The one thing you almost never see on a chick lit cover? A face. These covers are selling a notion that the story inside will be fun and relatable, about “everywoman” (or at least “everyfictionalwoman”). Not all chick lit is generic and unchallenging, but the publishers want to at least feign that they are, which means they can’t alienate the reader by making the covers about anyone in particular.

(In fairness, few novels put faces on their covers, because they don’t want the reader to have a fixed idea of what the characters look like. But with chick lit, the addition of certain common signifiers combined with the absence of a specific personality is particularly insidious.)