The Expert Book Smuggler

Edited by: Emilie Rose

If you’ve been in online book spaces for any amount of time, it’s likely you’ve heard the name Tessa Bailey at least once. Known for her incredibly smutty books, Bailey has been a staple of the online romance scene for a while now. Bailey is well loved by her readers, but has faced criticism for the content of her books, alleged race-baiting with her covers, and accusations of transphobia amongst other criticisms.

Let’s dive into why many think your favorite author is problematic.

My Killer Vacation Cover Controversies

In January 2022, the cover for My Killer Vacation was revealed on social media by the cover artist and Bailey herself.¹ At the time, it appears there was little criticism regarding the cover aside from comments from readers who felt the style resembled that of the animated TV show Total Drama Island. However, that would change in April once the cover artist began making plagiarism accusations against the artist for Chloe Leise’s Two Wrongs Make a Right.

The cover artist, who goes by the handle @bookshelfgremlin, posted the following to her Instagram account:

This is a repost of the cover I created for Tessa Bailey, it was revealed in January,and it has been available to preorder for months. An author posted their new cover yesterday for their debut traditionally published romance², and it bore STRIKING similarities to this cover for My Killer Vacation that I worked on and revealed at the very beginning of the year. Namely the entire pose, hand placements, flowing windswept hair, tattoos on MCs arms, the pop of red-it’s all honestly just too close for comfort.

I know this is not the author’s fault – authors published traditionally usually have very little say in what their covers look like, so I don’t blame them whatsoever. I blame @berkleyromance for allowing it to happen at all.

The cover here I worked on really had a lot of meaning for me; I pitched an entire concept to Tessa, complete with both vintage historical romance clinch covers and vintage travel posters as inspiration for the overall vibe, color palette, and type treatment. It’s something I believed in and loved working on for one of my favorite authors. It was a dream job! So now imagine my upset at seeing it recreated for a traditional publisher, who will have all the power with marketing and promotion to get their book onto all the usual bookstore shelves. And it feels like I basically did the first cover draft for them, for neither pay nor recognition.

This is not only unfair to me as the original artist, but also to the author for whom I created the cover initially (Tessa), and the author with the traditional publisher who probably didn’t ask for this either.

I will not be purchasing the Berkley book when it releases this fall, and it pains me to say because the author is so beloved. I won’t be giving Berkley money when it feels like they already took something from me. I’m so annoyed with this because the book in question is also a retelling of my favorite Shakespeare play, and I wish I could have enjoyed it with all of you. Almost as much as I wish traditional publishers would come up with their own new ideas.

This post, along with a story comparing the covers, was picked up by @BookishTeaAlerts on Twitter. From there, the controversy spread quickly on Twitter and other social media sites with users questioning why the white MMC (male main character) appeared East Asian on the original cover.

From there, discussions sprang up regarding another book from Bailey titled Window Shopping. It appears that one iteration of Window Shopping featured cover art that led to accusations of race-baiting as the characters on the cover did not resemble the characters as described in the book. Per Bailey, the MMC of Window Shopping was inspired by Ted Lasso and some readers have referred to the character as, “so white it is practically a plot point.’

The conversation regarding the cover for My Killer Vacation did not end with these discussions. Bailey addressed the conversation herself on social media with two different statements. The following was posted to her Facebook account:

Hello everyone! If you haven’t seen the ongoing situation regarding my cover for My Killer Vacation and Chloe Liese’s cover for Two Wrongs Make a Right, I just want to come here and give my position on it. My cover designer felt Chloe’s cover (from her publisher, Berkeley) was too similar to mine. I do not share this opinion. I don’t think they look anything alike. I’ve contacted Chloe personally and apologized and wished her best of luck with the book, which promises to be amazing.

Truthfully, I think my designer has been beat up on enough. I’m not participating in that and hope no one else will in this thread. She was a dream to work with and I love her artwork. Unfortunately, I can’t get behind someone encouraging readers not to buy another author’s book and I’ll be recovering My Killer Vacation. wasn’t an easy decision. If anyone has a cover illustrator to recommend, please let me know in the comments.

Love and understanding,Tessa.

The author would later post a cover ‘re-reveal’ on April 28th with the following caption:

Hello! There is a stunning, new cover for My Killer Vacation! Thank you to @okaycreationssh for not only giving me this work of art to fall in love with, but also fitting me in on extremely short notice. Some of you might be wondering why I am re-covering the book and while I want to be straightforward without drawing any more attention to the situation, I don’t know how to do both. So I’ll just say that my previous cover designer felt a publisher had copied the cover she did for me and made those feelings public, taking me quite by surprise. And while I didn’t share that opinion at all or support her choice to encourage readers not to buy the other author’s book, I don’t have any ill will toward her. We all make mistakes. I once tried to crowd surf at a morning concert that was being filmed for the Today Show and was escorted out. Mistake. There isn’t any footage, so don’t try and find it. I digress. I contacted the author whose cover the accusations were made about and we’re completely cool. I’ll definitely be buying her upcoming book. Again, while these kinds of accusations can be damaging, I’m sure everyone can show some understanding to my previous designer, as well as some appreciation for my new one (Sarah at Okay Creations) because this couldn’t be a better fit for my bounty hunter and school teacher crime solving duo. Thanks, everyone! Preorder available everywhere – coming 6/6/22 – please bear with me while the cover updates across platforms!

Around this time the cover artist cleared all posts from her Instagram save for one, which addressed the controversy.³

Yesterday, I posted my personal feelings about a cover I illustrated. I did not consult Tessa Bailey about those feelings, and she does not share them. It was absolutely not my intention to hurt specific individuals- namely, Chloe Liese- and it saddens me that that has been a byproduct of my posting-I sincerely wish it weren’t so. Further, I agree with Tessa Bailey that her cover should change, and I wish everyone the best.

Unfortunately for Bailey, the controversy surrounding My Killer Vacation still did not end there. After Bailey shared the new cover on April 28th, readers and authors alike immediately noticed the MMC’s tattoo, which many said appeared to be a Māori tā moko.

Author Courtney Clark Michaels addressed the tattoo on Twitter stating, “The more I think about this the angrier I get. Tā moko are taonga. It’s literally considered a cultural treasure. They are uniquely designed to honour a person’s whakapapa their heritage.”

This was particularly interesting as the character’s tattoos in the book are described as a skull and flames and were represented as such in the original cover. How exactly did the new cover land on a different tattoo, much less one with such rich cultural meaning? While Bailey is currently a traditionally published author, it appears that My Killer Vacation was a self published book at the time. She herself hired the original cover artist and therefore had more say in the cover than if a publishing house had done the work.

How did she have two versions of this cover with such inaccurate depictions of her book? Combined with the previous accusation of race-baiting with Window Shopping, it is clear that this is an issue tied directly to the author. The tattoo was changed to the skull and flames mentioned in the book sometime between April 28th and May 13th. I was unable to locate any posts from the author addressing the change.

While Bailey clearly played no part in the plagiarism accusations and handled the controversy well… the same cannot be said for the issues around race-baiting and cultural appropriation.

‘Dickscourse’ and Gender Essentialism

In November of 2022, Bailey posted a TikTok in which she discussed how she often thinks about how ‘size really matters’ in romance novels, how penises in said novels can be ‘unrealistically huge’, and how this is not a problem she wishes to correct. In the video Bailey ponders the idea of a ‘princess and the frog’ type scenario in which a MMC is cursed with a small penis that is fixed when he is kissed by the FMC (female main character). Bailey’s idea is that the curse would be broken by the kiss and the man’s penis would then magically grow ten inches.

This video (since deleted) was not received well and readers swiftly began discussing how the video was transphobic, body shaming, and gender essentialist. This is unsurprising as Bailey is often criticized for gender essentialism in her books as she places great significance on ‘male’ this and ‘female’ that. Olivia Waite had the following to say about Hook, Line, and Sinker in a book roundup for the New York Times.

But this book keeps insisting there are two kinds of people, the male ones and the female ones. Men: big, strong, dumb and horny. Women: small, soft, mysterious and pure. And perhaps I should have realized this boded poorly and bailed out in Chapter 3, where our hero is described as “the maestro of feminine wetness” and a “masculinity maelstrom.” (A malestrom?) Bailey’s reputation is built on being “the Michelangelo of dirty talk,” but I wasn’t expecting her work to sound quite so baroque. To hear a 21st-century woman refer to her anatomy as her “femininity” midthrust is jarring, a throwback to the tortured circumlocutions of bodice-rippers past.

Reviews on Goodreads express similar sentiments:

• “Another huge problem with this book–and, from what I’ve been able to gather from Twitter discussions, Bailey’s novels in general–is the gender essentialism. Oh my god, literally every single thing in this novel feels like it’s gendered. We have Brendan’s “male vulnerability” and Piper’s “feminine message,” and, at one point, a “feminine chair” ??? like ??? Methinks this novel has a fundamental problem when it comes to its depiction of gender dynamics and I was not about it. Will definitely not be reading anything else by Tessa Bailey in the future.” (It Happened One Summer review by Fatma)
• “The author is constantly shoving traditional gender roles down the readers’ throat and it’s really annoying. The gender essentialism is pervasive and I was so done with it by the end. A couple (paraphrased) examples : “men need to assert themselves in front of other men, it’s the law of the jungle”, “men like it when women make them feel strong, ask him to lift heavy things for you”, the author calling Hannah’s vagina “her femininity”, etc. All that stuff adds absolutely nothing and just makes me wish an editor had cut it out.” (Hook, Line, and Sinker review by Juliette)
• “I came here expecting a light hearted, feel good romance novel that didn’t shove gender norms and patriarchal expectations of women down my throat but yeah that’s kinda exactly what I got. It’s just another book that puts male validation on a pedestal so strongly that it’s written 90% in the male lead’s perspective while he talks about how horny and possessive he is about the female lead.” (Fix Her Up review by Senti)

Bailey’s writing more often than not focuses on ‘Alpha males’ who are possessive, jealous, controlling, and generally outright misogynistic. In contrast, the women she writes about are often painfully inexperienced, outright virgins, or entirely accepting of a man taking control and viewing them as possessions. When they are virgins, their virginity is a prize that must be carefully guarded from other men.

In Protecting What’s His, the male lead is a cop who many read as an abusive, misogynistic, and controlling stalker. A review from Feminista says, “Some people might be reading this book and thinking wow, so sexy and hot. I am sitting here thinking about real life horror stories of men, whether they are men in blue or not, who are too possessive when it comes to their wives and girlfriends: stories which sometimes ends in abuse if not death.”

In Need Me, the male lead is her professor whose father was ‘seduced’ by a teenager and found guilty of statutory rape. The lead refers to his love interest as ‘lolita’ often, including in bed, and even compares her to the teenager his father was involved with.

In Fix Her Up, the heroine is passed from her brother to her love interest as if she were a possession- she must go from one man (family) to another (love interest) and the characters in the book seemingly do not view her as her own person. Further, the male love interest appears to see her as a sister even once they have sex and refers to her breast as a ‘little sister tit’.

It is therefore entirely unsurprising that Bailey would make such a video as it is entirely in line with the works she has written thus far. Readers have often discussed how Bailey will describe actions or traits as male or female as shown in Fatma’s review above. For her, it seems that men and women fit into extremely specific boxes defined explicitly by their gender.

While writing this article, I shared Bailey’s video with my patrons and asked my trans patrons to share their thoughts for this article. A trans masc patron, Casper, shared the following:

This was interesting to me because I was so braced for outright transphobia that I was surprised to find I thought this said more, [in my opinion], about romance as a whole. To me, it so frequently comes off as ubiquitous in a lot of the big name romance authors that they equate dick size to desirability or even just the bare minimum? There’s often quite a bit of language in their sex scenes [about] how he’s just friggin huge and she’s so widdle […] It reminds me a lot of a few years back when big/small dick energy were huge phrases in the overall cultural lexicon. Moral goodness = big dick; evil = small dick. So it was easily this phrase that became very easily central to bodyshaming because oh, you didn’t hold a door open, you’ve got a small dick. Like the dick size is entirely irrelevant to your actions, morals, and ethics. But, [in my opinion], where Tessa Bailey really went wrong is how she ascribed her viewpoint as universal and being with someone with a small dick/having one as a curse. If she had said something along the lines of “this is my preference and I’m choosing to write about it.” Like…sure! Okay! I wouldn’t really have thoughts on it? Because that’s neutral and doesn’t devalue a huge swathe of the population from cis men to trans men and masc folks to intersex people.

Like it’s one thing if my best friend and I, who are both trans masc, joked about being cursed with lack of a dick, let alone a seemingly giant one by Tessa Bailey’s hand gestures. It’s because of our lived experience and dysphoria. It’s also specifically talking about us as two individuals vs however many billion people. And since I know the majority of people who will read whatever gets written up out of this are likely women: this is like when [me] and my female family members complain about our periods and say, very dramatically, we’ve been cursed with a uterus. This is, again, complaining on a small, metaphorical scale, about pain and hormonal swings and, in the case of one of these family members, having an emergency hysterectomy. In short, I don’t think trans or intersex people were even on Tessa Bailey’s radar. I’d say it’s in line with a microaggression.

I agree with Casper that Bailey likely never even gave thought to anyone outside of cishet men and women when making this video or writing her books. To me, Bailey comes across as an author who operates purely on fantasy with little consideration to what those fantasies might say about her. Does this make her an evil, bad person? No. But it does make her someone who operates from a place of privilege.

Cop Romances

“This man. He sits at the table with the FMC and her 17 year-old sister, not only talking about dead bodies but discussing an ONGOING INVESTIGATION into a gang war. And then basically says that he wishes he could just let both sides keep killing each other since it was solving the problem without his help. This dude is a WINNER.” (Protecting What’s His review by Diana)

When discussing Bailey operating from a place of privilege, I think it is important to discuss her cop romance books. While taking a look through Bailey’s Goodreads account, I noticed she has at least 13 cop romances and at least two military books between her Line of Duty, The Academy, and Crossing the Line series.

While those from primarily white, privileged households may enjoy cop romances, those from communities regularly brutalized by law enforcement tend to feel differently. What may seem like a sexy one liner to her readers is an actual reality for others.⁶

“Baby, I don’t need an excuse to cuff you. I just need the opportunity.”

Protecting What’s His by Tessa Bailey

There is nothing sexy about a police officer abusing his power to stalk a potential love interest. There is nothing sexy about a man who upholds the police state which subjugates the racialized, disabled, and homeless. By placing a cop in a romance novel as the love interest, the author romanticizes the police state by default.

When combined with Bailey crafting cop love interests with tendencies to stalk and manipulate their love interests? It is no wonder readers are turned off by these books.

“DISORDERLY CONDUCT should be called “UNETHICAL CONDUCT” or “STALKERISH CONDUCT,” because at least then there would be some truth in advertising. What was marketed as a steamy, hijinks filled romance is actually a complete train wreck of a novel that is less a romance and more a lesson in stalking.” (Disorderly Conduct review by Danya)

Where does this leave readers?

Whether or not this article inspires you to add Bailey to your DNR (Do Not Read) list is entirely up to you. I don’t find Bailey to be an author that sets out to cause harm, but one who operates within a vacuum of white privilege. The decision to DNR is one that you alone should make.

However, it is my hope that this article can at least encourage you to read her books through a critical lens.

Citations and Footnotes

1 Many posts regarding this cover have since been deleted so I cannot 100% confirm that both the cover artist and author posted about the original cover. I have, however, seen this discussed online.

2 Tessa Bailey began as a self published author before signing with a publisher. My Killer Vacation was initially self published and later picked up by Avon for a wider release.

3 I cannot confirm the exact time this was posted as the account appears to have been deleted.

4 Gender essentialism – Wikipedia

5 7 Gender Essentialism FAQs: Definition, Flaws, Alternatives, and More

6 How cop romance movies perpetuate problematic narratives – Scalawag