ABSTRACT
The escalating prominence of regional sagas in fastseller lists significantly increased the commercial importance of women authors in British publishing in the 1990s.1 This discussion will look at a specific group of saga novels, the Liverpool group,2 and seek to elucidate how the discourses and semiology of their covers become developed between the tensions posed by the exigencies of the London-based publishing industry and the superior local knowledge of local authors and artists. Radway (1984) indicates ‘the effectiveness of commodity packaging’, that is the relationship between cover and content, for the mass-market romance, (Radway 1984 in During 2000, 565) and similarly effective packaging has been particularly significant in the development of the saga sub-genre. This chapter offers an analysis of 1990s practices in book titling, cover art semiology, book cover paratexts and some author and reader epitexts. This will include consideration of how Liverpool saga covers constitute paratextual thresholds (Genette 1997) to the narratives within, and how and why specific themes are indicated on this primary marketing medium for these bestselling fictions. Further semiotic and textual analysis of covers will interrogate contradictions posed by publishers’ juxtaposition of representational artwork and the thematic indicators in back cover ‘blurbs’.
