Lynn Sanders
Page 2
Cherif: …but we didn’t know that when we first did it. We just took romantic stuff that we liked, like the guys in armor and stuff like that, and we went to the Romantic Times convention. We met Marsha Canham and Virgina Henley, who really liked our images. They ended up going to their publishers with samples of our work and sold us. They sold 2 covers for us. They basically put their foot down and said this is what we want on our books, surprisingly enough their publishers went for it. And it really doesn’t happen like that. In the established protocol of doing covers, they come to you. Usually you present your portfolio and if they want to use you on a job, they will come to you. It’s very rare that an author has the power to do that.
So as this was happening, Lynn and I were bouncing different ideas back and forth between each other, like what could we do to generate more of a presence or more PR in this industry to sell covers, but also to make some money, and that’s where the idea of Romantic By Design got started. We had this group of male models that we were using for various projects, and we thought what if we had this little mailer catalogue, with some very nice romantic themed products, like candles, pewter goods, books, romantic picnic baskets…
Lynn: …and have the guys present it, rather than the women do it all.
Cherif: So we put together the little catalogue you see there,
it was a real learning experience, because we did, like most of our projects, we did everything from start to finish. We did all the copy, all the product development, marketing…we did everything. And it was fun. We did it for a couple years and we said you know what… we don’t want to be retailers anymore.
Lynn: And we decided, because the expense of putting the catalogue out, in just one shot is $15,000, just to produce.
Cherif: Yeah, it was very expensive.
Lynn: And then right away, what we were finding that our pictures didn’t go out of date, but the products all did, within a 3 or 4 months, 3 or 4 of the products weren’t available anymore. So we would have to make supplements and it seemed like too much money, then of course the internet was coming down the line, and we thought if we ever wanted to regroup we could do it on the internet.
Cherif: Also it is a lifestyle thing, filling orders, mailing stuff…we wanted to paint, get back to painting.
Lynn: And you have to choose what you want to do. We chose to be the illustrators rather than the production people, shipping people and all that other stuff.
Cherif: We really learned a lot to do that project, it was a huge education. We learned about printing, desktop publishing…
Lynn: ..and actually we pulled a cover out of there.
Well, this one’s in “Passion’s Blood” of course
Cherif: We actually shot the products, and that’s a whole new style of photography that commercial people know how to do, but we never really had a reason to do it. We had to do our own product photography.
Lynn: What I thought they did wrong, they didn’t make the product big enough, the picture was so tiny, but as usual we were rushing and left a lot of things we would have changed a little bit. The photos didn’t show the detail of the chalices off. They are just so pretty.
But a lot of the pictures in the catalogue we used for other things.
Anyway as time went on, Cherif picked up on the art really fast. Which is good cause I would have fired him immediately if he didn’t (all laughing) but he was a very talented artist. But we had the problem where we tried to present ourselves as serious artists and we fall back into, he’s the cover model, no brains and all that.
Cherif: In photography, it’s funny because people will label you as something, I guess it’s normal, we all do it, they need you to fit a certain mold, so they can relate to you. And we do a lot of stuff in the photography world and in the romance world. In the photography world, Lynn is the focus of attention, and in the romance world it’s the other way around, it’s me. But in reality, we have a business partnership, it’s both of us all the time, in whatever field.
Lynn: And I think too, as he gets a little older, it helps.
I noticed that as a young person and being a woman in the art world or in the photography field, that nobody paid any attention to me either, it wasn’t until I got over 30, that I’ve gotten a lot more attention. In pretty much a male dominated business, a little age on you helps.
Deborah: Can we ask about your cover models? Where do you find them? Do authors come to you with ideas? How does that work with the publisher?
Cherif: Well, there’s been different ways. It’s not always the same way. Obviously I had long hair, and worked at Medieval Times, they loved the way I looked because it fit the physiology of what they looked for, so most of the time we used me, if it’s appropriate. But we like to get variety, otherwise all your work looks the same. So some of our cover models have been friends of mine, either I’ve met them through Medieval Times or through hobbies.
Lynn: We had John come over…
Cherif:... John DeSalvo, we met through the conventions.
I’ve given my business card to a couple of people, they never call me back (grinning) but I’ve even seen a guy who was delivering hoagies or something to a fast food place, he had long blond hair and I’m like “hey you…want to be on a romance cover..?” (laughing)
Lynn: That’s why you can’t do that in the street, you have to go to the gym…(smiling)
Cherif: …but the female models, we used my wife,
and we used other people that we’ve met, like Stacy Walker, we use her a lot. And then we had a recommendation from a publisher, who used a model in New York and they knew she moved to Chicago, when she asked if there was anybody working out here, they gave her our telephone number. We hooked up with her, although she’s in California now, she’s a real good model, her name is Rachel.
And between Stacy and Dawn, my wife, we get most of our covers done. Occasionally we will have a publisher request that we get head shots from a casting agency, but that’s very rare.
Lynn: If you've noticed that John is on ¾ of the covers, that look, it’s him.
Cherif: We changed wigs, different costumes, it’s the same person but..
Lynn: We did some with Leland and Leslie…
Cherif: We just used them for a cover, for Heather Grahams new book, which is at the publisher right now, it’s pretty cool!
Nancy: Do you use your own ideas or do the publishers tell you what they want or do you get to develop it on your own?
Cherif: Mostly they tell you what they want.
Lynn: It’s kind of a mixture.
Cherif: They will give you a drawing or a summary of what they want. Lynn and I will shoot what they want, like to the letter but we give them a variety. 75% of the time they will pick something that we have come up with. The one for Heather, we gave12 different looks, we really wanted them to be satisfied with that job. Normally we give them about half a dozen different looks, which makes up for the fact that we are not in New York, where they might be able to send an art director to the shoot, where the art director can be there and say yes or no. We don’t have that luxury, so we give them a digital proof sheet, that has a whole variety, then they say yes..no..yes..no..and they vote. It seems like today they make a lot of committee style decisions, they vote and it takes a couple weeks to find out what they want.
But sometimes it can be really locked in, for example the “Year and a Day” cover for Virgina Henley, there was no leniency to that one at all. It had to look like this. They sent us a drawing on a napkin and it turns out it looks like the picture “La Belle Dame Sans Merci" by Frank Dicksee which is Pre-Raphaelite.
Lynn and I had it hanging on the wall, and we were looking at this napkin ...
Lynn: Well she told me on the telephone too, "Maybe she could have flowers in her hair"...
Cherif: They always say “maybe”, it took us a while to figure out when they say “maybe”, they want it!
“Maybe she can be on a horse. Maybe the horse can be white.”
Lynn: I think they were looking at the painting when they gave us the description.
Cherif: Very rarely do we get a publisher who doesn’t have a pretty good idea of what they are looking for. They almost always know.
Lynn: This is a speck one, we did in Texas, that was the first cover we ever did, Marsha Canham’s “Blood of Roses”
Cherif: Lately, we are selling stock too, which is a whole new
direction for us. Sometimes we have publishers that have a smaller budget. Or publishers in Europe use our stock a lot and in that case we have complete control over what they use.
Lynn: We have our second book that we are working on too. We are looking for a publisher. Of course “Passion’s Blood” was the first illustrated romance books at that time. They had illustrated books, but they are mostly drawings and sketches. Ours are this combination thing, called “stylized realism”, combination photography and mixed media. When I was a photographer, and I started painting the photographs, the photographers would have a fit because you were not true photography, you were something else. The painters would have a fit because you were using photography as a base. We had both sides not liking us in a way.
Cherif: It's tough for us to fit in.
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