The author says:
This for a romantic thriller or romantic suspense. While vacationing on a train journey across Europe, a feisty ATC is forced to work with a tenacious FBI agent to prevent a series of deadly terrorist explosions she is triggering against her will.
Nathan says:
It’s a very well done illustration, but it doesn’t seem right for this book. I’m not sure what an “ATC” is (air traffic controller, maybe?), but with FBI agents and bombs involved, I’d expect to see a gun or other sign of action and violence. This gives more of the impression of a modern “gothic” novel — dramatic and possibly perilous, but the heroin is without defense.
The other problem with the illustration is that it doesn’t allow clear areas for text, meaning that the title and byline (and subtitle and tagline) all have to be squeezed into odd spaces.
(Of the utterly boring character of the font used for all text, we shall not speak).
Other comments?
I adore this but I think it needs a few tweaks. Consider dropping her down a bit to give yourself room along the top. If you added a speeding train fading off the page behind her into the black with the title in a bold thriller font across that and switched out the shadow of the tree in the lighted hall for a more menacing one I think you’d have an amazing cover.
Assuming it’s Air Traffic Controller, that seems to play no part in the plot which makes it more of a distraction than benefit (aside from the obvious of her being on a train and not a plane. Maybe if she was on a plane her ATC skills could be utilized to crack the case)
A speeding train thriller needs a modern sans typeface, possibly italicized or even tilted, and something in the image to convey speed or action as well as romance (weird).
I like S M’s idea of making more room and adding the train in the background. Maybe a shadowy figure, too.
Or maybe we shall speak of the font: Lucida italic and all of its look-alikes are right up there with Papyrus and Comic Sans as being the most over-used fonts in the design universe. I remember it being my favorite 20 years ago.
a quick crude example.
https://imgur.com/a/DXtUjt3
I removed the light because it didn’t fit the tone, looking a bit too fantasy, and added the explosion there (which needs a billion tweaks)
I think the tag line could use some work, something punchier and more interesting
She’ll punch your ticket….
Destination Danger
A vacation to Hell
I don’t know, something like that…lol
Maybe even- Dream Trip Turned Nightmare. that last might look great as a smaller subtitle beneath the main one.
Yours is way better than mine. Wha-whaaaaa
What does the image say about the book, its plot, themes or ideas? Pretty much nothing. The color helps create some atmosphere but there is nothing to suggest the book you describe, which is supposedly about “a feisty ATC is forced to work with a tenacious FBI agent to prevent a series of deadly terrorist explosions she is triggering against her will.” Declaring the book to be a “Romantic Thriller” isn’t enough. There isn’t even anything in the image to suggest the period in which the book is set. It could be set in Sherlockian London so far as I can tell, and be about Jack the Ripper.
The typography is all over the place, but before you worry about that I think you need to reconsider the artwork.
https://i.imgur.com/NXRXgOj.jpg
Even as a rough idea this is a vastly superior concept!
Yes, I don’t love BL’s font, and it needs tweaking, but overall, it’s quite good and could be developed into a real winner.
Totally stole the font from s m savoy
https://i.imgur.com/pyCwabR.jpg
Different Style
https://i.imgur.com/tqXF1LL.jpg
OK, well, fonts.
Before I leap into that, as a woman, I’d like to beg the submitter to please, please, lose the word “feisty.” It’s right up there with “plucky.” I don’t know many women whose teeth aren’t set on edge by either of those pretty-patronizing adjectives for women. Do we describe would-be secret agents, or men thrust into positions requiring them to be brave, etc., as “bouncy?” “Scrappy or frisky?” Or any other adjective that essentially means “determined BUT CUTE and manageable?” It’s right up there with perky. ’nuff said. I realize that this is CoverCritics.com, and not “elevator pitch.com,” but I felt compelled to ask.
Now, the fonts. As many others have stated, those fonts on the submission are at best yawn-inducing.
If you want to stick to a serif, try something with a bit of variety to it, maybe something like Desire Ragged B. But I really feel this is more of a sans environment.
Perhaps Alcatraz? LL Rubber Grotesque? Of course, good old IMPACT is always a good one. I like Motor Oil quite a lot. Agency FB Bold–not a wild choice, but a solid one. Payback might work here. Snickers, ditto. I won’t suggest SF Fedora, even though it might indeed work here.(It’s probably a bit too light-hearted.)
With all due respect to my colleagues here, I don’t love the “rushing” effect, of creating trailing contrails from the lettering to connote “hurry,” but it can be used effectively. Fonts like “slipstream,” to me, are a bit too…I don’t know, overused. If you must, though, Storm is a decent one (watch the kerning).
ANYway, you get the idea. Once you’ve established the title font, you can probably use a simple serif for the subtitle/tag line and even the byline, if you wish. But in my opinion, it needs a bit more personality, than what you have now. The font will help to sell the idea behind this cover, which at the moment, as the others have said, is a bit too ambiguous in terms of tone/theme/genre.
The biggest problem lies with the authors/artists dumping off their covers but then not returning to give feedback to help whittle the ideas into an effective cover.
Seconding the thoughts on “feisty.”
https://i.imgur.com/ge1ZRD7.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/pfNYlY7.png
My apologies for the crap job retouching it (being lazy)
Font is totypena
That’s pretty cool
Thats cool
Great job on using the lighting to transform the image into something much more fitting. The original illustration is pretty good. Your version is a really classy, bold, attractive cover.
It’s not quite hitting ‘thriller’ for me, it reminds me more of the violent arthouse psychological world of director Nicholas Winding Refn!
But on the other hand it definitely says ‘danger’ and ‘tension’ and ‘craft’ so what you lose in exact specificity to the genre you probably make up for in sheer striking-ness.
The only thing I don’t love is ‘A Romantic Thriller’ being above the byline – I would put it under the title.
I agree. The color change is effective, but the cover still suffers from the same problems I outlined before (and I quote myself):
…the image by itself does nothing toward even suggesting that the book is about “a feisty ATC is forced to work with a tenacious FBI agent to prevent a series of deadly terrorist explosions she is triggering against her will.” Declaring the book to be a “Romantic Thriller” isn’t enough. There isn’t even anything in the image to suggest the period in which the book is set. It could be set in Sherlockian London so far as I can tell, and be about Jack the Ripper.
I like S M Savoy’s cover idea with the speeding train, but it needs to be more modern. B. L. Alley’s terminal also works. Still, I think the moving train gives more life to the image, and implies a fast paced book. As for the fonts, I like the motion implied font S M Savoy used in the first. Maybe color it differently. Overall, though, the train in S M’s cover fades too much into the background and would be unrecognizable in a thumbnail image. The train should be larger and centered, perhaps with your character nearly silhouetted by it in the foreground.
Absolutely! The train and girl need to be integrated into a single visual message.
I looked at the romantic suspense category on Amazon and most of the covers there use a clean sans serif font with an image of a place. This style could be recreated pretty easily using an image of a train station.
https://i.imgur.com/wJnj4Dw.jpg
This is a modern book about people in modern careers on a modern train…yet I see a peasant-type girl in some kind of stone vault with an old-fashioned lantern. Everything about the cover says old-timey, set somewhere between the Middle Ages and the 1800s. So while it’s a great picture, save it for a book about a stable girl during the Revolutionary War. This one needs a clean-cut modern career woman in or near a train.
The other thing is that romantic suspense is a subgenre of romance, so it’s utterly imperative that the man also be on the cover and that they look like a couple. Playing up the thriller aspect too much would be a mistake–your audience is not Tom Clancy readers. Most romantic suspense books seem to look a lot like romances, except with chunky thriller-type fonts.