: Yes, if we were lucky.
Green: To pull off magic! And then and then we would be shooting right after the other – I mean we could have six to seven book covers in one day. It was boom, boom, boom! So Sharon and I became a very highly polished, efficient team.
One hour is not a lot of time for all of that work.
Spiak: Oh, it's not nearly enough, but you know, we make it work.
Green: Every once in a while if we had a big author, a big budget then you would get two hours, but if it was just your mass market, your paperback you got an hour. If it was a hardback then you would get a little bit extra.
Spiak: Well I remember when I was painting and I was doing photoshoots. If it was a wraparound book cover, and there was another scene on the back they'd give us an hour and a half.
Green: Yeah, that’s true.
Spiak: We never got two hours, even back then.
Green Yeah, we would get an hour and a half, two hours.
Do they tell you if you do are you doing a front cover and the stepback too? Is that something they…
Spiak: Oh, yeah, you're always aware of what it's gonna be.
Green: ‘Cause your front cover would be the couple in an embrace. Normally fully dressed. And then you would open the inside…
It gets racier.
Green: And it was like, “Oh, they have no clothes on! Wow.” It's a big scene. And then all of a sudden it's so completely different. Her hair is down and it would be a very different shot, you know. It was a lot, but we did it!
You mentioned earlier that you had to pick the more experienced models for the more intimate [shots]. Did they get kind of shy, or were they maybe just not as comfortable?
Spiak: Yeah, we had some trouble with that… some people are more modest than others. Let's put it that way. And some don't mind taking their clothes off in front of you. It depends on the person.
Green: I mean, the thing that was interesting as well for me was, I was from Scotland, and so a lot of the covers I was doing were like “The Highlander,” and then bring in the part of the psychology into creating a safe space, especially for the female models that were coming in. Because at the end of the day a lot of the time they might have nothing on– they’d be topless and they’d be in an embrace with a guy so you would see her from the back. So her whole back would be exposed so there would be no bra straps or anything.
Addy Parsons was the only other female photographer. It was all guys.
Spiak: She was the only female photographer. That was it.
Green: The one thing that I strived for in my studio was that every female model that walked in the door had to feel safe. So that you feel safe with the guy. They had to feel safe with the team. And that was one thing that I was really protective of– and especially if it was a new girl that was doing a book cover, then I always made sure that I picked a specific male model that I knew was going to be very sensitive to the situation. There was a lot of give and take with a new person, but if it was a new girl and a new guy – Oh my god! It was a disaster. So and nine times out of ten, I would have complete control in who I wanted to shoot, but there were other times when we didn't and I'm like, “Okay well it's gonna be what it's gonna be.” And Sharon and I would be trying to get the girl to open up and loosen up and–
Spiak: Yes, ‘cause if you got a young girl who’s never really done a steamy romance before it can be awkward, and it shows in a picture.
Green: And then the art director would say, “Oh, she doesn't look like she's into it.” And I’m like “She’s not.”
Oh no! It's not really the vibe that you want for a romance novel.
Green: Yeah, she’s ready to bolt!
Spiak: She doesn’t really like this guy. But, on the other hand, when there's chemistry between two people then it's always good.
Green: That's the magic. That's when we would get those extraordinary – they were amazing. Like you felt at the end of the day that you just made a wee bit of magic and you go into Barnes & Noble, to the New York Times bestseller list and it would be, “Oh we did that, we did that, we did that, we did that, we did that, we did that.” And you would be like, “Oh I remember that shoot, that shoot, that shoot,” and it was great because you actually then got to see the finished result of the work that we had done.
I found this cover for a Duke of Her Own that I think both of you worked on.
Spiak: Yeah, I'm sure I did too, yeah.
I don't know a lot of model names from more recent years, but I think this is Paul Marron.
Green: I was the first photographer to ever use Paul as a professional model.
Really!
Green: Yes! He came into my studio, it was a casting and he had just signed up with Wilhelmina. [To Sharon] That actually looks like Serene, doesn’t it?
I actually would have been up a ladder shooting that.
Spiak: Yes, I think it is Serene. That’s an odd angle, isn’t it?
Green: James Griffin [the illustrator] did such incredible drapery with the fabric, with the dresses.
Spiak: Yeah, that’s a dress I made.
Green: James and I have worked together for 20 years. We've probably literally done thousands of covers.
I still shoot Paul. I still work with him.
Yeah, I know he's got a fandom, I think —which I guess is not that uncommon—because of Kresley Cole’s Lothaire cover, so his face is everywhere when people talk about that book.
Green: If we knew we had a new model, a woman, we’d always put her with someone like Paul.
Green: Gentle, like a gentle person who would be– I mean a lot of these covers that you're doing, it's the guys like grabbing her and so it's kind of like that whole kinda like macho thing going on. And a lot of the girls can get turned off by that, there's a fine line between the reality of it. There's a lot of the times where it has to look like they're going in for a kiss or they've just had sex on the beach and obviously there's none of that stuff actually happening in my studio, but there had to be that sense of that longing, or giving into the guy, or resisting the guy or whatever it might have been.
And Paul was one of those models that we used that had the ability to know when to pull back. Like he wouldn't go in just for that extra – and there were some guys that did by the way, and the few of the guys that kind of crossed the line – I never worked with them again. They never got back in my space. Because it's kind of like, “Look, this is not cool.”
Paul— just a sweetheart, and the girls just really liked him and they would always say, “Oh, I really like Paul. I liked working with him. This is my first shoot. Thank you for doing that.”
We're a family. We all have to figure out a time and a space where we can all kind of work together and everybody walks out my door and they feel like they've just had a good time. I don't want any of the models to walk out and feel like they've just been traumatized.
And you get a great cover. You walk into a store and you see that connection between the guy and the girl. You know, Sharon does the magic with her wardrobe, her dresses. And sometimes we have extravagant sets where we have to make a bed or she's sitting in a chaise and it all has to be done in an hour, you know. So we need to make sure that the models are going to work well together. So a lot of stuff goes on behind the scenes before you actually see the cover.
Once you’re hired for a cover, does it start with you getting the galleys?
Spiak: That doesn't happen anymore.
Doesn’t happen anymore!
Green: We’ll get a synopsis of it.
Spiak: A little paper that says “Well, we want this to be an outdoor scene in a garden with a castle in the background.”
When I started, I had to get the galleys, and we had a lot of freedom. We don't have the freedom anymore that we used to have. I had a lot of freedom to create the cover. They would give me the galleys and just leave it up to me. They might say, “Oh, it's an outdoor scene.” Or they might say, “It's indoors in a bed.” You know what I mean? They would give you a few hints. And I’d go through the galleys and I'd find a description of a scene, and I try to go for that.
Was it a lot to look through? Was it the full book?
Spiak: A full galley, yeah! Hundreds of pages, hundreds of pages. They were sometimes three inches thick.
Would you skip to a love scene or would you read the whole thing?
Spiak: I always skip to the love scenes, I very quickly flip through and skip to the love scenes.
Green: We have been behind the scenes on making these covers for so long that a lot of the time we essentially give a finished cover to an artist who then – it's getting done on Photoshop.
Spiak: Nobody paints them anymore.
Green: Because it's so photorealistic. If they want someone who has got reddish hair, nine times out of ten, we will get someone who's got reddish hair. If they want a very specific scene, I pretty much shoot the very specific scene. So a lot of the time two-thirds of the cover would essentially be the work that Sharon and I put into it. So it's good that we're finally getting a little bit of acknowledgment for what goes into the photoshoot, which then goes to the artist.
Y’all are an integral part in setting that up with all your experience and the thought that you put into the photoshoots. The outfits, just everything.
Spiak: And then the artist who gets the photos, they have to provide the background stuff. Where it is, the location, you know?
Green: I mean it used to be when we first started doing this, they would be like a whole team in the studio. It would be the art director, the editor, maybe the publicist, sometimes the author, and then the artist. There would be an additional four to five people in the studio for the shoot and then me, my assistant, and Sharon. And so it was a lot of people involved for a one-hour shoot, so we could get a little noisy. It could get a little chaotic because there were a lot of people.
You would think that they would come to the studio and have a plan of what was going to happen or what would be the synopsis that we would have to recreate. You would think that they would have that. And sometimes they did and then all of a sudden they would change their mind because then Sharon would come in with a variety of dresses, and they would decide that they wanna do something really different. And it would set everything all into chaos, and we would have to try and figure out how to make it work.
And then there would be a lot of shoots that Sharon and I did where it was just her and I and the models and they actually were the best shoots because we had complete freedom to create the shoots that we wanted to do. The models would get in sync with each other. It wasn't so messy. And then towards the end, I think they realized they really didn't need to be at the studio: It wasn't necessary – Sharon and I actually could do it. So then the pandemic [happened] obviously where nobody was coming into the studio, and it would be a Zoom with the art director and the editor and the artist. But I would say for a majority of the covers that we did for a very long time, it was Sharon and I.
Spiak: We actually have more experience than they do.
Green: So they would send us a sketch and then they would say, “Use your own creative liberty ” and then I would set it up, I would do what they wanted and I would tell them, “I don't like it. It doesn't work, their bodies don't feel right. This is what I'm gonna do, and I think it's gonna be better.” And that's what ended up happening.
Yeah, so like that cover for example where Nathan's basically got Suzanne — it looks like they're on a rock. I mean, how uncomfortable! Hair up, her hair down, his shirt on, his shirt off. Like you know her leg open enough so that he could come in between her, like all of this stuff was happening.
And then Derek James, the artist, he wasn't at the shoot for that. It was just Sharon and I. We did that cover. But then you put Nathan and Suzanne in a shoot together. No offense seriously, they could do an Amish shoot and we would have to separate them. They have just such intense chemistry that it was always a really sexy shot. Always.
I'm looking at it now. It's gorgeous. You did this in a studio and you were angling them to make it look like they were leaning on rocks?
Green: We would have props that we would build for her to sit on and then– and these are the types of models that you would use, someone who was experienced, because she had to arch her back. You know, she was bringing Nathan into her chest, things like that.
Spiak: Yeah, we would build something that simulated a rock or a hill.
Green: And then position her so that her leg would be higher and then she would arch her back and we'd make it… She was sitting on a box and he was right between her legs.
She's on her toes, her legs behind her, she's bending her back. I don't think it's a pose that you could hold for a long time, you would probably start to kind of spasm and stuff, but that's when you use an experienced model like Suzanne. She had to make that shot work.
Nathan? I don't know, maybe I'm gonna get into trouble for saying this Sharon, so correct me if I'm really screwing up here but, a lot of the times the guy is just: bulky, big muscles, great back, nice bum and a pair of tight black trousers– but the girl, she's the one that has to ooze all of the sensuality. She is the one that has to almost look like she's having an orgasm. Mouth slightly open, eyes closed. A lot of the time they would actually say, “You need to look like you've just had an orgasm.” So she had to sort of have all these emotions on her face.
Nathan is just Nathan. Nathan's hot and sexy, he’s a good-looking guy. He's got a great body. He doesn't have to do that much: take his shirt off, the guy's got a great body. But Suzanne, she was the one that had to do a lot of the work for that shoot. She's the one that looks like she's sitting on a rock, like she’s just been taken by this prince. And she was uncomfortable, but it worked because it gave her that sense of urgency and you know with her head being tilted back, and the sort of slight–
You know Sharon would always go up and say, “You need to arch your back, you need to arch your back” and so then she would go up to the female models and she would kind of like, put her hand on their back and bend them in position. And then he would just go straight in because it was like timing you only had a minute or two and then obviously she would have to straighten her back up again because it would be uncomfortable.
Spiak: And I would always have to readjust the skirts and the necklines of everything and make sure that everything was looking right.
Green: Yeah, we have to see enough leg so you have to lift the dress up, and how much leg did you show? Sometimes it was too much leg. And then Sharon would have to pad the inside so it didn't look like she was wearing a big diaper. “Oh wow, she looks like she’s pregnant. We can't have that.”
Spiak: Especially in the Regency dresses.
Oh yeah, the empire waist.
Green: Yes, yeah. And especially if you're sitting in a Regency dress because of the empire, it's right under the bust line. You know, Sharon would be patting it and making it flat and — Oh my god, it was too funny!
Oh, that's so funny because I was – there's actually, a lecture from you, Sharon, that's on YouTube and during the lecture you're showing some photos of Fabio and another model who I’m not familiar with…
Spiak: Oh, was it in, was it in the library?
Yes, I believe so. And somebody [in the audience] said the same thing, “He doesn't look like he's doing any work.” And then you were like, “They never do.”
Spiak: Fabio never did much work except when he was carrying a girl. The girl always did the work with that. Always. Unless like I said, he was picking her up and carrying her, which… I have several that I used him for that.
He was good at hoisting.
I have a few issues of The Romantic Times from 1993. And there is a Mr. Romance Paperback Cover Model pageant that you were judging, Sharon.
Spiak: Yes, I was a judge in many of them.
And you also provided the costumes. So you were kind of like, double duty on that.
Spiak: Yes, I was always double duty.
How often did that happen?
Spiak: Every year. There was one once a year, a big convention. And they don't do them anymore, it just doesn't happen anymore like that. I mean, it was huge! We did amazing stuff. There was always the cover model pageant for the guys, and then there were tons of events. They were fun. I love the conventions.
Green: Yeah, she actually did a trip to Scotland.
Oh my gosh — I saw that you mentioned cruise somewhere. Was that on a cruise?
Spiak: Yeah, we we did cruises too.
Green: Yeah, but you know, Scotland, I mean, I would say, oh, a good third of my covers have a castle in the background. It's the highlands, it's a guy in a kilt. It's, you know, it's kind of like your Outlander.
Spiak: There's more Regency now. But the historicals that I did, I never did a Regency by the way. I never painted it.
Green: Really?
Spiak: Never. No, I did a lot of medieval.
Green: Western, looks like you've got.
Spiak: And I do a lot of Western, yes. But they had the bigger budgets, those historicals. They really did.
Green: Well, I think Regency is making a comeback also because of Bridgerton as well. I find it fascinating that young women are into the original paintings as well, that’s one thing we learned from Suzie the other day, from Smart Bitches.
Spiak: I met her just the other day at a gallery opening, and she said that there's a big group of younger women that are into the old ones.
I can attest to that. On Instagram, they're really popular. People love to repost the covers. There are hashtags like #coverlustfriday and #stepbacksaturday and then everybody posts–
Spiak: Oh, I'd like to be a part of that!
Oh, yeah, they'd love to have you, I’m sure!
Spiak: I’ve got hundreds of them.
Yeah, I see both of y’alls work on there all the time. I think there's a big craving for more clinch covers, more people on covers–
Spiak: And not cartoon characters!
A lot of publishers have kind of moved towards doing that.
Spiak: I hate those cartoon character covers.
They're not my favorite.
Spiak: We want real. We want something that you can touch. You know, they used to bump up the covers. To literally bump them up, so that they had dimension. Embossed! I used to get letters from readers saying, “Oh, I can feel his muscles.” Those covers cost a lot of money.
They don't budget for that anymore and they're a lot more in-house. Something you mentioned earlier, I've seen this year come up a lot: 2000 was the hard shift to digital. I know that a lot of folks that didn't have any interest in working digitally retired that year.
Spiak: Yup, they were all old!
Was there like a “Hey, we're not doing this anymore” or was it just kind of like a gradual?
Spiak: No, no, it was a gradual change.
Green: No, because, when I first started working, it was… you had two choices of how you wanted to do your shoot. It was either slides. And it could be 35mm or 2.25. So it was either I would shoot with my Hasselblad so that would give you a 2.25, or it would be 35mm, or it would be black and white. If you think about the stuff that Sharon painted, you would do a black and white shoot and I would then go into the darkroom. Sometimes I'd be doing seven to eight shoots a day, black and white. I would then go into the darkroom, develop the film, make a contact sheet, give that to the client, and FedEx it. That would be like, maybe 2 days. They would get the contact sheet, then they would call me with the images that they wanted. It'd be what we would call a jumbo: an 8x10 close-up of both the faces of the models. Again, obviously black and white, and then we would do an 11x14, which would be a full frame of the models.
Because it was shot in black and white and they would get black and white images, that was in a day when the illustrator really did the illustration. It could be the models would look nothing like the pictures that I took. Nothing. The guy could have blonde hair, but he would end up with dark hair, or a ponytail, or the girl could have dark hair and it would end up being beautiful raven or red hair because it was a black and white. And then with digital, it changed everything. We had no choice because the art directors basically demanded it.
Spiak: Yeah, they didn't have the imagination that the artists have.
Green: Yeah, but also when everything went digital the artists themselves had to learn how to do Photoshop. So from when I did the shoot to when the artist would theoretically get the images that they could then start painting, it could sometimes take a week. [Maybe] five days. For digital, I would have the images to them by the end of the day on WeTransfer, and then everything would be sent on a DVD the next day. So it was much more efficient to shoot digital and you were getting the images much faster.
Spiak: Everything was faster.
Green: The artist could, you know, be coming from Philadelphia and be looking at the images on the train going back home. But what it did was it changed the whole format in the sense that everything then became super specific. If we needed someone who had blonde hair, we had to get someone who had blonde hair. So it made it more efficient but it also created other problems as well. I missed it–the idea of being in my darkroom. I missed the idea of having that, where you felt like you were actually more of a photographer. It was like, “This is what I was creating.”
I shoot using the capture software, so every time I take a picture, it automatically shows up on my computer. So if I wanna go back, I'll say to the models, “Can you come and look at this?” And we can maybe sit and scan like 30 shots and I can tell them where, maybe I'm not feeling it and I'll say, “Look, can you see this shot here?” Can you see what's going on?” And they're like, “Oh yeah, I get it. Yeah, I can see it.”
So I think that's helped a lot of the inexperienced models when they actually get to see themselves on the computer. They can tell themselves that it's not working out. And then Sharon's like, “You know, you have to tilt your head this way, you're tilting your head that way, you need to bring your shoulder back so you can open up your chest to the camera.” So in that aspect, the digital was able– it was a great format to teach.
Spiak: It's a good tool. Yeah, for sure.
Green: Yeah, I don't mind actually. I'm cool with it.
Spiak: I just never wanted to learn it.
[Laughter]
Green: But we didn't have a choice. I mean, to your question, it wasn't like we could be, “No way I'm sticking to the old school way of doing things!” You would have been out of business and no illustrator would work with you.
Spiak: And of course, I wasn't painting [covers] anymore, so for me it was great. Now I paint pet portraits and people portraits.
Green: Do you know who Emmanuel Fremin is? He's a French model: longish hair, very sexy… He's actually a really good friend of mine and he got stalked in Union Square in New York City by these groupies, who basically had like an entire fan page just for his covers. Like they knew who he was! And they started showing him all the different links that they have for all his covers and he was just absolutely petrified. And he was like, “Oh my god, this is so bizarre!” He was their Fabio, and he had no idea that they were actually creating this entire website just of all his covers.
If he's not doing conventions like they were in the nineties, then he probably was just like, “Where is this coming from?”
Green: Yeah, he had no clue. They were just fascinated by him and he had longer blonde hair, and Emmanuel was French. He just had to open his mouth and talk and the girls wouldn't remember!
I have a few of yours. And I saw them on your website, too… The Hawk and the Dove, I think. This is Virginia Henley. I've got that one.
Spiak: Oh yeah, absolutely. That's a good one. Here's one, that’s a Fabio.
Oh, is that Desert Dreams? Oh, that dress is beautiful.
Spiak: I made that dress. It wasn't green.
Yeah, I was gonna ask — that's gorgeous. What color was it?
Spiak: It was kind of a mauve color.
So what type of historical is your favorite to do? I know Regencies are super popular now, but like –
Spiak: I like the medieval and the Western. Western's fun.
Green: Very few Westerns nowadays are a clinch. It's more just the guy. Cowboy, all cowboys.
Spiak: But I also like the Georgian era. I've made a lot of dresses of the Georgian era.
Green: Yeah, they're very extravagant.
Spiak: They're much fancier.
Green: I like Georgian for the women's costumes. I didn't like it so much for the men.
Spiak: They were fussy.
Green: A little fussy.
They would usually just have their shirt off anyway, right? Or just like–
Spiak: Sometimes they wanted the little shoes with the buckles and the knickerbockers and the long socks. Guys just don’t look sexy in them.
I would actually have to say I think my favorite is… I would say Regency, actually. Yeah, because there's just something so simple and elegant, and when you get a really good model. It just is – you feel like you've just shot a little bit of magic…
Here's where the Regency took a detour for us, I'm gonna bring this in just to show you how observant the fan base is for the Regency covers. I could be doing twenty book covers in a week, and other photographers could be equally busy. There could be one author that was working with Kensington, who might also have been working with Grand Central Publishing, and we had to be in discussion that the same dress would not end up being on the same cover in the same month. Because the fan base would then tell them… they were that crazy that they could tell us, “Oh, she wore the same dress in the last book” and I'm like, “How are we supposed to know this stuff?” We don't see the covers, and we don't read the books. But the fans were so incensed. It's like, “No, no, no, no, you need to change the dress, you need to change the dress!” So we then had to be aware because of the fan base that the dresses had to change. That's a true story.
Spiak: I would always tell the artist, “Don't make [the dress] the same color as it is.”
Green: Yeah, change the color.
Spiak: Change the color, do it a little different.
Green: Oh and then more came and said, “Oh, she was wearing the same jewelry. Oh, you can't put that jewelry on her because I read the last book.” We're like, “Oh my god!” Look we need to have our own research team! Because the fans were actually calling in and saying, “No, the last cover it was the same dress. You can't do it.” Like, they got pissed off.
I've seen Goodreads lists of a dress that comes up a lot and so people will be like, “This book has this dress, this book has —” but I didn't know people were actually upset about it. I thought it was just like a fun Easter egg.
Green: No! Nope, they would be making comments and sending in emails to the editors. The editors would tell us, “Can you make sure that you don't use the same dress that you used on the last book cover?” and I said, “But I don't know what the last book cover looked like, I didn't see the finished result. He might have changed the color of the dress.” And so that's why Sharon would always end up bringing in five or six dresses so we could compare. They wanted their money's worth. They wanted a different model and a different dress and to bring out all the different– you know, “She shouldn't be wearing pearls, it should be maybe a red ruby or maybe some sapphires or emeralds.” We were like, “Wow!”
So it seems like the prep work got much bigger just because like you had to be so specific– you had to have all these extra things in mind, whereas before you were able to be kind of flexible and it was like, “This isn't finished, I can change this whenever.”
Green: Yes.
Spiak: Well, another thing is when they were doing painted covers, every artist has their own style and their own way of painting fabric or jewels or whatever, you know, so it always looked different back in the day.
Green: Sharon and I are trying to figure out how many covers we've worked on together. Thousands. It's crazy. It's thousands.
I’m just very grateful that I've been doing something as a female photographer in New York for as long as I've been in business and have had incredible relationships. I've seen some of my models become moms and have their kids, and shoot their kids portraits and so I have these relationships outside my studio where a lot of these models have become my friend.
It's the fact that people still wanna shoot with Sharon and I, and they still wanna work with us, I would just say I’m just very grateful for that. Now what I'm trying to do is just basically create a very specific stock library of all my images, basically everything from all the Young Adult books I did: Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys. Goosebumps, it would be, you know, VC Andrews, Flowers in the Attic. We did all the reshoots when they would bring out a lot of the old covers and modernize them and reintroduce them to the younger generation.
Then we got to shoot a lot of vampire erotica, that was a different phase when you got to do stuff like that. Because I'm creating this stock library I'm gonna go back and I'm gonna find a lot of stuff and be like, “Wow, I remember doing that. That was fun.”
The vampire stuff for Sharon was really cool because it was a lot of fantasy, so that was where Sharon could really go crazy, because there was no specific wardrobe. It would be bustiers and leather and bangles and daggers and belts and crazy stuff, you know. Then we did a lot of steampunk stuff, like your Victorian time travel.
It's been a journey. I'm very grateful. It's been cool, you know. And we're still shooting. I don't think there's anybody else left.
Spiak: Yeah, it's true.
Green: They've all retired or died!
Spiak: That's what I said the other day. I said, “Well all my contemporaries have died or they’re not able to do anything anymore.”
Green: We're still standing. We're still here!
You can buy prints of Sharon’s paintings at SharonSpiakArt.Com, and it would absolutely be worth it, they’re stunning. She also does portraits of pets and humans alike! Be sure to contact her on her website for more info.
Shirley Green can be found at ShirleyGreenPhotography.com, and you can also follow her thirteen-year-old Pomeranian Rocky, who attends all of the shoots and dresses accordingly, on his Instagram, @Rocky.Rockstarr.
Tune in to the Reformed Rakes podcast to hear more from Sharon and Shirley!
I can’t believe there aren’t any comments yet! Really enjoyed this interview on the evolution of cover art ESPECIALLY with two women artists so involved in everything from old-school paintings to costuming to photography to digital. I started reading older romance novels earlier this year just for the beautiful covers, and it’s so fascinating to read how the process has changed with the industry. I also really appreciate the obvious care and professionalism extended to models. It would be really interesting to read an interview on their perspective and experience with the romance industry!