The author says:

Will the plane crash that killed her husband two years earlier also claim Genny Stevens as a victim? When the insurance company demands their money back she hires Taylor Coleman to prove her husband’s innocence and protect her and her two small children. Someone else has a different plan for Genny, one that doesn’t involve her staying alive. She wonders if help from an unexpected source can possibly manage to arrive in time.

Guarding Genny weaves suspense, intrigue and fantasy into a modern day romance while straddling the worlds of the mystical and reality. This is a draft for the first of four books in the Moonlight Magic Series. It can be considered a Clean and Wholesome romantic story but with enough suspense, intrigue and mysticism to appeal to the YA through the senior citizen set. At this time we are leaning towards the Romantic Suspense category but are still researching which option is best. The book is finished, we just need the cover to publish. Thank you for any input that will better the cover.

Nathan says:

I have to tell you, if I saw this cover on Amazon I’d seriously consider putting it up on LousyBookCovers.Com.  Why?  Here’s what I see:

A bear’s butt.  In a moon.  With a smiling woman. But mostly a bear’s butt.

Does this tell me what the genre is?  Who the intended reader is?  What kind of story I’ll find behind the cover?  No, none of that.

And your description takes it further afield. You’re describing a suspense thriller, but suspense thrillers aren’t marketed with smiling people and gentle color schemes and bears’ butts.  Suspense thrillers are marketed with bold fonts and ominous shadows, and the people definitely aren’t smiling. Heck, you even mention a plane crash in your synopsis!  Plane crashes are exciting and dramatic! So why am I staring at a bear’s butt instead?  (And if your answer is, “It makes sense once you read the book,” you’re doing it wrong.  Nobody reads the book so that the cover will make sense to them.  The cover needs to appeal to readers before they know anything else about your book.)

The thing is that suspense thriller covers, especially “woman in jeopardy” covers, are really quite simple.  Go to Amazon and look at Tess Gerritsen’s covers, or Tami Hoag’s covers, or Lisa Jackson’s covers.  These are the readers you’re going after, so you need to catch the readers’ eyes by marketing to them in the same way.

Other comments?

The author says:

Face Lift is an urban fantasy set in a near future where there’s still a bit of magic in the shadows. Gregorios, a rare facetaker, infiltrates an island medical compound in search of his missing wife. The “doctors” claim to possess the scientific secret to eternal youth, but Gregorios discovers instead old enemies, old magic, and a plot of astronomical proportions.

Nathan says:

Zzzzzz… Sorry, what?

Okay, that was uncalled for. But it seems that everything about this cover is intended to be innocuous and deferential.  The color, what there is of it, doesn’t stand out from the monochrome image, which is all shades of gray instead of having any clear blacks or whites.  The fonts are thin and indecisive.  There’s nothing here which tells me what the genre is, who it appeals to, or whether this book has any adrenaline or “juice” to it.

You could take several corrective actions here — add a color overlay to the background image after you’ve played with the levels, make the fonts bolder and more decisive — but this cover could probably best be served by going back to square one.  Really, you could go to a free image site like Pixabay.com or Deathtothestockphoto.com, find the first image that captures your attention, and work from there to create a better cover… because “captures your attention” is what this cover is lacking.

Am I wrong? Anyone else?

The author says:

An adult paranormal romance set in present-day USA in which a vampire assassin and the prince of the werewolves fight their desire for one another while trying to prevent a war between their clashing factions. It’s the first book in a series aimed at women over the age of eighteen. It’s in a similar vein as Kresley Cole and Sherrilyn Kenyon.

Nathan says:

Nice cover for a steamy romance — but where’s the paranormal?  Nothing on this cover indicates “werewolf,” “vampire,” “supernatural,” or anything but two hot people getting groiny. Far be it for me to defend the “photobombing wolf” we see far too often on covers at LBC, but at least they serve the purpose of letting potential readers know that the book isn’t just 100,000 words of standard hookups.

What can you do with the color scheme to make it look not just warm and fuzzy?  If you make the figures smaller, could you put something in the background, like crypts or vaulted cathedral ceilings?  Could you convey something in your fonts — old Germanic, or clawed scratches?

Other ideas?

The author says:

Evelyn Carter is a struggling video news stringer, who stumbles into the biggest story of her life. After she records and reveals to the world the arrival of a time machine, she is recruited to become a member of an elite government time travel team. She and her team travel through time, with the public goal of recording historical events on video for the world to see. Along the way she learns of a hidden agenda that must be kept secret from the public at all costs. Buried deep in the past is a potential solution to stop the unstoppable. The team must journey farther through time and space than anyone has ever gone or thought possible, in order to put the pieces of the puzzle together. However they are blocked at every turn in their efforts, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Nathan says:

Hmm. There are a lot of choices that seem almost-right here, but they’re cumulatively less than the sum of their parts.  I’ll try to pick them apart.

First, I’ve got real problems with your font choices.  The title font is too plain to be enticing, but too innocuous to be urgent.  The back cover font is an impediment to reading the text.  And while I have no problems with the byline font itself, it doesn’t mesh well with the other fonts at all.

The color-transparency of the silhouetted figures is also annoying.  But more than that, they seem to be indicating that whatever is worth looking at is happening somewhere off the cover.

And then you’ve got an egg-shaped moon on the back cover. Definite demerits there.

To tweak this cover, I would move the sun to behind the couple and crop it like this:

Since the other detail in the image doesn’t actually convey any additional information, it can be excised in favor of focus.

Anyone think differently?