The author says:

The novel, The Battle for Taiwan, is set around the South China Sea and is the second in a series of books. There is a slight change of action in this second book as its focus switches from an early sea battle, which the Chinese lose, to dramatic internal problems in China. Chinese faceless generals and other powerful people take the opportunity of disorder in China to steal three nuclear bombs. These faceless men act first against Taiwan and then Vietnam. Our hero Matt Fraser, accompanied by his loyal friends, hunt down the faceless men. All this happens against a backdrop of the faceless men trying to assassinate the new President of China who was not their preferred choice. In the mold of Sum of all Fears, the action is both suspenseful and surprising in its outcomes. Once again the book is fiction, but it draws heavily on actual events for its story line.

Nathan says:

First up: You say it’s the second in a series. I can find The Third Gate listed for you on Amazon; is that the first book? If so, you’ve missed an important opportunity for branding. Ideally, books in a series should maintain the same font choices and art styles so that they look to be of a piece — you want readers and fans of your first book to be able to pick it out from the background noise on Amazon or in the bookstore.  I’d advise you to start work on the second cover by returning to the first cover and deciding what to modify: The color scheme? The particular images (keep their same place in the layout)? etc. (If that’s not the first book in the series, then ignore this paragraph.)

On top of that, while filling in a country’s geographic borders with another image is a design trope with a long and distinguished history, in this case it works against you.  The image inside the border is a longer-range shot than the surrounding background, and so the internal image looks like a hole to something more distant — there’s more confusion than recognition, which works against the goal of immediate comprehension of a book cover.

At this point, one way or another, rethinking the concept of the cover will be more help than tweaking the present one.

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