Tracking the Contemporary Romance Color of the Year

Every now and again I get finished copies of books, which is nifty, especially now that hard copies come with colorful treatments on the edges, or embossing and foil on the covers.

But I kept seeing this one book on my desk out of the corner of my eye and had to look again to remember which of the Fuchsia Pink Contemporaries it was. It kept giving me a double-take because there have been so many Fuchsia Pink Contemporaries!

Which got me thinking.

I think we need to declare a Contemporary Romance Color of the Year.

Pantone picks a color of the year, and there’s been mountains of research into how one color trend moves from industry to industry, like interiors and wall colors to automotive paint, for example. Color is an integral part of branding and iconography, and certainly some colors would lend themselves more to one genre over another.

There are now color schemes that I mentally associate entirely with one genre.

For example: if you are writing suspense, well, Suspense is Blue and Gold.

See what I mean? This was only a sampling of all the Suspense is Blue and Gold cover designs I spotted.

I also noticed this trend, which doesn’t quite qualify as a single color, but is definitely a repeating motif, one which I’m calling Split Down the Middle: 

Unrelated: it’s probably not a great thing that my brain loves patterns SO much because this is the result.

Also: I am not, like, REALLY not good at spotting AI covers. Like Katee Robert said in a podcast interview with me, it’s like trying to spot the fae and I’m very unskilled at it. So if you recognize one of these covers as AI, please know that I’m not trying to celebrate AI art or promote it or anything like that.

Patterns, though? I’m extremely good at spotting those, as you’ll see in the next few weeks. I’ve got quite a collection of covers sorted by color, and it is QUITE a competition for Contemporary Romance Color of the Year.

I’ll be posting collections of covers as entries in the competition in the coming weeks here and on social media (you can follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Xitter, and BluSky) and then we’ll vote on which one you think is THE Color of Contemporary Romance for 2024.

Can you guess what the leading color contenders are? What colors have you spotted most on Contemporary Romance?