The author says:
Medieval Fantasy/Sword & Sorcery, new adult/adult novel.
“Ilas is not the gentle goddess the invaders believe her to be, you know. There will come a time when her sword is all that stands between humanity and ruin.” Kanika, the scorned Seer, must reclaim her identity from the invaders’ Crown Prince Atham. Though her people may never forgive her, she must redeem herself through fire and blood if necessary and take back the land the Seers have called home for centuries. However, Prince Atham’s position is not as secure as Kanika would like. Prince Meto and Princess Elsephere both have designs on the throne, which would spell the end of any hope of justice for the subjugated Seers of Argorien. THE TAINTED SHRINE follows the fight for control of the conquered city of Argorien, the revolution that creates more problems than it solves, and the unnatural creatures threatening to consume the Fierce Lands in chaos.
I am both the artist and the author.
Nathan says:
Nicely done artwork, although the biceps could use some refinement.
However, the whole definitely doesn’t say “Medieval Fantasy/Sword & Sorcery” to me. The only element that even indicates at historical Europe are the girl’s blonde braids, which aren’t visible until one spends time examining the image. My guess at first glance would have been either non-European mythology, or science fiction incorporating non-European mythology.
However, a lot of that “Medieval Fantasy/Sword & Sorcery” vibe can be added by switching out the typefaces and perhaps adding some ornamentation or scrollwork around the borders. Even just replacing the garden-variety Roman-ish font with a simple uncial would do wonders. (Our resident font expert will be along presently with suggestions, no doubt.)
Also, the glow around the white letters makes the print harder to read. I would suggest a dark glow or simple drop shadow to separate the type from the image.
And finally, the “by” in the byline is unnecessary. When people see a title and a name on a book cover, they know that the name is that of the author. The only time you need “by” is when you need to describe the book: “A Historical Drama by,” “A New SERIES TITLE Novel by,” etc.
Other comments?
I like the artwork. I assumed it was a fantasy universe with medieval level technology and not anything specifically European, so if that’s more what you intend, you’re fine. Because my vision isn’t the best, I pay particular attention to the readability of the type. And this is not very readable, especially in thumbnail size. I’m not sure what to tell you to fix it—I usually just play around with different fonts and colors and effects until I find something readable and easy to see. But the glow behind the letters, making the background paler, makes the white letters less visible. You want maximum contrast. If you leave your art its original color, instead of fading it out or putting in a glow or whatever it is, your letters will show up better.
I agree that you don’t need the “by” with your author name. I think you Should make your name bigger. Not as big as the title, but bigger than it is. As big as you can. Or almost. Yes, only the big bestselling authors seem to get their names bigger than the title, and I have no idea if you’re there or not, but it doesn’t hurt to make your name big enough (and clear & contrasting enough) to be memorable. So your reader can remember your name when they want to read your next book.
The biceps look odd because they aren’t biceps. I’m pretty sure they are sleeves gathered above the elbow, translucent white ones. There are blue-yellow bands at the end of each sleeve that make them more obvious, but they are hard to notice because they are cut off by the edges of the cover. If there is bleed area in the artwork available on the right and left, zooming out just a little to reveal more of those armbands I think would entirely avoid confusion.
Seconded on the letter glow. I’ve tried to make that effect work myself many times, and simple drop-shadows always end up functioning better. It’s a great idea in concept, but glowing text seems to be very hard to actually use effectively.
With the exception of getting the text to ‘pop’ a bit more, excellent choices on color palette. The orange, blue, and black really let the blinding light from above flare out. The strength of that light is another reason glowing text may not be needed. Divine radiance is already established and needs no help from the typesetting.
Kris:
FWIW, I’ve had some luck using the glow–but it has to be uber-tight to the lettering. When you allow it to dissipate outward, too far from the letters, you get the result that you have here–instead of highlighting the lettering, it obscures it. Also, surprisingly, white isn’t always the best highlight color of choice. I’ve found that contrasting colors (contrasting with the background color, I mean) can be quite effective.
Font Queen here. (ha!)
I actually find Medieval/Gothic/Celt to be the hardest lettering to do. That’s because the font designers for this area seems to have a dreadful lack of imagination; everything is either blackletter or the dreaded “Celtic” fonts. And they all either look alike, or are unreadable. You end up with Irish Uncialfabeta https://www.dafont.com/irishuncialfabeta.font or Stonecross or the like.
Since the girl has Nordic-style braids, you could go with a Viking-rune font..but those always have readability issues, too. PLUS, most of the free/cheap fonts have serious kerning problems, so your T in Tainted would look as though it had come adrift.
Perigord is a possibility. DeRoos Caps can be nice. Dalelands does the Celtic-font thing with fewer spacing issues than typical, and it’s highly readable. As Nathan mentioned, there’s always good old PR Uncial. (Scurlock is a nice change-up–but it’s not right for this book.) Ethlinn could work.
So, if those are no-gos, there’s Medieval Blackletter. You can’t talk about Blackletter without talking about Old London, which is enormously popular. If you use it, please don’t make it black. 🙂 Germanika has a nice flair to it, but it’s smaller than the others, and I don’t know if you can make it large enough to work for your cover, and if the swashes can work, for your cover, as light as they are in weight. (I wish that Black Flag was a bit more developed, and that the upper-case T was a bit better done. Rats.)
Iglesia is nice and strong, clean lines, readable. Hmmmm…Fancy Card Text might be perfect for this cover, if you can give it a solid or decent background. (That’s because the fleurons through the Uppercase letters are quite fine in weight.) Gregorian FLF is quite nice. LaBrit is a nice, simpler Olde English Blackletter font, that’s nice, not overly ornate, etc.
Now the Non-typicals. The upside is, they’re not common. The downside is, they’re not common, so if you use them, your reader might not instantly grasp the genre, which is, let’s face it, bad. You’re obviously not (thank god) one of those self-pubs that thinks that swimming against the flow of the other salmon will somehow end up with you winning the race. Doesn’t work that way.
I like Rooters. It’s clean, readable–but it could be misconstrued as being a Western font. Pirata One is a more modern Blackletter-Celt homage. Abaddon would be a nice choice–if it were a bit heavier. I don’t think that The Black Veil would work for this. Shadows of Security is too busy, for your cover.
I think that Viking Hell is too clunky-chunky for this cover. I wonder if Ikarus might work, though? Especially if the Celtic-Viking sort of look of the girl is enhanced. (BTW, the sheer of the sleeves is definitely not working–it does look as though her arms are wrinkled, rather than it being a sheer sleeve.)
Anyway, I think that one of those will do it. For the byline, you should go much larger and sturdier, and probably a nice, plain sans serif. The more flashy the title font, the less flashy the byline should be. Consider using the orange tone, in the walls (?) behind her, for the text fill of the byline lettering.
Also consider using a DARK glow background, around the title lettering. And reduce it a lot, in terms of the radius. Tighten it to the white/cream lettering, and it should help it stand out a lot. Or consider strengthening the outline of the red-orange around the letters, or better yet, both.
Hope something there helps.
There’s not a whole lot about the image to be improved here, since that’s some very gorgeous professional-looking artwork. Granted, when I saw the thumbnail, I actually thought the gal on the cover might be a Twi’lek gal from Star Wars; the edges of the headdress looked a bit like a pair of twin tails. That clearly not being the case on closer examination, about my only complaint is the same one the other critics are making: all that misty cloudy glow-y stuff around the titles and byline is making some of the image difficult to understand from a clicking distance, and it’s not doing the text’s legibility any favors either.
When you’re finished picking out some appropriate font that stands out from the imagery as Hitch has advised, I’d concentrate on making the contrast between various details in the image itself a bit clearer: make the headdress a bit more clearly distinct from the windows behind it, make those blonde braids a more saturated golden yellow so they’ll be more distinct from the white of the headdress, etc. Beyond that, I don’t really see anything else that needs to be done. Once these finer tweaks have been made, the cover should be good to go.
One of the things that negatively stands out for me is those red spire-like shapes in the background. They are too bright for this image, clouding out the character. If you can darken them some, your character will pop out more. I also agree with changing the font coloring and removing the glow behind it. If the font outline color was black, instead of the red that kind of blends into the image, then it would probably become much easier to read. As for the author’s name, yes drop the “by”, and yes make it as big as you can manage. Big name author or not, show pride for the book you are trying to sell. Minimizing the name suggests to potential readers that the author is irrelevant, and therefore not worth their time. Not the image you want to portray. Lastly, having your character hiding her eyes behind the thumbs seemed an odd choice. I know you want to have a pose that suggests some type of faith, and circles the eye symbol on the forehead, but I have mixed feelings about blocking out the eyes themselves. On some level it works, but on other levels, it bothers me.
Like the others say: it’s decent artwork that’s not super clear in its genre/setting so it needs the other graphic elements to work hard to make up the shortfall.
I’ll get into the latter below, but first there is one thing I think you should change about the artwork. It’s true that the details of the image are not screaming ’traditional fantasy’ right now, but it’s understandable if you don’t want to or can’t have those changed.
However, the palette is doing a huge part of the mis-selling of the genre here, and it’s super easy to change. Red is simply not a ‘medieval fantasy cover’ colour. Look how simply shifting the hue of the background can create different genre feels:
https://static.wixstatic.com/media/61b1ee_d99610e4c8a24b54bc7a0d850357409f~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_610,h_287,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01/61b1ee_d99610e4c8a24b54bc7a0d850357409f~mv2.jpg
Also, the illustration currently only really has one colour going on. Everything in the illustration (barring some very tiny yellow details which get missed) is on a red scale with black and white shadows/highlights. Adding in a secondary complementary/contrasting colour really makes the illustration pop, and also makes it read more clearly at thumbail size as we can more easily distinguish from foreground and background and distinguish the figure.
(Incidentily in those linked images I’ve toned down the red in the skin-tones and brought a bit more yellow into it, she was looking a little sunburned in the original artwork).
Now the title treatment. You’re current font choice is not a bad one, a dignified serif is fine for a fantasy cover. One a different cover, with an illustration that was really singing out the genre, this font (if not the colours and effects) would be fine. But as mentioned with THIS illustration your title lockup is going to have to take on a lot of the job of visually signalling genre that your illustration isn’t quite doing.
You’ll probably want a more ‘fantasyish’ font but that’s where it also gets tricky because the more florid fonts are super easy to use badly and look the most amateurish when not worked with carefully. You might get away with sticking to a more simple serif font like you’ve chosen but wither way this lettering will need to be manipulated to become an attractive graphic lockup in its own right.
Here are two fonts I tried, out, one from each camp. ‘Cardinal’ for the more fancy-looking font, ‘Constantine’ for the more simple. I’ve shown you here how the fonts look when first typed out and what I’ve done to take them from that to lockups getting towards being ready to grace a book cover.
https://static.wixstatic.com/media/61b1ee_379e9330ff8f48f39aab81c0ed1f5d6e~mv2_d_2907_3000_s_4_2.jpg/v1/fill/w_610,h_630,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01/61b1ee_379e9330ff8f48f39aab81c0ed1f5d6e~mv2_d_2907_3000_s_4_2.jpg
BTW I’d certainly advise on a gold effect for the title. There’s no better colour for screaming ‘traditional fantasy’.
Now those are just two approaches with two fonts and a couple of colours. You can see that just these two examples have quite different feels. It’s really worth having a good root through a site like dafont.com (always remembering to check the fonts you like are available for commercial use before using them) and trying out a bunch of different fonts to see which gets closest to the vibe you want to convey.
On the outer glow: ditch it. It’s such a bette noir of mine. It can be a useful tool (I’ve used a similar effect in my mockups) but if it didn’t exist I think we’d lose far more bad graphic design from the world than good. Too often it’s used to break the first rule of good design: don’t hide problems, fix them.
Now in your case, you’re not trying to hide any design flaws with the glow! It’s simply an attempt to give the title a nice effect that actually only serves to undermine the basic good design choices. You’d be better off dropping both the glow and the outline on the text and having it plain white – though I hope my examples have inspired you to try something that could potentially work better altogether.
Re. the by-line : definitely lose the ‘by’. Also there’s no reason for your by-line to be so small. Sure you’re not a ‘name’ author but you should still present your name with confidence. You wrote the book! Furthermore you’ve got lots of space at the top of the cover to accommodate it, and frankly the background windows are not the best rendered part of the illustration, better to cover them up a bit with the text.
I was a little worried rereading my comment there than I sounded hard on the artwork itself as I was focusing on the nitty-gritty of how to make it work better.
And I just want to make clear, I think the art itself is great, definitely cover-standard work. Any concerns are not that with its quality but with how it can be better used to sell your book.
I hope you find some useful thoughts here on how to utilise it better; having done all this hard work in writing a book AND producing professional-standard artwork for the cover, the book deserves a really good graphic design treatment to match.
I’m looking forward to seeing what you come up with…
I personally think the artwork needs a bit of work. Definitely the idea is good, and it is only minor fixes: the arms do look odd, and the shading of the face should be softer, around the upper lip it is noticeable. The pose and overall composition is great so I would not really change the picture – except for the small umbrella behind her head. I cannot tell what it is, but I cannot stop staring at it now.
A subtle texture could add to the medieval look and as a side-effect smooth over any harsh contrasts in shading, perhaps try that first.
The art is great! It’s not often we see an author-illustrator talented enough to draw their own cover. Play around with the typography and maybe get rid of some of that black space and you’re set!
However, because you’re such a talented illustrator, I’m going to suggest another option. This art is perfectly good, but it’s also perfectly generic. I see “magic person standing.” Which is fine for the genre, because most authors have to buy predrawn art and can’t get something unique to their book. But nothing about the image makes me desperately want to pick up this particular book so I can find out about this particular person. (Other readers, YMMV.)
If you’re like most author-illustrators I know, you probably have drawn other illustrations of your book, or could draw more. I wonder if you have a picture that’s more dynamic or that displays a more unique aspect of your world–say, a fight scene or a unique monster, for instance. I believe you could come up with a cover illustration that would make me much more eager to specifically grab your book out of the pile.
I think the cover is excellent! It just needs some fine-tuning.
The rendering on the upper arms needs to be worked on.
The name of the author needs to be much larger (and without the “by”).
The title could be differentiated from the background a little more.
I’m not too crazy about how the subtitle disappears in thumbnail size, but that might be OK.
Thanks everyone for your advice. Designing covers is a remarkably different experience than just painting pictures, there’s so much more to it than I would’ve guessed before embarking on this, so I’m very grateful that there’s a panel of experts, so to speak, where selfpubbers like myself can get solid feedback before fully committing to a cover. I’ve decided to keep playing around with it – definitely appreciate all the tips on fonts especially as I’m completely clueless when it comes to typefaces and so forth. I’ll likely resubmit once the repaint is finished, but here is a little sketch/mockup/preview thingy:
Thanks again for all your help, it’s very much appreciated.
My bad, seems my HTML didn’t work properly. Here is the new sketch:
>>sketch<<
That looks like a really strong composition, with much more of the intrigue that, like Katz talked about, will draw readers in all the more. and more room to hint at the setting and genre that will attract the right readers.
It’s a great idea to sketch it out like this, taking into account the layout of type from the start.
That’s a nice apt font, though maybe looks a bit squished to my eye. I think you could get away with stretching it vertically if you stick with this typeface.
I know this is only a rough sketch and all this subject to change, but your title ought to be much bigger on the finished cover. An easy way to do that is simple having ‘tainted’ and ‘shrine’ on separate lines. At present the title won’t be readable at thumbnail size.
A helpful rule of thumb is, the fancier the font the bigger it needs to be (and with other things making it clearer like making sure there’s no distracting detail in the artwork behind it etc) as all the flourishes that give the type character also make it that much harder to read when small.
Designing and illustrating/painting etc are different skills for sure, but once your eye is trained into ideas like composition, contrast, negative space, drawing the viwer’s eye, colour etc in one discipline, those skills are transferrable. You’ve already been able to process everyone’s advice and improve the design, because you understand the principles behind it all. So I’ve no doubt you’re going to end up with a great cover.
Can’t wait to see the next version!