I first noticed the headless woman on book covers phenomena when I worked in a bookstore during the explosion of "chick lit" a few moons ago (perhaps 100ish moons give or take). often it was hard to tell books apart because they all involved some mixture of headless woman, wedding dress, shopping bag, small dog, flowers, and bright pink.
but i wasn't reminded of it until last year when a book called THE TORN SKIRT appeared on my "Amazon suggests" list. When I viewed the page to read the description and first page of the novel, I noticed a number of the suggested books associated with it included headless women or just women's legs.
so i started my search there to find other books with headless women. or women represented by their legs (which happens a lot too).
Also check out this blog, which has been collecting links:
Mediabistro
[originally posted 04/08/08; expanded 05/02/08]
The Torn Skirt by Rebecca Godfrey (well -- includes nose and lips)
I believe that these two below are young adult novels (the torn skirt is barely a novel for adults)
Innocents by Cathy Coote
Pure by Rebecca Ray
from there I just went into Amazon's WOMEN'S FICTION section (how convenient!) and started digging around. I also eventually looked in teen fiction, but didn't find much there, surprisingly.
Some general ones I found in Women's Fiction:

headless man included at no extra cost!

anything by Jennifer Weiner
or Jane Green for that matter (and even a man gets lobotomized here)
the two rows above are from the SINGLE WOMEN section of Amazon's WOMEN'S FICTION section.

This row above is from MOTHERS & DAUGHTERS section -- i LOVE the one where the woman's head is covered over by a HORSE'S HEAD! genius.
These are from the DIVORCE section. get it? They are DIVORCED from their BODIES. it's so symbolic!
anyway. There's something very disturbing from a feminist POV. But consider also that the lack of a face also reduces the amount of racial features. Is this an attempt to de-racialize the books in order to reach a wider audience? (skin tone is manipulated in various ways, although the bulk of the selections i found portray white women, with a few Indian authors' books getting the headless treatment as well.)
a quick look at some of Zane's books shows that the marketing trick is not limited to white authors:
However, Bebe Moore Campbell doesn't seem to get the headless marketing:
Nor does Terry McMillan
Eric Jerome Dickey has 2 that are headless, one that's a silhouette, and one that shows the man's face but not the woman's. yet most of his others show the women's faces.
So, the argument be made that white readers are being asked to see the subjects of the novels they pick up as de-racialized. This could serve the fantasy that the reader can "become" the main character more readily, although I suspect one of two more sinister psychological components: 1) consumers may reject a character based on her facial features and thus not buy a book; or 2) the cover is designed to elicit arousal through sexualization of body, parts thus reducing women to idealized physical specimens that the reader is supposed to find attractive -- whether the book itself provides her with a brain & personality is secondary to getting the book sold. this second possibility seems less realistic when you review most of the covers -- unless you consider the many "lolita-ish" poses as sexualized. but at the very least, presenting a playful female on the cover is attractive even in a non-sexual way for readers looking to enter a world of different experiences and responsibilities -- this is a woman who is going to be having fun, despite all the hurdles. she's not worried about bills, kids, health. she's worried about "fun" stuff. (I'm mostly thinking of Jane Green's books here -- where relationships are the focus but the covers assure the reader that the concerns will be lighthearted.)
Is the marketing for African American Fiction such that the readers will more readily respond to covers that clearly display women as specific, unique individuals? (or do the marketers assume that since the authors are black then the readers are black, so there's no reason to "hide" the racial characteristics of the covers? and I think Zane's books are a separate issue since they are very heavily sexualized covers for books that focus on sexual material.)
The sexual presentation of legs in many of the covers also makes me wonder what consumers are being asked to respond to -- much like a Victoria's Secret commercial, many of these covers seem bent on arousing the consumer, but not necessarily via a heterosexual mechanism (as many Romance novels do). Here, women are often portrayed alone in skirts, in the bath, somehow pantsless, sometimes shirtless. One the one hand, the metaphorical suggestion could be that the novel is about a woman "laying herself bare." but the initial visual stimulus (at least for me, a male reader who can't help but respond to half-naked women) is purely sexual, as if the association of sexual arousal will cause the person to buy the book either because the female consumer is attracted to women or to the idea that they can place their head on the body and become part of the experiences -- sexual or otherwise -- of the novel. Of course, the real reason legs are so prominent may simply be that they are the only interesting things left once the head of a woman has been deemed unsuitable for the cover. Showing stomach is not dynamic (they tend to be flat and otherwise indistinct. plus, women's stomachs can be too readily associated with pregnancy, an association that readers may not want to make if they are interested in the lives of single women, divorced women, etc.) feet and legs create some sense of versatility on the cover -- sexual, but also projecting innocence, coyness, playfulness, daring, strength, frustration, despair or any combination of these things.
It should be understood, though, that many covers I saw did include women's heads (including in the white, women's fiction section). but the overwhelming number of body part covers and headless covers warrants further investigation.i guess i've already started.
