The author says:
This is the currently published cover to my dark humor/superhero novel. I want to ‘re-brand’ the cover because I feel like it missed the mark on depicting genre/tone. While it does have superheroes throughout the book, the main focus is on Adam, the guy who got stuck with the worst superpower ever-an immortal disaster magnet for superpowered events. There’s a lot of insanity (mole people and portals to twisted versions of Wonderland anyone?), and a darkness that follows a jaded and sarcastic Adam. While I initially thought the illustration definitely hit those targets, I had a few people mention they didn’t even notice the superhero in the background. But I’ll be honest, I’m at a complete loss in what direction to go with this, as there are two more books in the series I don’t want to mess up the next two covers. (Authors’ readers it would appeal to: Caimh McDonnell, David Neth, Samuel Shem) Thanks for your time!
Nathan says:
The art is well executed, but I can see the problem that others mentioned to you: the superhero in the background both blends into the general busyness of the cover and is partially covered by the title, which means that the superheroicness (I’ll let someone else figure out the appropriate noun) is lost.
I think that you could work with the same artist — I REALLY like the style for this novel — and modify some elements:
- Make the background much less busy; let the smoke isolate Adam and the girl visually.
- While you’re at it, move Adam and the girl further to the bottom.
- Place superheroes in shadow of silhouette nearer the top, letting them be both distinct from the background and separated from Adam.
Here’s my thumbnail sketch of the layout:
This both simplifies the cover, and makes a point of Adam’s visual separation from the superheroic types. I blocked in the title in an arc because it would take up less of the real estate, allowing your artist to put in the hero silhouettes clearly while allowing space between them and Adam.
And if you still need it to me more comic-booky… the rectangle to the left of the title is where most comic companies put their indicia, as more of a visual cue to the genre.
Other comments?
As an experiment, try coloring rhe super in the existing art red and yellow and see if it helps. Part of the blending difficulty I suspect is that green and white are not stand-out colors on the whole. To make a background element show up as a full-on superhero (without being prominent enough to overshadow the mains) you may need to go with full 4-color campiness in the super’s design. Incredibles 2 and Captain Marvel coming out soon may make red and yellow the way to do that.
The idea being to help inform your redesign choices.
This illustration/cover is hovering about on the borders of working, but is not quite there.
It’s got strong parts. The grouping at the front works. They are well drawn and convey what looks to be relevant and important stuff abut your novel’s content and tone: the comedy, the subversion of tropes, the dark-Alice-in-Wonderland-i-ness.
But the rest of the cover lets this down. There’s some issues more of the technical side (more on which below) but your more fundamental issue here is the cover aiming for an uncertain target and not quite hitting any of them. It’s falling between two stools.
Overstuffed covers full of weird and unexpected imagery can work. I’m thinking of authors/covers like Tom Holt, or David Wong, Jasper Fforde, or Robert Rankin, Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett.
Books by all of these authors have been fronted with insanely detailed and busy illustrations that convey just how inventive and genre-hopping the content is.
Here are some examples of successful covers that go for ‘this novel is crammed with interesting stuff, impossible to sum up simply’ approach.
https://pictures.abebooks.com/BOHEMIABOOKS/16223448615.jpg
https://vulpeslibris.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/mitchell-1.jpg
https://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMjgzNWE3NDQtNmIyNS00MmMwLWIwMWItNjRiZTFkNmI1YjM5XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNjYxMjcyNDk@._V1_.jpg
All very different covers but comparing them gives you a couple of vital clues for where your cover is falling down.
Because while your cover is busy and detailed it’s just busy and detailed enough to be confusing without being busy and detailed enough to be intriguing and madcap.
One thing you’ll notice is how although the covers look over-crammed, the designers have actually been very careful in allowing space for, and inco-orperating, the title treatment. It’s always important to have a large, clear and attractive title design in this age of online-browsing-by-thumbnail, but in this case it’s vital also for the reason that it provides a focus to a cover otherwise scattered with disparate imagery of equal weight.
Another point to notice is that these covers use their palettes very carefully to create clarity within the cover.
Of course, this map-cap everything-but-the-kitchen-sink is just one approach. The other is to do as Nathan suggests and focus on one strong aspect of the novel rather than trying to reference lots of the ideas that are going on.
As I say, currently the novel is falling between two stools, and this version is the other it’s not quite reaching. As your readers have noted, the superhero imagery is lost on the cover. It’s due to the composition of the illustration and placement of the title. But you have a problem even if you are able to re-shuffle these things which is: the superhero is unfortunately the least well-drawn part of the cover.
Ideally, you’d get a whole new background and superhero element to place behind the good foreground. You’d need something that really sells the idea of the superhero genre. Something like Nathan’s idea for the composition sounds perfect: archetypical superhero action at the top, fed up guy and companion at the bottom, a really good title treatment in the middle.
Whether you pull the cover in the loads-of-imagery direction, or in the focus-on-superheroes direction, it means going to the artist to create more imagery for you.
You just haven’t got quite enough/the right stuff in term of imagery there to communicate/sell your book’s tone and genre right now, however much you improve the layout.
By way of demonstration I’ve mocked up a couple of compositions using your existing imagery and with a better title treatment. They’re an improvement in terms of layout, and one can almost paper over the cracks of missing imagery with enough explosions but not quite:
https://static.wixstatic.com/media/61b1ee_af90807d20164851937f34bfc296adfd~mv2_d_1875_3000_s_2.jpg/v1/fill/w_354,h_566,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01/61b1ee_af90807d20164851937f34bfc296adfd~mv2_d_1875_3000_s_2.jpg
https://static.wixstatic.com/media/61b1ee_122970c1a6e841eb99c2c17b8071bdd3~mv2_d_1875_3000_s_2.jpg/v1/fill/w_354,h_566,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01/61b1ee_122970c1a6e841eb99c2c17b8071bdd3~mv2_d_1875_3000_s_2.jpg
Finally, the other obstacle you’re facing in designing the cover is your title. I assume it’s a phrase which makes sense in the context of the novel but it’s pretty opaque as a title. It’s not a phrase that really means anything to browsers. Which means your cover has to work extra hard to sell the book and tell the browsers what kind of thing this book is. And I think it makes it all the more important to have an incredibly strong title treatment visually, If you’re got a weird title you need to be really confident in how it’s presented!
(Apologies those last two links are to versions of the images with a mistake in the by-line, here are the corrected versions)
https://static.wixstatic.com/media/61b1ee_f1825354ba2a4b72b2e49c6da2f580d2~mv2_d_1882_3000_s_2.jpg/v1/fill/w_495,h_789,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01/61b1ee_f1825354ba2a4b72b2e49c6da2f580d2~mv2_d_1882_3000_s_2.jpg
https://static.wixstatic.com/media/61b1ee_73cbd779c6b744619a7a8d1f775c4ff5~mv2_d_4208_6708_s_4_2.jpg/v1/fill/w_501,h_799,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01/61b1ee_73cbd779c6b744619a7a8d1f775c4ff5~mv2_d_4208_6708_s_4_2.jpg
Thank you so much, I read through this entire comment and it was truly an eye opener and super helpful! I especially loved your mocked up covers. I appreciate all the time and input you provided, hopefully we’ll be able to work something out. (posting on behalf of Stephan a.k.a husband hehe)
Since you’ve got this book published already, I took the liberty of looking up a couple of links to their sales pages and having a look at the free sample previews. In summary, I’d say this is basically the story of a universe with superheroes in it as told from a civilian point of view; sure, the protagonist has the “power” of being a cosmic chew toy who never actually gets killed though he’s seemingly in constant peril, but that doesn’t really make him any less of a civilian. The genre for this, I think, is what’s known as meta-fiction: like John Scalzi’s Redshirts, it gives us the perspective of the lowly “bit part” characters who have to live in one of the crazy universes created by writers of popular schlock such as superhero comic books and space opera television shows, calling into question how much we would like living in some of our popular fantasies if we weren’t the main characters. This book being basically a superhero comic book story told in prose, it’s rather appropriate its cover look something like that of a typical superhero comic book.
Having spent much of the nineties and early aughts following a few superhero comics myself, I’d say at least your main character is properly front and center on the cover (though I’m wondering who that gal in the blue dress holding the knife is supposed to be and what she’s doing crowding the cover’s focus on the protagonist), but not much of anything else is in quite the right place for a comic book cover. Your title, for instance, really ought to be centered and closer to the top as the titles on the vast majority of superhero comics are and have pretty much always been. Also, “The Fiasco” ought to be in a different font or at least a larger size of font than the rest of the title to emphasize that “The Fiasco” is the protagonist’s “superhero” alias and the rest of the title is a reference to the particular caper he’ll be pursuing in this “issue” of the comic book.
You wonder why so many of your readers have trouble noticing the guy in a cape behind the protagonist and his lady friend/fangirl/female stalker/whatever there? The answer is simple: he’s facing the wrong way. On the covers of comic books, as in many television shows, pretty much everybody you want people to notice at all needs to be facing the fourth wall; this is why artistic license allows for restaurant scenes in television shows to pack as many as a dozen people around a single table in such a manner that they’re all facing the camera, though this would be exceedingly impractical for so many people to do in real life.
The reason why that caped guy isn’t properly facing the fourth wall also gets to the heart of the matter: he’s busy fighting a guy “off-camera” because although the foreground is properly centered, the background is not. I rather suspected the cover image was part of a bigger picture, and my visit to the sales pages confirms that this image is actually part of a panorama that extends around to the back cover. To be sure, some graphic novels get away with having such a panorama (usually showing lots of people in capes and tights punching each other) centered roughly on the spine, but that’s because they’re traditionally published graphic novels; for most regular monthly issues for comic books and for e-books, the front cover is all you get to use for your canvas because very few of your prospective readers are even going to look at the back until after they buy the book.
While I can nitpick a lot of this cover’s aspects, that last problem is the main one: the background’s center of perspective is way over to the left on the back cover. Ideally, you want the background and foreground to have the same center of perspective: since the foreground focus is firmly centered on your protagonist, the lines of anything receding off into the distance behind him should all be pointed toward that same focal point. It’s still fine to have some “bonus footage” in a panorama extending around the spine to the back cover, but everything that’s absolutely vital for your prospective readers to see belongs on the front cover, and the center of perspective is one of those vital things.
One or two other minor tweaks: you might want to go a little old school with the layout, maybe including one of those “logo windows” with a portrait of the hero in it on the upper left corner that Marvel and DC tended to use a lot on their comic book covers from their Silver Age on up through the nineties. Another way you might distinguish “The Fiasco” as the character title from “in News” as the caper title is to put each of them in different frames, such as having “The Fiasco” in a word bubble and “in News” in a zigzagging “shocker” caption box. Basically, anything you do to make your book’s cover look a lot like a comic book’s cover should help get your target audience’s attention.
Speaking of old school design, considering that this story is supposed to be somewhat humorous in a kind of dryly sardonic way, you might try parodying the way those old comic books (over)hyped themselves by throwing in a tagline or two in a caption box as well. A few ideas:
“For the first time in comics: a man whose ‘power’ is the ability to be taken hostage!”
“Adam Millard: Professional Kidnapping Victim!”
“Only 99 cents: cheap!”
(By the way, 99 cents for what looks to be a story of about 100,000+ words is very cheap indeed: back when I was buying comics in the nineties, only issues of Untold Tales of Spider-man went for so little. You could probably get away with charging $2.99 for your book, which is still less than what a single issue of any standard monthly superhero comic series costs these days.)
Ahh I think RK has a better handle on the book than me, it does indeed sound more firmly in the superhero meta-genre vibe than anything else!
I see now how we’re meant to read the title. You definitely need the treatment to communicate that. Like RK says, ‘The Fiasco’ should be treated like a superhero name/franchise title nice and big at the top of the page, and ‘in News’ should be styled as a story title.
I think the classic superhero comic layout is almost a must. I like all RK’s suggestions – I think the taglines are a great idea.
But I’m a little unsure how you’ve going to get your current artwork to work with all of this in mind…
Well, if you look at the back cover, the picture angle is a bit skewed, but the center of perspective is right about where it ought to be and the flying guy with laser beams shooting out of his eyes is facing roughly toward the fourth wall. Basically, if you reversed the background panorama and put the protagonist in front of the street instead of the buildings where he is now, you’d have a decent image for the front cover. Of course, with the protagonist filling up so much of the foreground, you’d also have to raise the flying guy with the eye beams higher on the cover to make him visible.
Mostly, it’s a question of whether the designer can separate out sprites of the various characters from the background and shuffle them around. If the sprites and background weren’t originally separate from each other, extracting character sprites shouldn’t be too difficult for any reasonably sophisticated editing program, but the background will have to be redrawn.
Here’s some reference points. These are two (very good) non-fiction books, so some of the needs and details will differ but see how they use touches of comic-cover layout and really utilised the most iconic versions of comic typography to utterly clearly signal their connection to that world:
https://www.penguin.co.uk/content/dam/catalogue/pim/editions/226/9780099487067/cover.jpg
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61KgjgTeCtL.jpg
They also use printing effects, the look of cheap, slightly-misaligned four-way colour printing that immediately screams ‘vintage comic’.
I can’t attest for the merits of this last book’s contents (I swear!) but it’s cover is actually rather good, using a background illustration that signals one important aspect clearly (y’know, sex), and graphic elements – title treatment, pretend four-way-colour separation effect, spiky sound-bubble-ish shape for the by-line – that clearly signal the other important aspect of the book (the comic book milieu).
It’s got a well-managed palette too, with the right mixture of contrasting and cohesive between these vying elements. I’d have gone so far as to call it a great cover if the title treatment had a little more oomph.
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/91G0Eq98SQL.jpg
Bearing all this in mind I mocked up a few more versions of covers that take your available artwork in this direction, to demonstrate the sort of thing you could do (obviously I don’t speak for RK but I think this is along the lines they were talking about?):
https://static.wixstatic.com/media/61b1ee_a7583e1461c7445caf8f09826c800a16~mv2_d_3821_3000_s_4_2.jpg/v1/fill/w_610,h_479,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01/61b1ee_a7583e1461c7445caf8f09826c800a16~mv2_d_3821_3000_s_4_2.jpg
Apart from doing the stuff already mentioned by both RK and myself (the title treatment, the half-tone effect, the comicy tagline etc) I’ve done some fairly heavy editing to the original image, chopping stuff up and moving it around (not always super neatly, as it’s only a rough pass). That’s to try and get everything we need onto the page and decently framed. I’ve also played around with the colours quite a lot. I’ve introduced red/pink tones to the main figure and picked it up in the text to create contrast from the background (where I’ve upped the green tones that were already there. This kind of thing really helps make sure the composition reads clearly even at thumbnail size.
I’ve erased the girl as her gothic-Lolita-Alice vibe is just too far outside the vibe of this cover direction and she’s a distraction. The central ‘gag’ or idea of the story you want to get across is clearer without her. She (and the cute little flying drone robot element also not used here) could be utilised for the back cover design.
And once one has pushed the cover as far as you can into the classic comic look, you can play around with dialling it back and balancing it out. After all, you might feel that the above covers actually say ‘comic book’ too much and it’s not clear this is a prose novel. Here’s a version with experiments with dropping some of the comic signifiers and bringing in a touch more of the ‘novely’ look to the font (and because I haven’t come across a book cover yet I don’t think would suit a nice bit of Futura):
https://static.wixstatic.com/media/61b1ee_32090b7b9f1f4d2da7fdfaeca282d09a~mv2_d_1882_3000_s_2.jpg/v1/fill/w_531,h_846,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01/61b1ee_32090b7b9f1f4d2da7fdfaeca282d09a~mv2_d_1882_3000_s_2.jpg
(Oops excuse the typo in ‘professional’ in the links, it’s clearly not my week for spelling errors)
Hi, I just wanted to say, thank you so much for the detailed response! You and Kata have given me a lot of ideas to share with my husband (author), though I did want to mention the price is actually a sale, it’s normally $4.99 🙂
I appreciate you taking the time!
I really like the artwork style for your book. It really portrays the feel of being in a comic-book universe. The background to the main characters is what doesn’t work. It is too distracting from the main characters, without making it instantly obvious there is a superhero battle happening. As said by others, you have to actually study the image to come to that realization. Our hosts suggestion on the cover outline changes seems like the best choice to me.
I just want to say an especially big thanks to Nathan for taking submissions and offering advice, this site is amazing and the people who comment here have been nothing but helpful, thank you!