I mean, honestly, this is lame, pointless and quite dumb, even for Broadsheet, which is saying something. It's a political statement if the covers of books written by women in another country tend to be pink? My God. Stop the presses. Does the President know? "Sir, we have a problem."

Sometimes reading this site is like watching clowns get out of the little car in the circus.

So why bother reading?

Usage of Pink colour is a curious one.

The history of pink and its association with femininity has only recently taken hold. As historians confirm, it is not until end of 19th century that pink equated with girliness. Until then, pink was a chosen colour for male babies, for its direct link to red, which was understood to be aggressive and thus more masculine.

Instead, baby blue was the choice for girls - a cooler, more subdued, "passive" colour tone.

Saying that, I am not certain how publishers, or for that matter, any marketers, are aiming to please me by associating products aimed at me with babies. Am understood to be an infant? Or merely considered infantile?

There are other colours in this world, and Pink is certainly not my favorite.

Publishers have good marketing departments just like other corporations. You're not going to convince them to avoid a strategy that is moving product. Kind of irritating for an author to have to have a cover that uses a lame stereotype, no doubt, but I'm sure they don't complain when they cash the royalty check. And if a cutesy cover sucks someone into a more serious or literary work than they were expecting and they end up liking it anyway, no harm done at all.

Wrote a book and chose a cover, which I was able to do because my publisher is small, of a painting by an artist, Denyse Goulet, whom I had admired for many years. It was corporate satire and the cover reflected that with men sitting in various arrogant postures around a boardroom table. If anything, the cover had a masculine feel.

Later, when I searched for my book on Amazon, its cover had miraculously changed: it now featured a pair of shapely legs, a huge briefcase where the skirt should be and stilettos. The cover screamed chick lit.

Still don't know how it happened or who done it, but I think I know why.

Marketers are packaging books written by or about women in a manner proven to sell more copies, thereby exposing the work to a larger audience.

Sounds good to me.

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P.S. I'm with Doppleganger on this--I can't muster up the energy to care about this one.

P.P.S. Complaining about publishers packaging non-chick-lit as chick-lit pre-supposes there's something bad or inferior about chick-lit (unless you're objecting on the grounds that book covers shouldn't be misleading). And if you're against chick-lit in general, then why? (For me, I'd say because it's often poorly written and, even when not, on subject matters that don't interest me.)

Publishers - especially paperback publishers - latch on to fads in commercial art as a quick way to attract attention from bookstand-browsers in order to facilitate a sale.

In the 1940s just about every mass-market fiction paperback had a pulp-fiction-style cover and blurb, even "classics" from Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Algren.

Some trade paperback publishers like to package classic novels with a tastefully-designed pseudo-Impressionistic illustration; look at any recent Jane Austen re-issue.

So now "chick lit" is in vogue and that's how stuff will be marketed. Get the idea?

If a few women are tricked into reading something substantive when going for their chick lit fix, it isn't all bad. Sure we all need escapism, but too many readers of chick lit (or Tom Clancy and Clancy-like "writers") don't read anything but chick lit (or see above).

I say we slap a Clancy cover on Bugliosi's The Prosecution of George W Bush For Murder and trick some of the semi-literate males who read Clancy novels into reading something worthwhile. Slap a chick lit cover on it, too.

Movie studios do it all the time. Remember Spiderman? The ads on shows that pull a heavy female audience focused on the upside down kiss, while the ads on male oriented shows focused on the action.

I understand why they do this, but I hope there's a bit of actualization going on here. I mean, just because there's a female character there, doesn't mean I need the cover for Postcards from the Edge. I feel Tom Robbins as having some of the most amazing female characters in his novels, no matter how minor they might be, but I would not want to imagine the covers to be pink, flowery and gaudy. I think I'd start searching for older versions in used book stores instead!

If you don't like publishers stereotyping pink as the "chick" color, why perpetuate the trend yourself. Broadsheet is the only page on Salon.com to turn the heading and Salon logo pink! Why is that? Did you ask for the page to be pink, to identify it for women's issues or did Salon do that? Either way it is exactly the same thing and until you change the broadsheet page you CANNOT get on book publisher's cases for doing the exact same thing. Hypocrisy from anyone is what is truly annoying.

@ Doppelganger: I didn't get the impression from Ms(Mr?)Scherer's post that s/he thought this pink trend was important. I don't think the idea was that this is yet another PP (Patriarchy Plot) against feminism. It clearly is not as important as the Kobra Najjim stoning post, and the text, at least to me, clearly reflects this. It's just a moderately interesting item that stroke the author as worthwhile for a short comment. One often sees such things in blogs. Do the others agree that there were no implications of great importance or great outrage in the post?

@ crowbot: I got interested in what you said about red having been the color for male babies and blue for female babies before the 19th century. Do you have any references on that?

Despite the "offended" tone, I tend to agree with mizbinkley here: it's just one more case of publishers doing what's necessary to sell more. I remember when pulp science fiction was published in magazines and paperbacks with gory pictures of scantily clad ladies about to be attacked by long-tentacled aliens... and even today, the covers usually have nothing to do with the story and everything with the need to capture the attention of possible buyers. No implicit sexism at work, just healthy desire for money.