The author says:
This young adult fantasy is set in the modern times, but in a fantasy world that is built around various lores from our own. It is supposed to appeal to readers that like Percy Jackson and Harry Potter. The protaganist is Ryan Ribble a rabid gamer, and Deidre Mikals another girl from his own world. Together they must ascend the mysterious tower in a race to restore the princess’s magic before her time runs out and an invading army overtakes the land.
Nathan says:
I can see what you were trying for here, but it really doesn’t work. The main font especially doesn’t look like it’s intentionally pixelated; instead, it looks like an oopsie by someone who didn’t know how to use the software. The image of the boy isn’t especially dynamic or interesting, and his pixelation again looks like a mistake more than a conscious decision.
From your description, it doesn’t seem like this is supposed to be a LitRPG or a “sucked into the game world” adventure, and if that’s the case I think you’re overplaying the “gamer” angle. I think simply having a boy in modern dress (possibly with a Minecraftish tee shirt) surrounded by people in pseudo-medieval garb against a fantasy background would work better.
And your name shouldn’t be the easiest-to-ignore element of the cover.
Other comments?
I can see your vision but the pictures are too bland and washed out. You need strong colors and dynamic lighting and a boy with a great expression. He needs to look interesting. The font is horrid but fix the art first.
Gaming may have been the theme but it looks like you tried to make a normal cover with low-resolution elements. Unless he’s transported into a game à la Tron or Jumanji I’d abandon that concept. I agree with Nathan that a person wearing a gaming tshirt will probably work better. If his digitized form is relevant, put him against a ‘real’ backdrop and punch up the color and depth.
Remove “It is supposed to appeal to readers that like Percy Jackson and Harry Potter.” from your description. The genres you select upon publishing will take care of that without the un-earned arrogance.
If you are planning to publish this, remove it from Wattpad and any other sites like it immediately. The feedback you get there is too inconsistent to be useful. Instead find knowledgeable and reliable proof readers and an editor.
Am I to assume each book will be titled “X and the Tower of Lore” ? Or will they be “Ryan Ribble and the X” ?
I’m not a fan of the book title and volume title being the same.
Actually just the first one. The Tower of Lore thing is because that’s the title of the video game they’ve been sucked into. The first book is about Ryan, and the second will be about Deidre who is trying to save him after she kills him off by accident in the first book. I was going to keep the ‘tower of lore’ series tagline so they would know it’s part of the same set because her book will be named something separate.
Wow you guys have given me really strong feedback, thank you so much! I didn’t realize so many things were wrong with it, but this is the difference between a personally made image, and one created for me. After seeing the alternate mock ups you guys have come up with, I see a much stronger vision now. Also the guy is sucked into his tv into his favorite video game but I think I can give the same impression by putting him in an anime shirt or just a simple gaming one.
Yeah the description was just for here. I uh kinda copied what someone else had done with the type of readers it should appeal to because I’ve never used a site like this before. I would never put that in an actual blurb or pitch, I thought it was needed to convey the feel I was going for.
Thank you all again for all the feedback. I didn’t realize how bad of a fail this attempt was, so I will be working on it and resubmitting in the future.
I get what you are trying to do…but it’s not working. Besides, just going by your description, there seems to be no special reason to emphasize computer graphics to such an extent. But…if all of the graphic elements —the kid, the background, etc.— where rendered normally, the cover would be even more uninvolving, uninformative and bland. In short, either way it conveys absolutely nothing of the book you are describing.
To ice the cake you committed a cardinal sin: you made the title of the book hard to read.
Frankly, I think the only solution would be to abandon this cover and start over from scratch.
I normally post here and try to find things about the cover that work, that can be used in a revamp. Unfortunately, my almost-immediate reaction to this was nothing more than, “No.” I hate to say it, but this needs more than a rework or tweaking; it’s just not working at all. At the very least, if you are going to have a game background, then you need the hero to be crisp. Moreover, the colors are horribly muted and unexciting.
If you want to use a gaming, fantasy-type background, here are many, and I mean, many pretty great fantastic drawings: https://pixabay.com/en/photos/?q=fantasy+world&hp=&image_type=illustration&order=popular&cat=&min_width=&min_height= any of which would work. Many already, happily, have towers. You could use one of those, fade it a bit or blur it a bit, and then put your crisp action-hero at the fore.
There are many more fantastic, game-like backgrounds that you can find at sites like Fotolia, DepositPhoto, and of course, there’s always Deviant Art.
If you view Rick Riordan covers (Percy Jackson), as well as pretty much every other fantasy author that’s successful in selling books, which after all, is the goal, you’re going to see that they are all very, very bright-colored. Not muted and dim. Even where Riordan’s publisher’s use shades, (colors with black added) rather than primaries, they ensure that there’s significant strong contrast (Trials of Apollo, Nine Worlds)–which is missing entirely from this cover.
On the fonts front, that’s not working, either. You could go with Alien Encounters, maybe, once you get a strong graphic going. Or The Led Display. Gameplay, although…that feels awfully 1980’s to me, too dated for this. Linear Beam is a softer version of Alien Encounters (I prefer the former). Hacked CRT might be great, if the cover is just right. Not for 99% of books, but for the right one, it could be great. Some folks like LED Dot Matrix, but to me, it looks more like lightbulbs, so I’d say it’s wrong for this one. JD Digital is an underused and underappreciated one. I like Led Board’s illusion of movement.
Anyway–my point is, once you have a great graphic, there are a bajillionty fonts that can be used, to convey “hey, this is gonna be inside a computer game, kewl, right?” to the reader.
I know we’d all love to kibitz on a new design, when you have one. I know that these comments aren’t what you hoped to hear, but bear in mind–our sole purpose here is to help you get your books to sell. Nothing more–but nothing less, either.
Good luck and I do hope you’ll submit the rework.
I mean, hell…just for action and color and drama, what about one of these? For the protag? https://pixabay.com/en/warrior-pose-yoga-rocks-blue-sky-3401142/ or the blue version, https://pixabay.com/en/warrior-pose-yoga-rocks-blue-sky-3401143/ ?
mixed in with some gaming/fantasy elements? I mean, the heck with the “yoga” connotation, it looks like he’s fighting. Or THIS one, again, on a game-y background: https://pixabay.com/en/man-male-young-model-lifestyle-3384578/
Just sayin’. I realize that these might be too “old” for the protag, whom, presumably, is a teen, but…this is with 5 minutes’ time invested.
Even a background like this https://pixabay.com/en/fractal-3d-render-tower-block-727318/ with the color and contrast punched up and the MC clear as a bell in the foreground.
Maybe something like this: https://pixabay.com/en/fantasy-landscape-haze-green-tower-3281738/
The art is basically a do-over, so I want to talk about the text.
The title shouldn’t have an ampersand. Titles in the format “X and the Y” are generally on three lines, with the middle line smaller:
Ryan Ribble
and the
Tower of Lore
(This is how some of the Harry Potter covers are done, for instance.) Or else “Ryan Ribble” in a large font and the entire remainder of the title on a separate line in a smaller font.
If your series titles are going to be “X and the Y”, the name of the series should really be “Ryan Ribble” rather than “Tower of Lore.” After all, the series is going to be Ryan Ribble doing a bunch of different things, not the Tower of Lore getting visited by a bunch of different people, presumably.
The tagline is a comma splice, it’s actually grammatically incorrect. The capital letters are also wrong and distracting. It should read “She wanted a hero. What she got was a gamer.” Or, to make it even simpler, “She wanted a hero. She got a gamer.”
Last but not least, putting your name between the series name and the book title makes it look like a part of the title. Put your name (in nice big letters) where the tagline is and move the tagline higher.
I agree about restructuring the titling, and the tagline.
Perhaps:
THE TOWER OF LORE
Ryan Ribble Adventures 1
Or:
RYAN RIBBLE
and the
TOWER of LORE
Gamer Series 1
and the tag:
She sought a hero and found a gamer.
or:
NOTHING! Leave it for the back cover as a header for the blurb.
As written (or using “but”) suggests the gamer fails to be a hero.
Here’s an idea, leaving the series number and tag for the sales page and back cover of the paperback edition. I was playing with the idea of branding, so each logo would be color matched to the cover art but otherwise be the same, only changing the wording and typeface of the secondary title.
https://imgur.com/a/KQuCZT1
From my own odd experience with games (grew up in the 1980s, started off playing with my brother’s Atari and proceeded to play through several generations of consoles from there), what I can say for your first draft of this cover is that while you definitely seem to be going for some kind of retro aesthetic from one of the earlier generations I’ve played (the 16-bit generation, by my estimation), you don’t seem to know quite how to achieve it. While your block-y fonts are somewhat appropriate (albeit more to an 8-bit system; I could easily imagine you lifted it from Ninja Gaiden or one of the first six Mega Man games), your male protagonist’s pixel mosaic look really doesn’t match either the 8-bit or 16-bit aesthetics. Each of these (in their time) generally tended to use much brighter and more contrasting colors, and to have remarkably well-defined graphics despite their many limitations. (The 8-bit NES could usually only sustain about 16 colors on the screen at any given time, though some of its late games managed to have as many as 32; and the 16-bit graphics of the SNES could sometimes show as many as 256 colors, though the picture’s individual tiles were usually only allowed to have 16 of them at a time.)
As usual, a good idea when trying to give a book a retro look is to go back and compare the aesthetics of your book cover to those of the games’ covers (and occasional literary adaptations of same). Note that the big ugly Plutonium Boss prominently featured on the cover of F.X. Nine’s Worlds of Power: Blaster Master cover required a grand total of four colors to portray on the screen for the actual video game; amazing, is it not, what the graphics designers for those early games were able to achieve? It certainly doesn’t look like a pixel mosaic, despite being an incredibly low-resolution graphic by contemporary standards.
If you want to suggest on the cover that your character is in some kind of old-time-y game, therefore, I recommend boosting the original photograph’s contrast and reducing the number of colors it uses either to 256 or (if you’re going really old-school and using an 8-bit aesthetic) 16 colors. If you want to suggest that he’s not actually in one of those old games, but just a world based on them, try looking to the cover art on the cartridges for the games themselves (several of which F.X. Nine adapted for the covers of his books) for the combination of cartoon-y line drawing and semi-realistic-looking painting you need as the aesthetic for your own cover. (Kindly note also that you should consistently apply whichever aesthetic you’re seeking to all parts of the cover; on this cover, the protagonist in the foreground looks like a poorly done 16-bit graphic while the background looks like a considerably better done 8-bit graphic.)
As for the captions? I’d recommend using custom art for the main title something like how the artists did on those old game cartridges. Judging by your description and some of your current art, I’m thinking you should probably look to the Castlevania or Gauntlet series for your inspiration, or whichever one of the old games you think the one in your story most closely resembles.
Your tagline’s not too bad, but as B.L. Alley notes, it could be a little clearer and snappier. Maybe you could go with something like “She needed a hero; she didn’t realize her hero would be a gamer.” (Incidentally, when connecting two only-indirectly-related thoughts in a single sentence that way, semicolons are your friend; a little tip I picked up from one of my literary professors in college.)
One final detail: be sure to use more color in everything. Even old horror-themed video games like Zombies Ate My Neighbors never went for this dusty washed-out post-apocalyptic look you’ve got going here anywhere on their covers or in the actual game levels. Regardless of the circumstances, the background should have an opulent selection of colors, and your protagonist should also be wearing some kind of brightly colored clothes. Basically, any older video game aesthetic necessarily involves plenty of contrast and lots of saturation in everything.
https://imgur.com/a/iCoFoZK
You need something more like this. Normally the covers I post here are free for the poster to take and use but this one isn’t because the boy picture would need to be bought. It still has the water marks on it. But you could make this picture for a really reasonable sum as the boy is the only part that needs to be bought.
https://www.dafont.com/dobkin.font Ryan Ribble
there are other good choices for the name font. I was going for a hand-written look but something distinctive and a bit edgy that could be used on all books but I’d only do that if the next book was going to be Ryan Ribble and the whatever he’s doing. I’m sure you could find a really great handwritten looking font that would match your boy’s personality better. If the next book will feature someone else, I might opt to use the more distinctive font on the tower portion. If the Tower of Lore will be on each cover, I’d make them the more prominent words too. If the series is based on Ryan, I’d change the name to Ryan Ribble Book 1
all other font is
https://www.dafont.com/centabel.font
laptop is free from
http://pngimg.com/img/electronics/laptop
boy pic from depositphotos
https://depositphotos.com/search/by-images.html?idList=%5B47742621%2C65324911%2C123125514%2C9276721%2C164998084%2C47742485%2C115001434%2C41275321%2C164968246%2C46421173%2C107554484%2C59157135%2C205317580%2C54825993%2C47742787%2C79389822%2C31213367%2C13884311%2C201675668%2C83938498%2C42520383%2C79396004%2C54830001%2C164697466%2C58245677%2C9935619%2C196893062%2C24261019%2C104854022%2C52537267%2C204650298%2C210352326%2C6255041%2C10471590%2C129936122%2C55380021%2C167428310%2C196892794%2C73817011%2C12602723%2C157427028%2C203206910%2C93102370%2C114098594%2C107691920%2C49049301%2C47742623%2C166048524%2C39599631%2C162389082%2C50028259%2C128166492%2C114098912%2C165978228%2C35848643%2C47037399%2C41800693%2C129335380%2C117910622%2C177276420%5D&mode=image&imageUrl
added some magic specs, a flame portal about a free pic of a tower from pixabay. Put in some aura around him for added ‘lift off’ effect. Added the same tower to the laptop with game over text but you could make it say anything you liked. Pulled the text color from the boy picture and just lightened it a hair so it would have more contrast and added some drop shadow to the text.
If this boy is too old, search for teenage boy dancing or boy hip hop and you could add the effect around him. If you do plan on using the same boy in the next book make sure there are other good pics of the boy you choose.
Very nice, as usual. She might even find a suitable teen boy on Unsplash.
Which ever part of the title will be common to all books should be the same typeface and in the same place on the cover.
Very, very nice, Savoy. Indeed.
Aww…Thanks!
Inspired by the Hardy Boys books:
https://i.imgur.com/yGr654E.png
Variation
https://i.imgur.com/UUFahP0.png
I like this idea a lot. I think the title needs to be together though cause it looks like 2 authors that way.
Maybe try a closing portal behind him showing a slice of a room with a tv and game system?
Nice idea
Either that or have him hold a controller or portable game unit.
Variation without and with a portal to his bedroom
https://imgur.com/a/TIfJ2tt