The author says:
Robin’s life had dissolved into dreams and nightmares but the nightmares became real. Wrapped in darkness and sounding like dead leaves she knew it was death. Now she was slipping between realities fighting to unlock her memories. Insanity closing in. A trap to keep her forever locked away under the stars of madness. A fight to unearth who and what she was. The Storm Bringer. The dead depended on her not to fail.
Nathan says:
Pretty much all that this cover says is, “I’m not a professional designer.”
- The artwork is okay, but it’s too murky to “pop,” and it’s definitely not ominous or nightmarish.
- The handwriting font is just casual, not ominous.
- Red type against a muddy background makes it extremely to read (look at the thumbnail above).
- You don’t need to tell me that it’s “a Robin Randle story” — you already told me that it’s a story about Robin Randle in the title.
Between the blurb and the cover, I STILL don’t know what the genre is. Is it urban fantasy? Portal fantasy? Supernatural horror? You need a cover that tells the genre first and loudest. Why? So that the target audience will know, “This book is aimed at YOU.” Otherwise, they’ll never look at the description.
Other comments?
I can’t resist playing with these…lol (you can have it)
https://imgur.com/fg2oU76
And then I realized I spelled Randle wrong so here’s the fixed version
https://imgur.com/O1Vz4kr
It’s a lot better than the submission.
I think that the submission is paranormal suspense/mystery. “The Storm Bringer,” with the dead counting on her. She obviously doesn’t know what she is, initially, so…your basic Dark Harry Potter story line. Y’know, she thinks she’s normal, then she thinks she’s crazy, then she finds out she’s a reaper or whatever.
The submitted cover simply doesn’t work. It’s not exciting, and it doesn’t say “genre this.” and it’s hard to read, and the fonts are awful.
My only issue with your rework, Savoy, is that it still, to me, doesn’t scream paranormal fiction. The tagline helps, absolutely, but I think perhaps a creepier, more supernatural font?
I like the picture, but I’m not digging the fonts. I thought this was supernatural horror from the description, so I was thinking of fonts that were less madcap and more gritty.
I don’t hate the image, but I don’t see it as appropriate for this book. Horror or suspense/mystery–that image ain’t exactly tingling with suspense. A bit dark, sure, but…meh. That’s my reaction to it.
I can only second what Nathan said. The cover really in no way conveys anything at all about the nature of the book.
I think that Savoy’s remake is pretty much dead on. The only thing that bothers me is the glowing yellow device separating the tagline from the author’s name. It seems both gratuitous and distracting.
Judging by the summary, this is either supposed to be a dark fantasy featuring a resident crazy young girl as its protagonist, or it’s a psychodrama about a crazy young girl hallucinating that she’s a resident of a dark fantasy world. Judging by the cover… well, I can’t make heads or tails of it from the cover; this is what typically gets tagged as mystery meat over at companion site Lousy Book Covers. Neither the thumbnail nor the full-sized cover provide any clues whatsoever as to what kind of book this is, and (as our esteemed host and others here have already noted) it’s awfully difficult to read the captions at either size.
Whichever genre this is supposed to be, you were probably trying to design your cover to be horrific, right? The apparent problem here is that you’ve mistaken dreary for horrific: absent any context, I would guess this is a watercolor painting of a lone distant medieval tower in a forested valley wilderness on a rainy day; a depressing but not particularly scary image. While a fair number of horror novels do use some rather dreary imagery on their covers, particularly when the story happens to take place in such dreary settings as in a miserable dystopian future or a filthy ghetto or a barren post-apocalyptic wasteland or the like, the point of “nightmarish” horror imagery in particular is to excite the prospective reader’s breathing and heart rate rather than depress it.
Consider Stephen King’s book It (and the movie adaptations made from it), for instance: very nearly the whole story takes place in the rather miserable town of Derry, which is gradually revealed to be such a depressing place because the influence of the titular unnamed eldritch abomination living beneath it is making everyone so apathetic and jaded. Is that alienated and apathetic town what you see on any of the numerous book covers and movie posters for it, however? Not at all: on just about every one of them, regardless of whether it came out before or after either of its movie adaptations, what you’re shown is some version of how the eldritch abomination presents itself to the story’s main characters: as the monstrous clown Pennywise. Whether the clown on the cover is the Tim Curry version from the 1990 made-for-TV movie or the Bill Skarsgård version from the 2017 cinematic remake or one of the early pre-adaptation visualizations, the prospective readers’ typical reaction (even if they don’t happen to suffer from coulrophobia) is an instinctive augh-what-is-that-demonic-looking-thing-get-it-away-from-me kind of cringe that sends a shudder up their spines and makes their hair stand on end while subtly (or not so subtly) elevating their pulse and respiration.
Now obviously, your story is not trying to go toe-to-toe with Stephen King or any other mainstream horror novelist’s book, but that doesn’t mean your cover can’t likewise focus on the scariest part of your story. So what exactly is the scariest part of your story? I can’t tell for certain from your synopsis, but it did offer three intriguing possibilities:
1. The protagonist may be losing touch with reality. If the “slipping between realities” you mention in your synopsis is what’s scariest about this story because she’s afraid she may be going insane, then a split cover showing her standing there alone between two completely different-looking “realities” and looking scared may be just the thing. (This is even more effective if it turns out her fears are justified because she really is going insane.) You can also boost the horror further by having her standing outdoors barefoot, dressed only in a hospital gown, and/or clutching at herself as if she’s cold and trying to keep warm: basically, anything that makes her look that much more crazy, isolated, and vulnerable.
2. Maybe what scares her worst is losing her grip on her own identity. If that’s her scariest prospect (and the story’s as well), the traditional way to portray this kind of insanity is to show her standing all alone and casting a shadow against a completely blank background. Instead of splitting the background (which is kind of difficult to do if it’s blank, though not impossible), splitting the protagonist herself and giving either side a different appearance in a Doctor-Jekyll-and-Mister-Hyde sort of way can boost this kind of horror further as well.
3. The only other potentially scary material I see in your synopsis is “the dead” who are depending on the protagonist “not to fail” them in some way. (If she does fail them, are they going to do something horrible to her, perhaps?) How to emphasize this kind of horror on your cover is obvious: lots and lots of skulls and other skeletal imagery, of course. Whether showing a Danse Macabre or just a lot of architecture made entirely out of skulls and bones, placing your protagonist in the middle of that will make her look crazy and isolated and vulnerable just for still having flesh and blood. You also get bonus “scary” points if she and all those skeletons are shown to be in a crypt or a graveyard or some such.
Bottom line: your current cover is dreary, and dreary is boring. Give your prospective readers something to excite them, whether it’s fear (for the reasons just mentioned) or adventure (i.e. the protagonist facing and overcoming her fears) or even sympathetic grief (i.e. feeling sorry for the protagonist while empathizing with her sufferings from being terrified). Your layout and color scheme for the lettering needs a lot of work too (blood red lettering isn’t usually as effective on any kind of horror covers and posters as you might think), but there’s no point in working on making your title and byline “pop” until you’ve got an exciting image to get your prospective readers’ attention in the first place.
I love your idea about a background entirely of skulls/bones. That would work wonderfully well, if done right. 🙂 I looked, and you can find background imagery of bones, skulls, etc. with some digging. Like this: https://www.textures.com/browse/bones/11816 .