The author says:
Fantasy: Edhenland, a place of peace and plenty, of family and friends, with storyteller’s tales of past history and adventure, but with no danger or things to fear because of so few unknowns. Until now!
In a short time the animals of the Big Orchard Neighborhood find there are yet Great Ones living in other neighborhoods, and also their lives of peace without threat or fear may be over. Outside their protecting mountains may be, almost certainly are, threats to fear greater than anything they have ever imagined. Newly grown animals, long wanting adventure will now find more than they could ever have imagined. So too with the Great Ones, the few remaining people of Edhenland. In more ways than one their futures will depend on what they are about to discover.
The top picture panel of the cover depicts a scene from Chapter One. Close friends Eli Elk, Benjamin Gray Wolf and Samuel Great Eagle are conversing as they walk. The eagle just brought new of a serious nature that may effect their very lives.
Nathan says:
This is the hardest kind of cover to critique, because I hate being unrelentingly negative but…
Your artwork’s just not there yet.
You definitely have talent, but you don’t have the requisite level of skill and technique yet. Undifferentiated line widths and colored pencils only call attention to the deficiencies in the art. The impression given is that of a talented adolescent — which means readers will expect the same of the writing: that it will show promise, but that the reader will have to lower expectations in order to enjoy it. That’s not what readers want to pay for; they want to be confident that they are in the hands of a master storyteller, not that they have to say, “Well, it’s not TOO bad…”
(And lest you think I’m just critiquing the artistic skill, I’m also talking about the design skill as well. The two actionless vignettes seem more intended to show “Look at what I can draw!” than to entice the reader with the contents, and both the sliced-off-circle layout and the title/byline font seem like randomly selected choices.)
Remember: If you want to give your book the best chance to find readers who appreciate it, you need to accept that there may be some skills, like art and design, that are not where they need to be. Your best bet is to find someone with the necessary design chops and work with them to make the best presentation possible.
And I meant it when I said you show talent (assuming you are the artist). Talent is the jumpstart for skill. Now work hard and make it grow.
Inks, man. You can be the most kickass artist in the world, but your illustration won’t look good unless you ink it. And if you’re publishing digitally, you need digital inks and colors. Colored pencil just doesn’t scan. (If you’re going to use colored pencil, you need to learn to blend instead of using light flat shading, but digital color is better.) IANAColorist, but here’s a sample to show you how much even a very quick inking and coloring can improve the picture.
Other thoughts:
-The H in “Edhenland” is really messing me up.
-Just lose the frame. Modern covers usually have whole-cover art.
-I agree that a more dynamic scene would be better.
-Be sure all your artwork is 300 dpi or higher–2700×1800 if you want a 9×6 cover.
-These are very old-school looking dinosaurs. That’s fine if this is a deliberately retro story meant to evoke a 50s Viewmaster, but we now know that dinosaurs actually looked quite different.
-You seem to be a non-native English speaker. Be sure to get a copyeditor who’s a native speaker to ensure that everything reads smoothly in English.
The art is wrong for the genre. You need a dino like Gwen linked. I immediately envisioned a great cover with that dino…lol
Your fonts are wrong for the genre. The frame isn’t working on any level. But lets assume you just have to use this artwork. Instead of this static frame try a the ripped page technique, except I’d opt for shattered rock or something where this art is peaking through the rip. But I’d distress the hell out of the art, maybe add some blood but definitely some lighting effects. But honestly I think this is a total do over
Sadly, all I can really do is emphasize what Nathan said. Even the suggestions that Gwen and Shelly have made really depend on a fairly high level of skill.
That being said, you should be careful about falling into the old trap that snares a lot of authors trying to create their own covers: being too familiar with your own book. You need to make a concerted effort to not include things that can only be understood or appreciated if you have already read the book. For instance, you say that “The top picture panel of the cover depicts a scene from Chapter One. Close friends Eli Elk, Benjamin Gray Wolf and Samuel Great Eagle are conversing as they walk. The eagle just brought new of a serious nature that may effect their very lives.” Well, yes…if you have already read the book. But to anyone else it’s just an elk, eagle and wolf, with no special significance at all.
What is there in the cover that even remotely conveys what you describe here: “In a short time the animals of the Big Orchard Neighborhood find there are yet Great Ones living in other neighborhoods, and also their lives of peace without threat or fear may be over. Outside their protecting mountains may be, almost certainly are, threats to fear greater than anything they have ever imagined.”
Frankly, to anyone looking at the cover who is not already familiar with the story, it’s just two pictures of animals, some extinct, some not. Neither of them suggest anything whatsoever about the story, its themes or intentions.
Things like typefaces, frames, etc. are really kind of irrelevant at this point. You really need to start from scratch and reconsider your cover all over again, art and all.
(By the way, like Gwen, the “h” in “Edhenland” really throws me. Is there any special reason at all for that spelling?)
While you’re right about being wary of being too close to the story when designing the cover, it strikes me that this author’s concern should be more about avoiding falling into the opposite trap, the “kitchen-sink cover design” pitfall which has the author thinking he needs to put the whole plot on the cover! Since this is a story about talking animals, I don’t think we actually need to see anything but those on the cover, do you? I mean, do you see anything about Bambi’s mother being shot or the great forest fire that takes place in that story anywhere on the cover of a Bambi book?
Those were pretty important events in the plot, but you never see them on the book’s cover, not even if it’s for one of the few non-Disney versions. What you see on the cover of just about any edition of Bambi is… talking animals. The same goes for The Land Before Time and The Plague Dogs and Watership Down; in fact, it’s not even obvious that those are necessarily talking animals on some of those covers. The closest thing to something from the plot I’ve ever seen on any of those covers is the patchwork on the one dog’s head on the cover of The Plague Dogs, hinting at some of the crueler experiments the human researchers performed on him before he escaped their lab.
If anything, I think this cover needs less material on it. Hence my recommending the author throw out the frames and the picture of the dinosaurs and focus only on those talking animals from the first chapter. All the stuff about the invading perils from the outside world and their (presumably) running into some dinosaurs later on can go on the back cover or just be cut altogether. Like a teaser trailer for a movie, a book cover doesn’t need to tell the target audience much about the plot; once you’ve established the story is about talking animals going on a quest, you can wait to tell your audience what actually happens on that quest until after they’ve paid to see (or read) the full story.
To put things another way, if inked and colored as Gwen Katz demonstrated, the artwork here would work very nicely in an animated indie movie from the 1970s; but as I was reminded at my 40th birthday party a week or so ago, the 1970s were 40+ years ago now, and the artwork from that era isn’t looking any less dated. More to the point, while the artwork could be updated and made to look far more sophisticated in the contemporary comic book creators’ techniques equivalent to the film-makers’ post-production processes, the real problem with this cover is that the layout just isn’t working. As Katz and Savoy both noted, you need to ditch the frames and fill the whole cover with the scenery, and (of course) get a more appropriate font for your title and byline.
For talking animals, Disney and Dreamworks and a number of less-well-known makers of animated flicks featuring talking animals have already pretty effectively demonstrated how to make covers for (in earlier decades) VHS tape jackets, (in later decades) DVD and Bluray cases, and (most importantly) illustrated tie-in books. Whether the tale you’re telling is family-friendly fare like Bambi or The Land Before Time or perhaps more mature material like The Plague Dogs or Watership Down, the master designers who crafted these covers have already blazed the trail for you. For more middling fare directed at the teens-to-new-adults demographic, there’s also Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn.
Moreover, despite what I said about 1970s artwork earlier, one of the absolute best covers (in my opinion) for J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit I have ever seen would have to be the illustrated edition based on artwork for the 1977 animated made-for-TV-movie by Rankin & Bass. Not only (as so often happens) was the original book far better than the animated movie adaptation, but the illustrated book using artwork from the movie has held up far better than the movie itself has in the intervening four decades; just check out the fancy prices it fetches from its buyers these days! I still fondly remember my mother reading from that version to me when I was a child, and it’s still probably more appealing to the story’s original target audience (older children and tweens) than even the unnecessarily bloated trilogy of movies Peter Jackson adapted from the same original novel.
Anyway, getting back to your book in particular, take your pointers from these masters of the craft and design your cover accordingly. Your artwork, as I say, might be good enough to serve as a foundation for a detail artist to ink and color and texture to look more professional, so go ahead and fill your next revision of the cover with it; just remember that until it’s inked and colored and more finely detailed, it’s only draft artwork. Also, if your work is intended for a somewhat younger target audience like the aforementioned Bambi or The Land Before Time, don’t overlook the potentially greater appeal a landscape-aspect-ratio cover (which would allow you to display your artwork more fully) may have over your current portrait-aspect-ratio cover.
Basically, despite being a bit rough-cut, your artwork is probably the best part of your cover; yet as it presently stands, we and your prospective readers can barely see it in the thumbnail. Pick one of the two pictures (I’d go with the one of the modern animals and save the dinosaurs for the back cover if I were you) and fill your cover with it. Then get an age-appropriate fantasy font (more cartoonish if appealing to children, more literary if appealing to adults) for your title and byline, which you can place in the ample “dead” space your scenery should provide in the sky above and the ground below.
In short, while your cover’s design is not off to the most promising start, a better layout and finish could make it far more professional-looking and (more importantly) appealing to your prospective readers than it is now.
I’m wondering – is this a children’s or adults’ book? That would make a difference to the cover.
How about doing something (very loosely) inspired by the cover of Asterix and the Goths? Show the animals looking worried, and just have a shadow of a dinosaur. That would also make it look more ominous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterix_and_the_Goths#/media/File:Asterixcover-asterix_and_the_goths.jpg
If this is middle grade, you might take inspiration from series like Guardians of Ga’Hoole or Warriors. Absolutely top-notch, realistic illustrations are standard for this age category, which is rough for indie authors!
I think that before too much worry is put into the techniques used in rendering the cover, more thought needs to be put into its content. Imagine the title changed to something like “The Evolution of Life in North America” or “Animals of Prehistory and Today.” The cover would work equally well.
The core problem with the art as it stands is that it conveys nothing about the book that is described. I understand that the animals are supposed to be talking to one another, but that simply does not come across clearly enough. You tell us that the cover depicts “close friends Eli Elk, Benjamin Gray Wolf and Samuel Great Eagle are conversing as they walk. The eagle just brought news of a serious nature that may effect their very lives.” But no one knows any of this who has not already read the book. None of this conversation or its import is apparent from the artwork…not even, really, that the animals are supposed to be speaking. They are just animals to anyone not already privy to the details.
I think this issue needs to be resolved before you do anything else. The suggestions already made that you follow the lead of Bambi, Watership Down, The Plague Dogs, Animal Farm…and even the Asterix books…are excellent.
I did not expect so many comments on the cover of my book, A Place Called Edhenland. The cover design and layout is mine but the artwork is not. I hired the artwork done. There is an old adage, you cannot tell the book by its cover. Has anyone read the book? The concept, writing, story line, dialogue and fifty-five characters are mine, all mine. There will much to critique there too, but I know good writing when I see it and there is a large amount of it in this story.
Forget the book cover long enough to read the book. See if it isn’t one of the best books – in spite of a few flaws – that you have ever read. Beside sparkling dialogue, humor, sadness and action, you will find all the depth you could ever want.
Justin Ingalls
I am frankly stunned by your response, Justin. THE COVER WAS SUBMITTED HERE SPECIFICALLY TO BE CRITIQUED. I mean, it’s one thing to be defensive is your cover shows up unbidden on LousyBookCovers.com (it’s still not a good reaction, but it’s at least more understandable). But when YOU volunteered to have your cover critiqued, and then your response is “Don’t judge a book by its cover” — that absolutely floors me.
First of all, we should not need to read the book before understanding the cover. I struggled with the urge to depict specific events from my books and it took several iterations to break free from that instinct.
Secondly, no self-respecting writer will ever describe their work as you have done. We are a group of perpetual self doubters, always asking how we can improve our writing while learning when to let go and move on to the next story.