One Slip

The author says:

ONE SLIP is a child endangerment thriller novel. It’s Nicholas Sparksish in that the child dies, but it’s not a romance,and despite the child dying, the book is edifying in the end. It’s a tear jerker.

Nathan says:

Two big unanswered questions: What gender is your protagonist, and what gender is your ideal reader? (Based on “Nicholas Sparks” and “tear jerker,” I want to assume the answer to the second is “female,” but…)  These make a tremendous difference in how to book is marketed and who the book is marketed to.

I’m still a little confused as to the general thrust of the book, since “thriller” doesn’t usually go with “tear jerker,” and “Nicholas Sparks” doesn’t usually go with “not a romance.” I will say that there’s not even a hint of menace on this cover. In fact, one could easily assume that it was a humorous drama, and the “one slip” of the title was what led to the child in the first place.

 

Updated: February 22, 2019 at 8:15 am

Comments

  1. For menace, and this cover idea, one would need to zoom and angle the camera out to make the child dwarfed and threatened by the merciless ocean. I’m not certain that can be reliably done, especially with a sun-drenched beach, though the title helps. A horror exaggerated image of a child’s toy floating, forlorn, in the middle of a whirlpool maybe?

    You could get that shot by throwing an inflatable giraffe into the turbine intake of a dam, then get arrested by Federal agents or be sucked through a turbine if you tried this in a boat (don’t actually do either of these things).

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  2. Tumbled toys on a beach, maybe a half water-destroyed sandcastle, child’s swim trunks in the water or a body barely visible under the water, maybe some drag marks being erased by the tide. a hair more darkness in the water. (I really like how the water is growing darker.)
    A tagline might do it, something like: she took her eyes off him for one minute.
    I think you need to imply there was a child, not show the child so our imaginations are engaged.

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  3. You need to rethink the cover image from scratch, I am afraid. There is absolutely nothing about the image that suggests the book you describe. Savoy’s suggestion is an excellent one.

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  5. I’m sorry, Gregg–but this cover is just boring as hell. It tells us nothing about the genre; it conveys no emotion at all; it’s nothing. Think about Savoy’s idea.

    Also–and yes, I know this isn’t PlotCritics.com–Nathan is right. Your plotline sounds very confused. He’s right in that thrillers are pretty much never tear-jerkers, certainly not for the reader, and Nicholas Sparks writes pretty much nothing BUT romances. There is a sub-genre called “romantic thrillers,” but having suffered through a few of those, they’re 99% romance, 1% “thriller,” most of the action constituting bickering between the m/f protags.

    When you say a “child endangerment thriller novel,” really…you might want to think about that pitch. I mean…if the kid dies, that’s typically the catalyst. If the kid is in jeopardy throughout this thriller–are you actually saying that he dies, at the end, and the protagonist doesn’t save him? In a thriller? That sounds…I just don’t know how the thriller audience would react to that.

    I’m sure that this is just a description problem, but…you might want to polish up that Elevator pitch, and then once you have the audience and reader really figured out, THEN start on a new cover.

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    1. Of course, a rescue thriller with a downer ending (i.e. in which the rescuer fails to rescue the person in distress) is not entirely unheard of, though it’s rare. The Guardian (2006) had a plot something like that, with the professional rescuer and mentor character Ben Randall “passing the torch” to his student Jake Fischer by failing to rescue a sailor at sea and ending up drowning with him when his ship sinks. Having an occasional thriller with a downer ending like that also serves to add a little credibility to other thrillers with happier endings: it’s easier to empathize with characters in danger and the people trying to rescue them when you know there’s a very real possibility they are going to die horribly.

      Incidentally, I’ve often thought the same principle ought to apply to romances as well. I mean, when you see yet another Harlequin Romance novel on which the tagline or the summary on the back asks “Can she get over [past trauma or psychological issues or seemingly insurmountable social obstacle] and win the heart of [guy who’s not so easily attainable]?” do you ever really doubt the protagonist gal is going to find some way to land her love interest in the end? If a romance novelist were ever to end the story with the gal failing to land her man, however, it would probably make the women who buy these bodice-rippers appreciate the rest of their collections more.

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      1. That may be, but for a self-published author without a personal brand and following, entering a genre with established trope conventions and then failing to follow them is just begging for bad reviews from disappointed genre readers who picked up your book specifically because they were expecting those tropes.

        And if you write a category romance without a happy ending, woe be unto you.

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        1. Yeah, you’ve probably got a point there; although I’d say if the story were traditionally published, or if the indie author were already established with something of a following, the audience might be willing to bear with the occasional “didn’t get the guy” ending. Mind, that wouldn’t have to be a completely depressing “Then she locked herself away, never loved anyone ever again, and died a lonely spinster” kind of ending either. I was thinking of something more like a “moving right along” ending:

          She didn’t want to go to work that next day, knowing he wouldn’t be there anymore, knowing how his harsh words at their parting would forever haunt her memories of him; but there would be bills to pay, and the world wasn’t going to pause for her broken heart. Even so, she got very little work done that day, spending most of the time staring in a forlorn funk at the desk no longer his that only yesterday had been a delight to her eyes. Lunchtime arrived and passed her by unmarked and without regret, as she had lost her appetite.

          In fact, she only realized she had “worked” through lunch when her coworkers began to return, two or three at a time, chatting and gossiping a little more cheerfully than usual among themselves. To her mild surprise, following the last of them onto the floor was her boss, who was being his usual fat, happy, and clueless self. Instead of stepping out in front of all the desks to address everyone as he usually did, however, he made a beeline straight to her desk this time.

          “Kinda surprised we didn’t see you at lunch, Charlotte,” he said. “Do you really get that engrossed in typing all that stuff into the computer?” She tried to think of something to say, but he wasn’t really waiting for an answer anyway. “I thought you might like to meet our new hire. We were mighty lucky to find him on such short notice after that deadbeat Artie up and flew the coop on us!”

          Only yesterday, Charlotte might have yelled in his face for saying such a rude thing about Arthur, might even have decked him with one well-placed slap and then loudly announced her resignation to everyone there to preempt his firing her. Today, she said nothing and did nothing; it was partially her fault, after all, that her former boyfriend “up and flew the coop” as her boss put it. As all of these thoughts about what he’d just said about Arthur blew through her mind in a flurry, she suddenly backed her mind up a line: what was that he’d said about a “new hire” just now?

          “Charlotte, this here’s Robert McGee,” he was saying, motioning toward the lobby hall where a young man she’d never seen before had just turned the corner and was approaching her desk. “He’s a little wet behind the ears; you know how what they teach these kids to do at that community college isn’t quite the same as what we actually do here. I don’t think it’ll take you long to bring him up to speed, though, will it?”

          Charlotte barely heard a word her boss was saying after “Robert McGee” as he prattled on about this handsome young hunk’s qualifications. All she was noticing at the moment was how this seemingly fresh-off-the-farm youngster had somehow managed to stuff a big beefy pair of biceps and a rippling rock-hard set of six-pack abs into an expensive-looking professional business suit that seemed just about one size too small on him. The look on his face, when she caught sight of it, was cute in a naive adorkable sort of way; not unlike that deer-in-the-headlights look ol’ Aurthur what’s-his-name had been wearing his first day on the job when they hired him.

          “Hello-o-o, gorgeous!” she thought.

          The end.

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      2. RK:

        Yes, but in the Guardian–the guy who dies and the guy who dies whilst failing to rescue him are both adults. Costner makes a choice to risk it. They’re NOT children in jeopardy. I mean, sure, there are thousands of literary fiction novels out there with dead kids, both as pre-book catalysts and in-book events (My Girl).

        But that’s not the same thing as a “child endangerment thriller novel.” A child endangerment thriller novel is like the book that spawned the movie “Mercury Rising.” The kid is in danger, hero Bruce Willis (unwillingly) saves and protects him. THAT is a “child endangerment thriller.” I mean, look at the Bournes–Bourne’s girlfriend dies. But the AUDIENCE isn’t weeping. Bourne might be upset, but we are NOT, not really. (I was more upset about John Wick’s dog getting killed, y’know?). Bourne doesn’t fail to protect her, as the primary thrust of the storyline. She’s killed as his catalyst, in the 2nd film. There’s a huge difference bwtween a catalyst event, and an utter failure on the part of the hero/protagonist to carry the day. What kind of “thriller” is that? A new genre, Failure Porn? Who’s going to read that?

        I just think that this is either wrongly categorized, or something. I really cannot think of a single modern “thriller” in which the targeted kid dies, meaning that the hero is a failure. Anybody else think of one?

        I 2nd what Gwen says in her 2/23/19 post.

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        1. Well, there’s the ending to Jack Slater III: an axe murderer takes the hero’s young son hostage, and Jack manages to get a clear enough shot to put a bullet in the bad guy and knock him off the building without hitting his son. Unfortunately, right before he falls, the murderer manages to grab on to the kid again and drag him over the edge to his death as well. Shortly thereafter, the credits roll.

          Of course, that particular movie is actually a story-within-a-story from The Last Action Hero, the movie is indicated to be part of a series (so the hero’s already established as a success and can afford to suffer a failure), and that cruel twist ending scene is a kind of “catalyst” to show us some of what motivates that character (played by Arnold Schwartzenegger) when he ends up being put in charge of the young boy who’s the protagonist of this movie. While I haven’t read the referenced work, I’m also told that this scene was written in homage to the book on which the first Die Hard movie was loosely based, in which the hero’s young daughter gets dragged to her death this way. In short, having a kid die at the end of a thriller has been done, albeit with lots of mitigating factors (i.e. the hero technically won, albeit at a high personal cost to himself).

          Basically, you can get away with any downer ending like that as long as it has mitigating factors like that. About the closest thing I’ve ever seen to my idea of a romance in which the girl fails to land her love interest in the end is the movie 13 Going On 30, which only gets a happy ending due to its also being a time travel story. Its first ending (before the protagonist returns to being her 13-year-old self back in the 1980s and brings things to a happier conclusion) was actually entitled “The Sky Falls” in the scenes menu on the DVD, and boy, does it live up to its title!

          So yes, I can see possible ways a “child endangerment thriller novel” could have the child dying; it’s just a question of how you mitigate the hero’s failure to save the kid’s life. Maybe the hero still saves the day, maybe the child’s death brings the heroine’s long-estranged ex-husband back to her, maybe the child’s death horrifies the villain so badly that he reforms, maybe the protagonist’s community gets a harrowing moral lesson about not letting this happen to their children. Get the idea?

          Of course, from what the author is telling us now, it sounds like this is more a catalytic “child dies at or near the beginning of the story” kind of setup. I’m just saying, unlikely as it may seem, a “hero fails to save the kid” ending to a child-endangerment thriller would not be altogether impossible for a really brilliant writer to pull off. (Granted, I don’t think I could write that story…)

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  6. Um… yeah, over at Lousy Book Covers, this cover would pretty easily earn the instamatic tag. What you’ve got here is a decent photograph of a little boy in the water at the beach, and that’s all; it has nothing the least bit menacing, or exciting, or even interesting to see. We don’t even have to bother with the test of whether this cover would make any sense without its title, because the title doesn’t really tell us anything anyway. (As our esteemed host notes, “One slip…” could just as easily mean “…in bed led to this handsome little fellow’s accidentally being conceived.”)

    Concerning your summary, I think your elevator pitch would have been a lot clearer if you’d mentioned Charles Dickens rather than Nicholas Sparks. While it’s true that “Stop Nicholas Sparks before he kills again!” has been a common criticism of the man’s work, it’s Charles Dickens who typically wrote non-romantic morally edifying stories in which children would die. According to one mathematically-minded critic who analyzed his work, the average lifespan of a child who fails to survive to the end of a Charles Dickens novel is about eight. (Yes, we’re counting Tiny Tim from A Christmas Carol here, but only the one who died in Scrooge’s unreformed future.)

    So… apart from these complaints, are we to presume this is story about a kid’s mother (or maybe father) having to get over a load of guilt for having neglected to watch him swimming just long enough for him to drown? If so, Savoy’s suggestions pretty effectively cover what you should do. On the small chance that (as Hitch suggests) you’re talking about a “thriller” in the sense of the kid being in jeopardy of drowning and being in need of rescue only to have his potential rescuer fail to rescue him in the end, and then having to deal with the guilt of that… well, actually, Savoy’s suggestions would make a pretty good cover for that story too. (I think that’s actually what we would call a psycho-drama, however.)

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  7. Thanks for all the comments. And thanks for the specific suggestions, Kristopher and Savoy. I agree this cover isn’t working. (What I was thinking was appealing was a small child, alone, in front of the massive sea. Some of the women I know who saw the cover said it made them think of their children and it made them very nervous, especially considering the title.) I didn’t know what to call this book genre-wise. It just wanted to be written this way. And, Hitch, it is more along the lines of what you were saying. “I mean…if the kid dies, that’s typically the catalyst.” So what genre is that sort of story?

    Thanks again, everybody. I will take your advice to start from scratch and come back with a new cover.

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    1. Gregg–if the kid dies, and that’s the catalyst, it’s ANY type of genre. It can be mystery, thriller, romance…the catalyst doesn’t decide the genre. It’s simply the event, presumably, that causes your hero’s world to turn upside-down, the event that pushes him into a new environment and a new world, that makes him do whatever he does. That’s not a “child endangerment” book, because the catalyst occurs immediately, in the beginning of a book or screenplay, etc. It’s the first real thing that happens in the First Act, generally. If the hero reacts, being (NOW) somehow threatened, and has to run for his life, or someone else’s life; if he has a clock against which he’s running (“bring me the uranium, or your wife dies!”), that’s a thriller. If the event has already happened, and he’s solving it, that’s a mystery.

      If the hero simply recovers from this, regaining his foothold and his life, that’s literary fiction.

      Without knowing what your book is, who your perfect reader is, perfect audience, it’s not possible, really, to target your cover effectively. So…I’d say, figure out what you’ve written, what genre it might fall into. You may need to tweak the book, to better suit that genre. Then come back with a new cover and we’ll happily help.

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      1. Cases in point:

        1. Mystery: Italian movie Mio Caro Assassino (My Dear Killer), in which the hard-boiled detective protagonist tries to figure out who killed the little girl.

        2. Thriller: Fritz Lang’s M, in which little Elsie is the latest of a number of little girls the serial killer protagonist has raped and murdered, crimes for which other criminals ultimately call him to account in a harrowing trial in their kangaroo court.

        3. Romance: The Billionaire’s Bride of Innocence, in which the gal has to get over suffering a miscarriage (that counts as a child’s death, you know) by rekindling her romance with her husband. (I chose that one completely at random; there are doubtless many more romances very much like it on that site.)

        4. Horror: Australian movie Daddy’s Little Girl, in which a father figures out who raped and murdered his darling little girl… and proceeds to devise numerous tortures for the killer as punishment for her murder and for those of a number of a number of other victims as well.

        5. Psycho-drama: The Shack by William P. Young, in which a bereaved father meets with God in the shack where his little girl was raped and murdered on a camping trip in order to discuss weighty questions of justice, mercy, and forgiveness concerning the girl’s killer and himself.

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    2. It’s hard for us to know what the genre is because you haven’t told us anything about the story except that a kid dies. That could be lots of stories:

      -A kid dies, and his mom must learn to heal with the help of Mr. Right next door. (romance)
      -A kid dies, and a tough hard-boiled detective is assigned to find the killer. (mystery)
      -A kid dies in a grotesque way, setting of a string of even more grotesque events ending with a horrific reveal. (horror)

      And so on.

      “Kid menaced by big ocean” could be a fine visual for a thriller/suspense story, but there are several reasons this photo doesn’t work:
      -The colors are bright and cheerful.
      -It’s a sunny day with calm water at a safe-looking sandy beach.
      -The kid is dressed for the beach and seems to be in no distress.
      -The frame is narrow, so the parents could easily be like two feet away.

      A better picture would be a very wide angle black and white shot of a rocky beach on a stormy day with dark clouds and big waves crashing over sharp rocks, and the child very small in the middle of it all. But I can’t really tell you if that would be the right image for the cover of your book or not, because I still don’t know what your book is about.

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  9. Thanks for all the great information, guys. And thanks for all the specifics regarding genre too. It’s all very helpful. I didn’t write this book with any genre in mind. And I realize my description was lacking. I apologize. It was all just wanting to get feedback on the cover yesterday. My bad. The book is really about the protagonist’s guilt and self loathing for the kid dying while in her care. And although the incident with the kid in the water happens very near the beginning of the book, the child doesn’t actually die from his injuries until maybe the three quarter point. Hitch, from your genre descriptions the book would be literary fiction. Not that I’m a literary writer. I’m not. Yeah, so literary with touches of R.K.’s psycho drama. I know there’s the “cancer romance” stuff and books like “The Fault in Our Stars.” But again, I wasn’t thinking genre when I wrote it. I will attempt the beach, spade, bucket, half sand castle stuff, but I don’t know if I have the skill to effectively pull that sort of cover off. I think there are some great covers with a single photo, though. eg. https://www.amazon.com/Her-One-Mistake-Heidi-Perks-ebook/dp/B07GNVJG5F/
    And that particular cover, and others like it, has me rethinking my font for the title and my name too. Now, I know that that cover is exceptional and professionally done. I don’t have the skills to match it. And, Gwen, you’re absolutely right about the sea being too bright, but I did ask some readers about the cover if rowdier waves were called for and pretty much the consensus response was that if the person responsible for the child let him stand there in rowdy waves, they would really question the person’s mental state. Water of course can be terribly dangerous (rip currents etc) without having big waves. But yeah, with that cover anyway, I need darker and a more ominous vibe. If you look at the “Her One Mistake” cover (btw I did not model either my book or the cover from hers–the “one” in the title and the mistake notion are coincidental) it’s a pretty nasty place for a swing. I think it could be said that the cover is unrealistic in that what kid would be swinging with that big puddle there? (Or course the idea being that the kid is gone from the swing.) But that doesn’t matter. We know from the general nastiness of the overall vibe that something bad has happened. Which the cover I submitted here lacks.

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    1. You now need to switch hats, from author to publisher, and figure out how to market it. To design a cover which will be effective for marketing your book, you need to understand who your target audience is — not in terms of demographics (age, gender, skin color, shoe size), but in terms of what other books you would expect your target audience to enjoy and buy. You then need to look at the covers of those other books to understand how your target audience is used to being marketed to, and what visual cues that audience sees as flags that “YOU wll enjoy THIS book.”

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      1. Thanks Nathan. Yeah, those visual cues are so important in the cover. I will be thinking about genre and target audience and what the visual cues should be. The typical child endangerment (in my mind anyway) is the empty swing or battered teddy bear by the side of the road. I would think in most of those books, though, the child would be saved. Since my child dies, I’m not so sure about the visual cues. But at least I’m thinking about it now. Appreciate your help.

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    2. Forget about what your mom friends said about the safety of the photo. Parents of toddlers may be alarmed by all sorts of things–say, a cars on a busy street–that say “normal day” to the rest of us. This isn’t a real-life beach trip that got mildly criticized on Facebook, it’s a fictional story where the kid actually dies. The very fact that someone went to the beach, took this photo, and brought the kid home safely inherently means it doesn’t fit your story. (If your cover is making the Facebook moms go “Oh no, that would be WAY TOO UNSAFE!”, you’re exactly on the right track! Books are supposed to have peril!)

      You also seem to have serious trouble describing your book. I still have no idea what happens in it other than “a kid dies”–I don’t know the setting, the protagonist, or a single other plot point. Notice how Hitch, RK, and I were all able to concisely summarize various plots in a sentence or two. This is an essential skill you need as a writer. You’ll have to answer the question “What is your book about?” hundreds of times, and if you faff around with “Well, it’s sort of Nicholas Sparks-ish, but it’s not a romance, but it’s edifying in the end…”, you’ve already lost that potential reader.

      Step back, identify one genre to classify your book as (whether or not that’s what you originally were thinking), learn to summarize the important plot beats in the length of one tweet, then report back to us and we’ll tell you what to put on the cover.

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      1. Thanks Gwen. I suppose I have trouble describing the book because I haven’t been describing the book. I wrote it and got right after the cover. You make good points. The idea of someone taking the photograph. Of course we don’t actually know the child was brought back safely, but it certainly is less worrisome than if the child is not on the cover. I’ll work on that elevator, tweet-length, pitch and report back. Appreciate it.

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      2. Hi Gwen. I was hoping to get your feedback on where I might head cover-wise, considering the genre I chose and the new blurb I wrote. (In my 2/27/19 5:14 pm post.) Thanks.

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  10. Blurb for One Slip genre: psychological novel

    Connie Silverstein has a wonderful life. She’s a fourth year medical student in Chicago. She’s got a beautiful apartment on the lakefront, a brand-new Volkswagen Beetle and a hunky Iraqi war veteran boyfriend. She’s lined up a coveted residency at a prestigious hospital after she graduates. Things could hardly be any better.

    But then one day she gets a call from her good friend, Miranda. Miranda’s daughter has been in a terrible accident and is in the emergency room. Can Connie take her four-year-old son, Todd, so she can deal with the doctors? Despite it being not the best of circumstances, Connie feels like she can hardly let her friend down. She races to the hospital.

    Todd’s a sweet kid, a charmer, who calls her “Aunt Connie.” He asks if they can go to the beach. Connie hesitates—it’s windy and the waves are rough—but then takes him there.

    She wished she hadn’t.

    Todd’s drawn out in one of Lake Michigan’s notorious rip currents and is rescued but only after he’s suffered considerable brain injury that may be permanent.

    Connie tries to help Todd—she has contacts with world-class brain injury doctors—but Miranda is bitter and shuts her out. Traumatized by her thoughts that Todd’s injury happened while he was in her care, Connie quits going to classes and takes to drink. Soon her life is spiraling out of control, and so her father forces her into therapy, but it’s no use. Connie can’t forgive herself. Over and over, friends and family assure her that accidents happen to everyone and she shouldn’t be so hard on herself, but only Connie knows the terrible secret that what happened wasn’t an accident.

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    1. Here’s my completely honest reaction to this:

      “Who the hell cares what kind of car she has? Not me.”

      The blurb needs to sell the sizzle, the hook, the big dramatic plot in the foreground. Not the background.

      SHE ONLY LOOKED AWAY FOR AN INSTANT.

      Connie was just trying to be a good friend, volunteering to take care of best friend’s four-year-old son Todd during a family medical emergency.

      She was just trying to keep Todd happy by taking him to the lake shore.

      Connie knew about undertows and rip currents. She wasn’t being neglectful.

      She only looked away for an instant…

      Sell the emotional hook. Make the potential reader NEED to read it.

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      1. YES. THAT.^ That’s a description that will hook readers. The quasi-synopsis won’t. I’d actually be put-off by the “too-perfect” character with the absurdly impossible life (no fourth-year med student has that life, ever…) and wouldn’t go further, so use something MUCH MUCH more like Nathan’s.

        And that’s Lit Fic. It’s not genre, unless you bring in a man (or other love interest) to heal her broken hearted wallowing. Then that’s some sort of romance-y thing. (not my bag, but, that’s what it would be.)

        I think that–somebody’s–idea (sorry, can’t recall who it was) of putting a wet, sodden teddy bear at the water’s edge, on a dark and stormy/overcast day with green, dark water (not shiny blue!) would do it. Nothing like a discarded, wet toy to say “uh, oh, bad s**t happened here to the kid.”

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        1. Thanks Hitch. I’ve got a new cover version I’m working on and it has shiny blue water (lol). I’ll make it dark green. And I agree the blurb has to be punched up.

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    2. Ah, so that’s how it works: while the kid doesn’t die at the beginning, the event that dealt the (eventually) mortal blow happens early on. For all practical purposes, that plot will play out exactly like having the kid die at the beginning, except with the additional angst from the protagonist believing she might yet be able to reverse her mistake. This is your elevator pitch.

      Our host’s proposed lines for the back cover sales pitch (which should work fine on the actual sales site too, incidentally) should be effective enough at hooking prospective readers. Another possible sales pitch:

      Worse than death is to die, and yet not be dead.

      Connie was trying not to let her friend down when she agreed to take care of her little 4-year-old Todd during a medical emergency.

      She didn’t want him to suffer; she was only trying to cheer him up when she took him down to the beach against her better judgment.

      She knew the risks; she took every precaution against the undertows and rip currents.

      Yet it wasn’t enough, and nothing she did would ever be enough; for Todd, for her friend, or for herself.

      Now, as poor little Todd lies in a coma in the hospital with potentially permanent brain damage, he’s not the only one whose life may be slipping away…

      Reply

      1. Thanks a lot, RK. And yeah, the incident with the near-drowning happens in the very beginning. And thanks a lot for reworking the blurb. That’s going to be my next task after getting the cover done.

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  11. Thanks a lot, Nathan. I really like what you did with the blurb. It is definitely amped up. I was hoping to hear from Gwen about the cover, as well. I guess I should’ve replied to her, rather than just making a new post. Thanks again.

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  12. Yep, it’s lit fic. Nathan and RK both wrote great synopses; I like Nathan’s better just because it’s a tad more concise.

    And I do think the “single abandoned toy at the beach” is a great motif for a story like this, especially an old, sun-bleached toy. (An abandoned shoe is also traditional.) Tone down the saturation on everything except the toy, a la Schindler’s List, and you’ve got a cover.

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    1. Thanks a lot, Gwen. I actually have a cover I’m working on with a single abandoned toy at the beach. It’s kind of hard giving up my little boy cover, but you guys have convinced me that this is a better way of going. And it’s good to know it’s lit-fic too. That’s a relief in many ways, knowing I’m not needing to hit conventions for any genre. And I was looking at Schindler’s List posters and there’s quite a few. I thought the one with the little girl was particular eye catching. https://postimg.cc/2qx3Gd2G Is that the sort of thing you’re talking about? In this image though, everything but the girl just looks to be grayscale, and her coat seems somewhat desaturated. In my case the toy is a bright red bucket. I’ll play around with it.

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    1. I like the red-on-B&W idea, but there’s something not effective about that image. And the fonts are not working either. Too bland, not strong enough, not “scary.” I know it’s supposed to be LitFic, but I’d suggest something eroded, like like Ghost Factory, to add some weight and gravitas to the title. If you want something thinner, more compressed, Loud and Clear might work.

      I’d also suggest a traditional serif for the byline.

      Now, about the image–it’s too gray. I understand that we’re talking about wanting to convey a stark feeling, but it’s just too soft a gray. If Savoy is around, maybe the image can be tweaked, to be more B&W and less GRAY. I do, truly, like the idea of the red bucket, but the background needs to have more contrast, IMHO.

      HTH.

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  15. The second one is better, contrast-wise. There’s still something though. Designer ppl, can anyone stick their designery oar in, and kibitz, please?

    Reply

  16. IMO you’re not integrating all the aspects into your scene. Your text looks forced into the open spot.
    https://imgur.com/a/lrqWT2I
    a quick remake. You can get all the pictures used at depositphoto. (I used 3 pictures here.) I put a black overlay on top of it to give it that sinister vibe and lowered the contrast a bit.

    The first big change is that this is a lake beach, not an ocean beach, which right away will set the tone better. But having the text look like a purposeful part of the whole will really help. Colors pulled from the picture and using the elements in the picture to frame it.

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    1. Thanks very much, Savoy, for the mockups. I really like the brightness and sharpness of the waves, and as you said with the black overlay, the darkness of the water further out is definitely menacing. However, I’m wondering with the bold title font you use if it isn’t saying thriller more than lit-fic (I did come to the conclusion, with help here, that the book is lit-fic.). And with the idea being that in my story the child is sucked out to sea in a rip current (and from what I understand about rip currents you need pretty substantial waves to cause them), I’m wondering if the relatively placid lake in your mockups would work.

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    2. I think putting the bucket in the water helps a lot (once edited in neatly, of course). It gives me way more of a sense that something’s wrong, whereas Gregg’s is good but still gives me the sense that the kid could be perfectly safe three feet away.

      I do think the grayscale with spot color on Gregg’s cover worked well, and I’d want to see it on this cover.

      I think what would help me a lot is an ultra-wide-angle lens (like this–not this photo, obviously, but this lens angle). That would allow you to put the bucket large front and center while still giving a sense of the size and scariness of the ocean and showing that it’s truly abandoned and there aren’t people standing just out of frame.

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    1. I think that is 100% better, you’ve really taken in some great advice.

      There’s a few things I would look at for improving it but the elements and their combination is all working for me.

      (You can resubmit this reworked cover to Cover Critics to start a new thread with advice, Nathan will post it with a link to this thread for comparison).

      I would look at different dark colours than black for the copy, and I don’t quite like how the descender of the ‘p’ is sitting on the line where sea meets shore. I think it’s called a tangent issue? Two separate design elements meeting in a way which implies a relationship they don’t have (so here, that the ‘p’ is sitting on the ground rather than the letters floating in front.

      More broadly, I think while this cover has become a very competent cover, it could be refined into selling your specific book a bit harder. At the moment it;s still defaulting to ‘thriller’ a little.

      At the moment, having the title interacting with illustrated/photographic imagery in a slightly playful manner (or even being semi-obscured by it) is just about the most popular way to signal ‘literary fiction’ on a cover. Here’s a cover with very similar elements to yours which does it:

      https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51yFCSd80ZL.jpg

      Here’s a random collection of others which all use the same trick with different styles:

      https://cdn.waterstones.com/override/v3/large/9780/0995

      https://api.zo.la/v4/image/display?id=9781501178771&w=315&h=475/9780099592532.jpg

      https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/5b2c03ae1ae6621d008b54fe-750-563.jpg

      https://i2.wp.com/www.casualoptimist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/codex-1962-UK-cover-art-owen-gent.jpg?resize=620%2C957

      Without going too deep into it, I think what the device does is signal the confidence and weight of a book by showcasing a very bespoke bit of design which dares to play with the legibility of the all-important title copy.

      So just tucking your title very slightly behind the breaker might be all it needs to get this up to the next level of fitting-ness and eye-catching-ness.

      Reply

      1. Thanks for all the feedback, Kata, and all the links. I love that tucking the title behind images, but I could not find a way to do it with this cover. To tuck the title behind the white caps I would’ve had to raise it, and that would’ve thrown off the symmetry. Also the color of the title (light or dark) was problematic, especially with the froth and splashing of the waves. Not that it couldn’t be done, but it wasn’t working for me. I’m going to submit the new cover to the main web site. Thanks again.

        Reply

          1. Wow. Cool. Thanks a lot. I never thought of something like this. I already submitted the updated cover but I will experiment with your.png and post back.

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            1. You might want to duplicate the layer and use a layer mask (or eraser) to erase the top edges but leave the bottom darker so it obscures more of the P on the bottom. I’d probably make a layer so it covers part of the S as well. I might even add some shadow behind it.

              Reply

              1. I tried, Savoy, but I couldn’t get it to work, especially since I’m going with a blue tint now, and so your .png looks slapped over the title, rather than a part of the waves. It was a great idea, though, I just wasn’t able to execute it. Thanks so much for helping.

                Reply

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