Not long into author Jasmine Guillory’s debut novel The Wedding Date , released in January 2018, Alexa Monroe and Drew Nichols strip down and leap into their hotel bed, marking the first of many steamy sessions to come in the book’s delightful 200-something pages. With that, The Wedding Date officially declares itself a true romance novel — though the book’s modern cover, with its artful silhouettes and bright red background, might seem more at home among comedies with eye-catching illustrations like Crazy Rich Asians or Where’d You Go, Bernadette? Amid the silken-haired Fabios and women in lush, low-cut gowns that typically populate romance novel covers, the artistically rendered artwork on The Wedding Date look like a different species. Placed together, though, the quintessential clinch cover depicting a couple embracing and this new, stylized cover form a kind of timeline: Where the genre has been , and where it’s going.