The author says:
The book is a character-driven historical/literary fiction piece about a Canadian living in Germany during the Second World War. The book follows the main character, Henry Martens, from May 1944. Working for his uncle, a Nazi Party leader and factory owner, Martens has successfully evaded military service until events in his factory bring him to the notice of the Gestapo. From there he’s sent to military training with the German Army, and eventual assignment to a combat unit on the Russian Front. Martens juggles his desire to return home (with conscience intact) with the necessity of toeing the line with his German superiors in order to survive. But the more dedicated a German soldier he becomes, the more he does to survive the war, the more unlikely it will be that he can ever return to family and friends in Canada.
Nathan says:
This cover design looks like a throwback to early ’70s publishing for young readers by Scholastic and the like. As such, I don’t think it’s hitting your target readers, unless you’re aiming at juveniles with a book that is as much to teach them about history as to tell them a story.
I think you need to go back and look at the other books in your genre, and be clear what your genre is. A wartime drama is a DRAMA (set in wartime). A wartime suspense thriller is a SUSPENSE THRILLER (set in wartime). Use the cover to convey the type of story first, and the setting second.
Other comments?
With a cover like this, it’s important not to over-interpret. I do not see a reference to seventies juvenile publications, and I do not see anything else that suggests this book is meant for children, so I believe it is best to interpret the cover in a more conservative and straightforward manner than read into it meaning that may not even be there. For me, the cover simply says that the story is about a German soldier in WW2. If that interests me, I can then read the blurb for more information; otherwise, I’ll just pass it by. At worst, the artwork is not interesting enough to catch my attention, but that will probably not matter to readers who find the subject interesting in and of itself.
I don’t mean that there are overt reference to juvenile publications, but that the style –white cover, illustration confined to a box — is reminiscent of those books. A large part of the effectiveness of a book cover lies in its similarities to other book covers the readership might be familiar with. (I could write a manual for apple horticulture and think it appropriate to have hands holding an apple against a black background, but most of the eyeballs the cover encounters would immediately associate it with paranormal romance.)
“I don’t mean that there are overt reference to juvenile publications, but that the style –white cover, illustration confined to a box — is reminiscent of those books.”
All right, then allow me to clarify: I didn’t get that (and I lived through the seventies), and I doubt more than a few post-seventies readers would get that, so I don’t see that as a problem, or an issue.
“A large part of the effectiveness of a book cover lies in its similarities to other book covers the readership might be familiar with.”
Which is mere copying and not actual creativity. Covers that are too similar to pre-existing covers do not sell well; those that are unique do.
“I could write a manual for apple horticulture and think it appropriate to have hands holding an apple against a black background, but most of the eyeballs the cover encounters would immediately associate it with paranormal romance.”
Personally, I’ve never seen a paranormal romance cover that looks even remotely like that, but that’s where the title comes in. If the cover you described had the title, “How to Grow Big Beautiful Apples”, I doubt very many people would mistake it for PR.
“Which is mere copying and not actual creativity.”
It’s not copying, it’s MARKETING: recognizing how the readers you’re targeting are used to being marketed to.
“Covers that are too similar to pre-existing covers do not sell well; those that are unique do.”
Not true. Check out any of the top-selling book lists by genre on Amazon, and you can see that there are similarities between books of specific genres. Books that don’t look like the genres they’re in don’t attract the attention of the readers of those genres.
“Personally, I’ve never seen a paranormal romance cover that looks even remotely like that…”
“It’s not copying, it’s MARKETING…”
You say potato, I say potahtoe. I have professional training and experience in web and graphic design. (Which is not to say you do not; only that I know what I’m talking about.) The biggest bugaboo at the school where I received my degree and at the company I worked for was if your design looked too much like everyone else’s websites or brochures or whatever. If they were here, they would deny that copying is marketing.
“Not true.”
Yes, true. I’ve read numerous articles in design trade journals that have compared the sales of books with similar covers and with unique covers, and the latter invariably out-performed the former.
I didn’t say there no such covers, only that I had never seen one. But even though I know what Twilight is, I still don’t get PR from that cover design, and I doubt anyone unfamiliar with the novel would either. In any event, with such a design, the title becomes critical.
I’m not advocating wholesale copying. I’m saying that one should be aware of how books similar to one’s own are marketed, because that means that the audience is used to being marketed to with certain visual elements (color scheme, type size and style, etc.). A cover is the means to instantly attract the attention of the audience who would enjoy the book, so using genre-specific cues is a very effective way to grab those eyeballs before the brain gets as far as reading the full title, subtitle, etc.
Numerous articles in trade journals notwithstanding: Look at the Amazon genre bestseller lists, and you can see that the books there without author name recognition, pre-existing brand awareness or a wholesale marketing blitz are novels whose genre you can tell from a glance at the cover. There is a place for originality, and there is a place for knowing the visual cues common in the genre.
I would assume that a majority of the reading public are at least peripherally aware of a book that sold 100 million copies and literally started “paranormal romance” as a publishing category.
One of my pet peeves is people citing “studies” without answering several critical questions in he context. (A link is ideal, but not always possible.)
Did these studies compare independently-published works to each other, or at all? There are substantial differences in the resources and reputability of independent publishing compared to traditional publishing. In a similar vein, were famous authors such as Stephen King removed from the results? Famous authors can afford to take cover design risks because their name sells the book. (This is evident in the book cover design for famous authors as well, as the author name will often be the largest thing on the cover, regardless of how “unique” the rest of the design may be.)
Were the studies using the mean or median of the groups they were examining? While not normally an issue, in a field such as book selling where a tiny proportion of books (such as Twilight or Wool) hit the jackpot and make a huge amount of money, these outliers can substantively skew the mean from the median, resulting in easily-misinterpreted results.
How were the groups defined? This is especially critical when discussing subjective categories such as “unique” or “similar” covers. Unique compared to what? Similar to what?
This is especially complicated when considering that genres are an important part of book marketing. Does use of genre cues, such as a magnifying glass on a clue-based mystery, automatically disqualify a cover as unique, even if the rest of the cover differs from similar works? Does a cover count as unique if it is apes the composition and elements in a different genre, but is not similar to the covers in its target genre?
As Nathan mentions, entries in a series often have similar covers to create series branding. Are the covers of series able to count as unique if the entries resemble each other, even if the composition and elements chosen would otherwise have been unique?
Even with all these questions answered, there are still logistical questions. With the rise of independent publishing, the number of books published each year is between 600,000 and 1,000,000 (Forbes, 2013). (Old data, I know, but it’s more likely to have risen than fallen as self-publishing has more avenues now.) Did the makers of these studies really sift through even 2 years of book covers to determine their “unique” category? Unlikely, as it would have to be done by hand, and while sampling is a valid technique, it’s much more effective in cases where a concrete measurement is taken. (I’m not saying that they should have evaluated 2 million books in terms of sales, by the way, just saying that they cannot prove whether the covers they did use were actually “unique” without sifting through an impossible amount of data.)
That leaves the scientists, at the very best-case, evaluating the categories in the same way that beauty is evaluated: using a small group of ordinary people asked to rate the picture on a scale from 1 to 10. (This avoids bias on the part of those conducting the study.) This is likely subject to bias as well, depending on how groups are selected, but it is probably the only way to conduct a study of this nature in any relatively impartial way that is also feasible. This also puts “unique” into a scaled form, rather than a separate category, which is more conceptually appropriate. Was this the method used in any of the studies? Did any of the studies describe the method used at all?
This is not nitpicking. Study design is important, and many studies are designed improperly. An improperly designed study leads to inaccurate, worthless results.
References
Morgan, N. (2013). Thinking of Self-Publishing Your Book in 2013? Here’s What You Need to Know. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/nickmorgan/2013/01/08/thinking-of-self-publishing-your-book-in-2013-heres-what-you-need-to-know/#43d16eb514bb
A YA paperback would be my guess as well, though that doesn’t necessarily preclude this being a drama or suspense thriller: The Devil’s Arithmetic and In My Enemy’s House were two rather successful YA paperbacks on similar subjects. That’s also a fairly decent picture of the protagonist you’ve got on the front there, who’s looking rather appropriately appalled/bewildered at his situation. (It was also rather clever of you to adapt that image from an old Nazi propaganda poster, though I hope it’s enough in the public domain by this point that no copyright holders will come hunting for your scalp for using it.) If this is a YA paperback, you’re doing a pretty good job so far.
That said, take a look at the covers of those two YA paperbacks set during World War II that I just linked, and notice an important advantage they each have over your cover: their cover images take up much more of the cover than yours does. If you can expand your image in any way to help fill the cover (either by getting a larger version of it or extending the drawing to show more of the sky overhead and the like), I’d definitely recommend doing so. I’d recommend specifically expanding the background if possible: isolating the guy in the middle of a larger expanse would make his disorientation and fright even more evident than it already is.
Also, your cover’s color scheme… needs work. I get how you’re trying to emphasize the protagonist’s originally being a Canadian by the use of the white background and red maple leaf of the Canadian flag, but I think your emphasis is misplaced; his Canadian heritage only seems to be important in the story’s context, not so much for your cover. The distinctly Nazi German symbol of the Iron Cross is also rather superfluous, since just about anybody who’s seen pictures from World War II in a history class would recognize the German eagle patch on the trooper’s uniform and that dorky German trooper helmet on his head from a mile away. Even with the black borders to help distinguish the cover from the blank white background against which it’s likely to be set on the sales page, having so much of the cover be that big blank white nothing just doesn’t look right for this kind of novel.
As such, I’d recommend removing the national symbols from the front cover altogether when expanding the picture to fill it, and replacing the red-on-white Canadian color scheme of the rest of the cover with the white-and-scarlet-on-black color scheme of Nazi Germany. Your prospective readers can find out about the German trooper’s actually being a Canadian from the synopsis on the sales page and on the back cover once they’ve actually clicked on the thumbnail (or picked it up while browsing the bookstore). What’s important right now is to get the attention of people who’d be interested in the story of an ostensible Nazi trooper who’s apparently rather reluctant to have any part in this war he’s been sent out to fight.
Concerning the back cover, some of the details on it could also use some shuffling: the last paragraph is right down where the brief author’s biography is usually supposed to go, and while using the national symbols as dividers between paragraphs might be acceptable, your making them so large has shunted the first paragraph up much higher on the cover than it really ought to go. More than national symbols, I also think prospective buyers would prefer to see some kind of intriguing tagline header on that synopsis. Consider a few potential headlines that have occurred to me just from looking at that picture on the front and reading your description:
How did Henry get himself into this… and more importantly, how was he going to get out?
No one would have guessed Germany’s poster boy Hans was actually the Canadian Henry… and he wanted out!
All Henry wanted was a workman’s wages, not marching orders.
History wasn’t going to let Henry stay out of its way.
Henry didn’t want the war, but the war wanted Henry.
At what price peace… or repatriation?
From now on there is no Henry; only Hans.
Lots of great taglines here.
“I’m not advocating wholesale copying.”
I didn’t say you were. I merely stated that the professional designers who taught me and whom I worked with would consider imitating the styles of preexisting covers instead of designing unique covers with styles of their own to by copying and lazy design, and would defeat the purpose of good marketing.
“Numerous articles in trade journals notwithstanding…”
So Amazon is a more credible source that analyses and studies by professional designers? Excuse me for being skeptical. Besides, Amazon sales figures are worthless because there is no comparison of the sales figures between similar covers and unique covers. As I said before, the trade journal articles demonstrate that when such comparisons are made, unique covers out-perform similar covers.
“I would assume that a majority of the reading public are at least peripherally aware of a book that sold 100 million copies and literally started “paranormal romance” as a publishing category.”
Irrelevant and a red herring. The point is that the cover you showed does not by itself say PR, and is only associated with PR because of the novel’s success. If the novel had sold little and disappeared into obscurity, virtually no one would think PR at the sight of that cover.
“I merely stated that the professional designers who taught me and whom I worked with would consider imitating the styles of preexisting covers instead of designing unique covers with styles of their own to by copying and lazy design, and would defeat the purpose of good marketing.”
Then I suppose we have no recourse but to put your professional designers and my professional designers into a cage and let them battle it out.
“So Amazon is a more credible source that analyses and studies by professional designers? Excuse me for being skeptical.”
Um, YES. Actually seeing what sells is a more credible source.
“If the novel had sold little and disappeared into obscurity, virtually no one would think PR at the sight of that cover.”
THAT’S MY POINT ENTIRELY. Because that cover was SO popular (with a huge marketing push), that style of cover became synonymous with “paranormal romance,” and for a number of years covers that mimicked that style did very well. The market did hit saturation on that (because, you’re right, straight-up copying doesn’t bring anything new to the table), so you don’t see new books which ape it to such a degree, but the point remains: If I published a horticulture book featuring a pair of female hands holding an apple against a black background, I shouldn’t be surprised that the readers who are attracted at first glance are paranormal romance fans, who are then disappointed that the book is not in fact what they expect. Meanwhile, my target audience of home apple orchard husbandmen skip over the book when it appears on a shelf of new releases or general sale books (i.e., unless they find it on the shelf in the “apple orchard” section at Barnes & Noble) skip over it, not realizing it’s meant for them.
All of which is a long digression from the point, which I didn’t realize was even a point of contention: Your book cover is an advertisement for your book. Its main purpose is to attract the attention of the potential reader of your book — that is, to attract the attention of someone who would enjoy reading that book. To do so, you need to know how those readers are used to being marketed so that you don’t make your book look like something it’s not (driving away your target audience, and attracting people who won’t want to buy the book when they flip it over and read the cover copy).
All clear? Are we done here? Good.
“Then I suppose we have no recourse but to put your professional designers and my professional designers into a cage and let them battle it out.”
Snark is not professional and is not a substitute for facts and does not refute rational arguments. Other than your stubborn refusal to consider alternative points of view on this issue, you have no reason to believe that what professional designers have taught me is nonsense simply because it challenges your preconceived notions.
“Um, YES. Actually seeing what sells is a more credible source.”
Ignoring for the moment that you have no way of telling whether those sales figures are even accurate or how they were compiled, etc., I find it monumentally arrogant to so blithely dismiss the fact-based findings of professional experts based on factless assumptions, anecdotal evidence, and preconceived notions. But then again, we are living in a post-fact society, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
“THAT’S MY POINT ENTIRELY.”
Um, no, that’s my point. Co-opting my argument does not prove your argument right, and neither does shouting.
“If I published a horticulture book featuring a pair of female hands holding an apple against a black background, I shouldn’t be surprised that the readers who are attracted at first glance are paranormal romance fans, who are then disappointed that the book is not in fact what they expect. Meanwhile, my target audience of home apple orchard husbandmen skip over the book when it appears on a shelf of new releases or general sale books … not realizing it’s meant for them.”
Two problems with this argument. The first is that it assumes that orchard husbandmen will look for orchard husbandry books in the general readership rather than in the section on gardening or doing a specific search for orchard husbandry books. The second is that it assumes orchard husbandmen know of or care about Twilight or PR enough to associate that cover with either. More than likely they simply would not get or understand the reference, but even if they are all closet Twilight/PR fanatics, the fact that the cover pops up when doing a search for orchard husbandry books, with a title that clearly establishes it is an orchard husbandry book, makes it highly unlikely that they will think, “What’s a PR book doing here?” At worst, it will be jarring enough for them to take a second look out of curiosity.
“Your book cover is an advertisement for your book. Its main purpose is to attract the attention of the potential reader of your book — that is, to attract the attention of someone who would enjoy reading that book.”
I don’t recall disputing this. You’re jumping to unwarranted conclusions here.
“To do so, you need to know how those readers are used to being marketed so that you don’t make your book look like something it’s not…”
I never disputed that either. I simply pointed out you can be lazy and copy what everyone has done, and hurt your sales in the long run, or you can be creative and create something unique that outsells everyone else.
Kevin,
PLEASE don’t lecture me about being professional. Being a pedantic jackass isn’t professional either, yet you’re dishing it out in spaces. I am not co-opting your argument, I’m trying to get you to understand mine without wild tangents, appeals to unnamed authority, or personal invective.
I understand that you have a personal animosity toward me due to how you perceive yourself to be treated in the prior thread. I even have your email saying that you had no interest in “encouraging [me] to harass” you, and wondering about my future retaliation. Instead, it is YOU who decided to continue our dialogue, commenting here with no further motivation that I can discern save arguing with me.
If every conversation in which you participate is going to devolve into a dick-measuring contest, I’ll cut to the chase and concede: You’re the bigger dick.
You’re banned. Go find another playground in which to throw your poo.
God, THANK YOU, Nathan. I was wondering how long we were going to have to listen to aggrieved petulance masquerading as pedantry. Based upon Mr. O’Brien’s statement about living through the 70’s, he’s much of an age with me–and even I, coming to the aspects surrounding book design, covers, etc., know full well that following trends that SELL is not copying–it’s smart marketing. And a lot of the ideas around design, design independence, and following trends rather than overt copying, have changed pretty damn dramatically since we were Flower children.
If a poster like the one for Brave (as mentioned in Derek Murphy’s infamous “8-Cover-Design-Secrets-That-Publishers-Use-To-Manipulate-You-into-Buying-Their Books” post) makes the uber-contrast of the red hair of the heroine, against the blue-black background of the poster a popular theme, is it “copying” for the Batman poster to use the SAME color scheme? Or is it great design to deploy it so effectively in an appropriate genre and story? I say the latter.
We all know full well that PR, YA, straight Romance, etc. have specific themes, colors, etc. The idea that going against the flow, and designing some cover that looks nothing like the others will brand you as a design genius, and make your book fly off the shelves, is self-indulgent, arrant nonsense.
And, for those who think that I know nothing of the topic, while I lay no claim to being a brilliant designer, we’ve had over 3700 books go through my shop, and I damn sure know what sells. (n.b.: for those that don’t know, we do not provide cover design services, so I have no pony in this fight, and I am not defending my own work.)
We’ve certainly had, I don’t know, several hundred clients who just knew that their genre-breaking cover was going to knock buyers’ socks off, make them notice it, etc. Yeah, right–and every single one of them sank below the surface of the Amazon ocean, never to be seen again. (It’s right up there with “experimental fiction,” in which some of our clients decided that as the next famous writer, they didn’t need no stinkin’ dialogue tags, or quotation marks, or beats, or, or, or…and all of those sank like stones, too. Very few experimental authors manage to float, not sink, on the waters of the Liffey.)
It’s like thinking that if you do something weird on the cover, that people will pick up the book just to see what’s in it. Yeah, right. (NO, they won’t.)
So, Nathan, thank you for saving us from more rounds of this. It was starting to make me grind my teeth, and I have to deal with this sort of crap daily.
There is some logic to standing out in order to attract attention. For example, if your genre is mostly doing neutrals this season, a saturated cover can really pop. HOWEVER:
A) If one aspect of your cover is unusual, that’s all the more reason to make sure the rest of the cover is harmonious with the genre so it still attracts the right readers.
And
B) It still has to look good and draw the eye. The cover Kevin is defending so hard is a black cat face on a black background. Nothing about that is unique or eye-catching. It’s useless to differentiate yourself from the rest of the pack if the rest of the pack looks good and you look dull and forgettable.
My bigger kvetch is that all these posts have nothing to do with the OP’s submission, the book about Hans. It’s all not-very-subliminally about the other cover with the closed submission thread. That is not cool.
Both Nathan and Kevin have very valid points. For me, though, I can only go by my gut reaction to a cover. My gut tells me this cover takes a subject with a very dark and conflicted story and paints an almost comical image of the book. From your description, it sounds like you need a darker feel for your cover, showing a man with a face covered in emotional conflict, not befuddlement. I’d suggest a dark battlefield background with your protagonist in the foreground holding a weathered Nazi flag in one hand, and a similarly tattered Canadian flag in the other. This would instantly paint a picture of the story in your potential reader’s mind.
Maybe try a picture of a group of German soldiers marching, shot from the back, with one having a folded Canadian flag peaking from his pack. (make sure the setting is dynamic though) I get that such a thing wouldn’t happen in real life but it might be a clear image of the books contents without having to have artifacts in the background. ( I realize color images of that era are hard to find though)
Another option is to show ‘service’ papers with his Canadian name scratched out in red and his German name penciled in really dark. you could work the title in around the name on the paper. Water stained, wrinkled, old paper might make a really cool dramatic thriller type cover and that cover idea could be made for free. Use some bold German fonts to really bring the point home.
Yes, I had originally tried incorporating a German paybook and a Canadian passport (both were little booklets about the same size) in the cover art but wasn’t happy with the look. Many good comments here.
The small square picture surrounded by white space (or flat-color space) evokes children’s literature from the 90s and before for me too, but more importantly, the white space doesn’t serve any function. That’s why modern novels almost always have full-cover art.
I’d definitely lose the cross and maple leaf; aside from being very on the nose, it’s not always considered couth to put Nazi insignia smack in the buyer’s face.
IME, World War II historical fiction fans are pretty easy to please. A nice big picture of some historically-appropriate soldiers and you’re fine. What savoy suggested is a good idea, but if you can’t manage custom art, a stock image will do fine.
Good comments all around, particularly the last para. As a fan of the genre, I tried to think what attracted me to covers like this:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Guy-Sajer-Forgotten-Soldier-Paperback/dp/B00RWL53ES/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
An artistic rendering, of a single soldier. I wasn’t aware of the association between ‘clean’ cover borders and juvenile fiction, but this is exactly why I like submitted to this group, I always learn something. Lots of great discussion here and a lot of good ideas.
Taking a hint from Katz and getting back to the subject, the cover is simply boring and uninformative.
I’d certainly lose the swastika and maple leaf, not so much for any connotations the former may have but because neither tell the reader anything meaningful about the book. You would have to have at least read the blurb first to understand the significance…and that is putting the cart before the horse.
There is really nothing to suggest that the book is fiction. Judging by the title and image, it could just as easily be a memoir.
At the very least, get rid of all that unnecessary white space and fill the cover with the image.
The trade journals that published the articles that reported the results of the studies vetted the studies before they published the articles by having them reviewed by professionals who are experts in study design and statistics. The journal editors reported that these experts found no design flaws or errors in the statistical analysis that would invalidate the results. So unless you choose to believe that either the editors or the experts lied, or the experts were in fact incompetent (in which case I would ask you to provide evidence to support your accusations), I believe we should give them the benefit of the doubt and accept the results as accurate, no matter how much we may want to believe they are wrong.
As for the design details, the articles provided citations for the studies, but I don’t have copies of the articles and they do not appear to be reproduced on the Internet. In any event, you would have to read the studies to find the answers to your questions, but again the experts who reviewed the studies found nothing wrong with their designs.
And it’s too easy to dismiss studies that challenge your preconceived notions with unsupported critiques of phantom design flaws. Without evidence to show that your criticism is genuine, it remains what it sounds like: picking nits.
For anyone who needs to be convinced that Twilight started a trend…
You, but is that peer-reviewed???
My results have been peer-reviewed by a panel of experts who are DEFINITELY NOT cats and chickens.
Long comment ahead, but it feels useful to get into the process for developing really good covers…
As ever, the starting place (as Nathan points out) in designing a cover should be to research what other books – especially successful ones – in your genre do with their covers.
A great place to start is going on Amazon and narrowing down the search terms as specifically as you can get (for example this is Books>Fiction>Genre Fiction>Historical>Military on Amazon.ca https://www.amazon.ca/s/ref=lp_932508_nr_n_7?fst=as%3Aoff&rh=n%3A916520%2Cn%3A%21927726%2Cn%3A927790%2Cn%3A932470%2Cn%3A932508%2Cn%3A16186982011&bbn=932508&ie=UTF8&qid=1524221814&rnid=932508
And also just googling terms like ‘WWII novel’ etc.
As your book is (hopefully!) new and unique in its particulars you won’t find exact matches to act as a template, because yes, there is a difference between paying attention to genre trends and mindlessly recreating other people’s work… ☺
But you will get a sense of what designers have done to get across the fundamentals of the particular novel they had to package – the genre, tone, audience etc. If you play a game of going through the covers in the search results guessing at the contents of the book based on the cover (and then checking how close you were) and you’ll begin to really appreciate how hard all the elements work on the best covers.
Because covers – in the digital age more than ever – have to communicate and attract in the few seconds a browser’s eyes pause on it on Amazon, you really have to pick out the most broad-strokes stuff.
THIS is why book covers work in trends. Like the example Katz linked. All those covers are beautifully executed and creative. The designers didn’t imitate the apple iconography/gothic palette of Twilight because they were lazy and unimaginative. They did it because they needed to say in a very immediate way to the right people, ‘hey this book is like that other one you love’.
Your book has a great hook, the wartime German army seen from the perspective of a Canadian within it. That’s going to intrigue a lot of browsers if you give them an opportunity to grasp that hook at first grant. So the job is finding a visual way to express all the intrigue and interest of that.
I think you’ve already got a good grip on what your cover needs to highlight based on the images you’ve chosen above. You’re going for the right elements. Now it’s just a matter of looking at how to more effectively and more attractively put those notes together.
Another thing to bear in mind is the art of the possible. An awful lot of wartime novels go for bespoke illustration or appropriate photography from a vast stock library. As an independent author these options which publishing houses have might be beyond your means. So when you’re researching, keep a particular eye on covers which use other means to make up their covers.
For example, a classic, effective route is a composition like this: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B01BBYK2JM/ref=s9_acsd_top_hd_bw_bHfSvT1_c_x_w?pf_rd_m=A3DWYIK6Y9EEQB&pf_rd_s=merchandised-search-4&pf_rd_r=03RYX6SCKR48536M3KX4&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=b94d694e-13d1-5def-bd50-d1be1de18834&pf_rd_i=16186982011
Which allows you to use two more generic/available images. Considering you have a hook all about a big intriguing central dichotomy (German Nazi / Allied Nationality) this would be a potentially perfect composition for your cover if you found the exact right two images to convey those two ideas strongly bounce off each other intriguingly.
Or here’s another popular and possible composition: https://www.amazon.ca/Munich-Robert-Harris-ebook/dp/B06WGNPNV2/ref=sr_1_34?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1524223075&sr=1-34&keywords=WWII
A background photo over-layed with text and a piece of iconography that clarifies/juxtaposes against the main image. I can totally see that composition working for your book with the right images used.
That sounds like a