The author says:
Book Description: A young light-gray cat named Narmel gains a platinum tail and learns to use it, while trying to find out secrets about a magical disaster called “silver storms”. The setting is in the land of Starnovia, where different animals are inhabited. This is a fully illustrated cover design, and not a quick concept demo. The rest of my book will have illustrations as well.
Genre: fantasy-adventure
Target audience: Young Middle-Grade (ages 9-10)
Nathan says:
Nice artwork, but shouldn’t the tail be waving in the air, as if it’s important? I think you’ve also got waaay to much dead space; let the cat take up more of the real estate. And the lightning bolts… don’t look like lightning bolts.
The font for both title and byline is a little thin to be read easily, and too ornate to be read easily by your target audience.
And the back cover’s DEFINITELY more of a wall of text than middle-grade readers want to see.
Other comments?
Not too bad, but…
Yes, the tail needs to be the centerpiece of the cover.
The typeface is much too difficult to read, even at full size. It certainly needs to be much larger.
Too much of the cover art is simply an empty landscape. All of the different visual elements—the cat, whatever those things are in the sky and the little sparkles stuck in the corners—are floating about in this space, unconnected with one another. The cat definitely needs to be larger, filling more of the cover.
I have no clue what those lightning-like objects are supposed to be.
Thanks, everyone, for the suggestions. You also said the lightning bolts didn’t look like lightning bolts, can you explain and elaborate?
Thanks, everyone, for the suggestions. I wasn’t so sure about the final design, so I found it helpful to get some feedback. But you said that the lightning bolts didn’t look like lightning bolts; can you explain and elaborate, and how I can make them more like lightning bolts?
They appear to be simply hovering in the sky. And what are all of those twinkly things surrounding them?
You ask about whether or not they look like lightning bolts. My suggestion would be to look at some images of real lightning bolts. http://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/styles/inline__450w__no_aspect/public/lightning_16x9.jpg?itok=VP5xZjRU
One thing you might consider doing is limiting yourself to no more than two. Filling the sky (and a distinctly unstormy-looking sky at that) with half a dozen nearly identical entities not only seems unrealistic but gives an impression that they are almost anything but lightning bolts. I would not blame anyone for thinking they were alien creatures.
The real problem, however, is that, like pretty much everything else in the illustration, they are all hovering round unrelated to anything else. So you have five “lightning bolts” in the sky, some twinklies in the bottom right and left corners, a cat in the middle and an amorphous landscape…and not one of these things seems to relate to any of the others. It’s really as though you put all of these things in a cup, shook them, and then tossed them into the frame of the picture randomly.
Alas, no. Standards for illustrated covers for recent MG fantasy are REALLY high. They look like this. Or this. Or this. When I tell you this art is nowhere near up to snuff, that’s not a referendum on you–publishers are just hiring FANTASTICALLY talented illustrators for their middle-grade fantasy, and that makes it very hard for regular authors to illustrate their own books.
Ron covered the layout issues already; nothing about this image directs the eye. We need the cat quite large in the center, turning around and looking at his tail a la Snoopy, with the lightning and sparkles in the background framing it. The rather plain gray spine and the very muted color palette are issues, too.
But the biggest problem is not the layout, I’m afraid, it’s the quality of the art. I’m sorry, there’s no nice way to say it. The linework is jaggy, the shading is smudgy and inaccurate, and the figure itself looks amateurish rather than cartoonish.
Time to hire a professional illustrator. A kid wouldn’t pick this up, especially not when there are so many other attractive options on offer.
You have some competent layout going on, some ideas in the right direction but I’m afraid this is rather far off being the cover that will attract readers.
I hope you don’t take my comments as too disheartening. But if what you seek is a cover for your book that will attract and intrigue readers, I’m afraid your own illustration isn’t the way to go and you’re going to have to rethink this cover.
Your illustration style might well be appropriate for internal illustrations. But it is just not professional-looking as front-cover illustration for a middle-grade fantasy novel. Like Katz says, MG cover illustration has a very high standard.
The cat is executed competently enough on a technical level but as an illustration still lets the cover down as it fails to convey anything much as a figure. Its pose does not draw any attention to the most important element about it – the tail. And while its expression is – scared? Determined? – its body language doesn’t convey any mood at all. It is just blandly sitting there.
In illustration, body language should always express the intended emotion or personality before the face is even drawn. And that is especially important in a book cover where detail is lost at thumbnail size and all that is left is the shapes on the page.
At thumnail what we see on this cover is a cat with nothing special about it, boringly sitting in a featureless landscape.
These are cats expressing emotion, clear even without their faces being visible in https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/halloween-set-cats-vector-silhouettes-evil-696250804?src=_iQ2qNozYt0XqXi6koVvfQ-1-2
This is a cover with animal characters conveying wary heroism in their poses (it also uses composition and lighting to convey the mood): https://www.amazon.com/Endling-1-Last-Katherine- https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81Y-yBjGwvL.jpg
And some more in a similar vein from the most obvious point of comparison, the Warriors series:
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51yzzspcmvL.jpg
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51SdN0jOlsL.jpg
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/5138ErUWdFL.jpg
Hopefully you can see what I have talked about above done well with these covers, and begin to see how you could apply these ideas to your own cover: to recap, they are executed with a high level of technical skill. A lot of thought is given to the positioning and poses of the cats to express moods and dynamics that will intrigue and excite. The environments they inhabit are also executed artfully, with naturalistic detail picked out that helps hint at the kind of world these characters inhabit.
A lot of the further problems with your current cover can be summed up in what Ron and Katz said: nothing on the cover directs the eye. You might find it useful to read up a bit about visual hierarchy:
https://www.canva.com/learn/visual-hierarchy/
To get a really good cover you’re going to need to rethink more or less from the ground up.
Check out the examples of covers in your genre given within these comments and more besides. The more you pay attention to how books occupying similar ground present themselves, the more you will see how to successfully do likewise.
Think about what these good covers choose to portray and emphasise to speak to potential readers. They feature a strong central image, are heavy on intriguing, fantasy-ish detail, movement, atmosphere.
Think about how they use composition, palette etc to frame the illustrations in the most effective way.
Also take a look at some stock sites for imagery you might use to create a new cover. As I say, your own illustration is not going to be right for cover artwork. But you have other tools at your disposal like typography and stock illustration to play with.
On a positive note, you have made a good start with title typography. It is too small and in the wrong colour to stand out at present, but it’s a well-chosen typeface for the genre and has potential.
Here are some more examples that are good starting points in your research:
http://moontrug.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/savagekingdo_paperback_1471118746_300.jpg
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81PCI1aoW%2BL.jpg
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51pd3DeSfkL.jpg
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/91iBP6ITGkL.jpg
These are all great examples and now I feel like a doof for not immediately thinking of the Warriors series. Of course those are the closest comps and therefore the covers that the authors should be trying to emulate.
The others do have a point about your being up against some stiff competition; while the cat and the landscape are competently drawn, you’re going to be competing with masters in your particular genre. To my eyes (and the eyes of any who’ve not read the novel), those silver “lightning bolts” could far more easily be glowing and glittering tree roots, or some kind of invasion of weird energy-based extraterrestrials; fantasy for kids in the fourth and fifth grades not being an especially rational genre, anything’s possible. While kids are indeed attracted to glittery things as birds are to tinfoil, unless you’re going to make this whole cover die-cut with glittery foil in the appropriate places (which I should warn you in advance will really run up production costs), nothing is going to make this book stand out very much from its competition.
I should probably also mention that in addition to being a “wall of text” as our host says, the synopsis on the back cover is an “elevator pitch” of the sort you’re supposed to submit to us here, and not to your prospective readers. Children (and readers in general) don’t like to be told what they’re supposed to be getting out of any given book; just blandly stating who your protagonist is and how his character will be developed in this book is kind of like the blunder President George H.W. Bush made on the campaign trail back in 1992 when he accidentally read the subtext “Message today: I care” out loud from his script. Your elevator pitch accurately describes the impression you want your synopsis to give, but it’s not supposed to be your synopsis on the back cover. As an article this site linked a while back pointed out, your back cover synopsis is not supposed to be a bland summary, but rather a hook to grab your reader’s attention: just as “look at these pictures of little Timmy; isn’t he cute?” doesn’t interest much of anybody outside your immediate family in your little Timmy, but “We still don’t quite know how to deal with little Timmy getting his face burnt off in that freak accident at the science fair” will immediately draw everyone’s attention to what you have to say about little Timmy, so too should you be saying something like “Well, how would you deal with having this freaky tail that seems to bring nothing but trouble?” rather than just “…Narmel struggles to accept living with his platinum tail…” the way you’ve got it now.
Basically, for both the front and back covers, focus on appealing to your prospective readers’ emotions rather than their logic. I remember several of my fellow critics were complaining about a different “cat cover” we had here a while back that it showed nothing about the witch who turned the protagonist into the cat, or the little girl whose pet and protector he becomes in the story, or other various plot points from his elevator pitch. My first impression suggested that (with a few tweaks) it actually was the right kind of cover for his book, however: “Wow, that cat looks seriously pissed off!”
Your covers likewise need to grab your readers by the gut, or the heartstrings, or the spine, or the tear ducts, or really just about any body part in which people feel their emotions. Forget about cramming every plot point onto either of them; just show the readers something that will make them say “Aw, that poor kitty!” or “Wow, I sure wouldn’t want to meet that little fellow in a dark alley at night!” or “Yikes, I hope he’ll make it out alive from that!” Like a Jedi Padawan, design your covers based on what you feel, not what you think.