The author says:

Tatum Rolf knew there were things about her life that just weren’t right. It wasn’t right living in the human world as a wolf shifter. It wasn’t right to be the female head of a male household. And it certainly wasn’t right that she was taller than most of her male peers. Sure, she could provide protection, education, and a livelihood for her two brothers and great-grandfather, but she couldn’t offer them a traditional shifter life. The only solution? Find a pack that would accept them all. And when the entire shifter race is threatened, she’ll need to use all her strength and wiles to ensure their survival and prove to the male-dominated world just how important she is.

Nathan says:

I appreciate the efforts to harmonize the individually sourced figures into a coherent image.  I think there are still spots where the different light sources are jarring — the left male figure’s face is a lot brighter than the others, and the right male figure’s right arm is so bright that it undermines the foreground female figure’s arm and gun, which is a more important detail.

By biggest complaint, though, is that in the thumbnail, all wolfish details to the cover are lost. Simply making the foreground brighter for contrast would go a long way.

Other comments?

The author says:

A middle-grade soft science fiction/coming-of-age novella that will hopefully appeal to fans of Sir Philip Pullman, Robert C. O’Brien, and Margaret Peterson Haddix.

Graeme Pendlebury is a genius. Or at least his fellow fifth graders think so, and he’s in no rush to correct them. He dreams of enrolling at MIT and becoming a physicist. . . Until he goes there and finds a pencil case, with his name on it, full of diamonds. Things only get weirder for him after that.

Nathan says:

Here’s a selection of Pullman’s covers:

Here’s a selection of O’Brien’s covers (definitely some older covers in here):

And here’s a selection of Haddix’s covers:

If your readership is their readership, then your covers need to at least have some commonality with their covers, to signal to those readers, “This book is for you!”  That means dynamic, colorful covers.  Yours is minimalist, low-energy, and borderline incomprehensible (it might make sense once one reads the synopsis, but if so, you’ve got those backwards — the cover is what intrigues a reader first to move on to the synopsis second).

I think you may have started with, “What cover do I have the skill and resources to put together easily?”  You need to scrap that and start with, “What does this cover need to sell the book to my target audience?” Then figure out how to get there.

Other comments?

The author says:

[Jacket Copy – Literary/Historical Fiction] In 1978, the tension on the streets of Managua was electric. The whole city teetered on the edge of becoming a war zone. The Somoza family held the people of Nicaragua in a stranglehold, stripping the country of everything of value and making beggars out of honest citizens. The only thing that kept them in power were the feared Guardia Nacional. In order to survive, Paco eked out a living as a street musician, busking and playing university parties. His politics were those of someone never sure of where he would get his next meal.

But when a violent government crackdown erupts on the streets, he’s forced to choose sides in order to survive. Thrust into a fierce guerrilla war, what begins for him as a struggle for survival becomes something more. The heavy cost of the revolution becomes clearer with every battle fought, and every traitor executed. Paco must find the balance between fighting for a cause he increasingly comes to embody, and maintaining his humanity.

Every Arm Outstretched examines historical events through the lens of the human heart. How do we determine right and wrong when society itself has become corrupt? Do we owe our ultimate loyalty to our comrades or to our ideals? And can the end ever truly justify the means?

Nathan says:

It’s a very well-done cover. My only major issue is that, in 2020, the symbol of the raised fist has become very much associated specifically with Black Lives Matter. While your usage of it here is correct historically, I fear that its presence on the book might give the wrong first impression to readers.

The other thought I had was to give some small indication of guerrilla warfare. Perhaps the otherwise innocuous silhouette could include the silhouette of a long gun (probably an AK-47 would be even better, but I’m not confident that that can be rendered identifiably in silhouette).

Other comments?

The author says:

Legacy of Hunger – Set in Ireland, 1846, historical fantasy drama/adventure (not romance). Not an actual scene in the book, but a conglomeration of several pivotal scenes. The standing stones are a portal into the fae world.

Nathan says:

The cover is beautiful as-is, at least for print sales; I think that some tweaks for the ebook cover would be prudent — pull in closer (it’s okay to have the series title across her skirt, honest), and separate the byline from the background more clearly, so that salient details are more easily seen at less than full size.

Other comments?