The author says:
Science Fantasy Adventure intended for gamer guys and geek gals. From the moment he could walk, Bowmark has trained for a fight to the death. The Disc awaits him: a giant bronze platform suspended over a river of lava. He dreads the day of proving—when he must kill or be killed—to claim the throne. His people have hidden from the rest of the world for generations. But when the discovery of a mysterious Atlas reveals forgotten lands and peoples, Bowmark begins to question his culture’s traditions and laws. His unavoidable future seems grim and pointless when contrasted with another world full of unique civilizations populated with other intelligent species and marvelous creatures. Meanwhile new threats arise from the depths, hidden enemies emerge from within, and soon everything and everyone Bowmark knows and loves will be changed forever. Torn between a desire to fulfill his duty, and his empathy for others, Bowmark must use all his intelligence and courage to navigate an uncertain future. Perfect for fans of Salvatore’s Drizzt.
Nathan says:
Unfortunately, this cover misses the “science fantasy adventure” part entirely. There’s a penumbra of the fantastic in the title font, but that’s it. The bronze head with dreadlocks only says “African-American interest,” which doesn’t overlap at all with the description you gave.
Better go back to the concept stage on this one.
I agree with Nathan: anyone looking at this book cold would miss understanding its subject matter entirely. It absolutely does not convey any sense at all of “Science Fantasy Adventure.” The blurb all by itself suggests more appropriate imagery, such as whatever is supposed to be occurring on the “Disk,” “a giant bronze platform suspended over a river of lava.”
Aside from being inappropriate, the portrait now on the cover is much too patently artificial. It looks more like a leather mask than a real human being. That is one of the pitfalls of computer-rendered human figures: they need to look absolutely convincing or they remain stuck in Uncanny Valley.
If it is important to include (what I assume is) your main character on the cover, then you need to make the portrait a little smaller and include additional visual elements that will contribute toward getting across the actual nature of your story.
I agree with Nathan that you should probably start over from scratch.
Gotta disagree here: I think this is a fantastic cover. To me it’s obvious that it’s fantasy just because the look-and-feel looks like other fantasy covers–the title, the type treatment, the tagline about quests, original artwork of a dramatic face, and so on. (Covers with a large, dramatic face and no obvious “fantasy” elements are common in the genre.)
I know I’m going to be in the minority here, but I say, if it looks great and matches other fantasy novels that sold well, don’t change a thing.
I think it is always dangerous to depend upon a tagline (let alone choice of typeface) to convey what a book is about. It’s the sort of thing that would make a cover quickly fail my “imagine the cover text in a language you don’t understand” test.
But even having said that, I don’t think that “Desperate Journey, Deep Scars” is necessarily immediately suggestive of “Science Fantasy Adventure.” Likewise, I also don’t think that the title “The Scarred King” instantly reads “Science Fantasy Adventure” either. For instance, there is a book out now called “The Shadow King”—which is a bio of Henry VI—while “The Winter King” is about Henry VII.
Frankly, judging solely by the cover this book could just as easily be about Shaka Zulu.
The problem as I see it is that the cover is not unambiguously “Science Fantasy Adventure.”
(By the bye, All of the little squirrelies on “The Iron King” cover—to say nothing of the ethereal handling of the art—tends to put it a little more squarely into the fantasy bracket.)
You’re entitled to your opinion. I’m merely saying that when *I* looked at this cover, I instantly knew, correctly, that it was fantasy, and “it might be about Shaka Zulu” never entered my mind.
If we’re interested in finding out whether a larger sample of people are able to identify the genre, would the author be okay with me posting a Twitter poll?
That would be interesting.
Regardless of the results, the art—if still used—needs a lot more work, if it is indeed meant to represent a real human being, which, from the description we’re given, I assume it is. (It occurs to me that perhaps the image is meant to be of a bronze bust, which it strongly resembles…)
And even if you were to get a significant number of people who replied “fantasy” (I can’t imagine anyone going as far as “science fantasy”), the cover still doesn’t say enough. It doesn’t convey anything of the sense of the book the author describes, other than literally illustrating the title. “The Scarred King” is accompanied by a portrait of a scarred face…and nothing more. What sets this book apart? What makes it unique? What is it about? There is a missed opportunity to get across the idea that the book is—apparently—one filled with both intrigue and action, with a protagonist who has been “trained to fight to the death” from birth, who is destined to have to “kill or be killed” to gain a throne, who discovers a world of “intelligent species and marvelous creatures.” Reducing the cover to little more than a portrait of the main character is a major contributor to the ambiguity I think is the main problem.
The authors hope to attract fans of the Drizzt series…well, they need to take a closer look at those covers.
From the viewpoint of a consumer: I like it. I would pick this book up at least long enough to read the jacket copy and maybe scan the first page. You may want to tweak the face a bit — in thumbnail, he’s giving more “confused” than “badass” — and I’d lose the tagline. Otherwise, though, this reader says Good Job.
(And I like the bronze statue effect — it makes it look, I don’t know, epic? Timeless? It kind of reminded me of The 300 — was it meant to?)
I like this cover too. The artist did a fabulous job on the face. I think it says fantasy very well. I like the color tones. My one quibble is I think adding some smoke and fire behind him would be better than the blue mountain. I didn’t realize it was a mountain at first. I thought it was a texture effect. Since the background is coming off as texture, adding fire would not only tie in with the story but it would say dangerous adventure better at first glance than a snowy mountain.
The rendering of the face is fabulous…but what is it? A leather mask? A bronze bust (but those eyes!)? That’s certainly not human skin and hair. The artificiality is both patent and confusing.
And besides, as I said before, it’s just a literal depiction of the book’s title and little else. There needs to be more: something to get across some of the themes the authors describe, something specific about the character’s role. This would not only go further in attracting and informing the reader but also toward enhancing the book’s individuality.
Savoy does have a good suggestion in saying that something better should be done with the background, something that adds materially at least toward getting across the themes of danger and adventure…even if “science fantasy” is still missing.
It looks as though I am probably going to be alone in this, along with Nathan, but I don’t think that this is a particularly successful cover, however handsomely rendered it might be, for all of the reasons I have already outlined earlier.
From the thumbnail, my initial impression was that this was going to be a story done in the style of ancient Greek and Roman epics, tragedies, or comedies; books with bronze masks or busts or the like on the cover are usually something one sees on the covers of modern translations for the works of Homer or Hesiod or ancient playwrights like Aristophanes or Euripides or Plautus. The occasional deity and fantastic creature notwithstanding, the nature of such classic mythologies is that they were written for an audience that believed in the world presented in them: the Greeks generally believed the sirens, the cyclops, and the rest of the legendary creatures therein to be actual existing beings, albeit existing mostly in far-off lands where few to none in the audience would dare to venture themselves. That we who don’t believe in the world as they presented it continue to read them and enjoy now as allegorical fantasies doesn’t change that they were originally intended to be received more or less as real history.
While I’m not at all familiar with this Drizzt series you reference, what I’m seeing from looking it up online is that apparently it’s set in one of the expansive fantasy worlds of the Dungeons & Dragons games: a setting that can be as lowbrow or highbrow as anyone likes, but is quite explicitly fantasy, and never has been presented as anything else. If that’s your inspiration, I would suggest you skip trying to make your cover like those of books of classical mythology and focus more on making them look more like the covers on those Dungeons & Dragons novels, even assuming you’re not licensing this story to that franchise. Basically, this is the same advice you’d get if your target audience were the same people who enjoyed things like J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings or George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire: even if you’re trying to be unique and original and write more than just glorified fan fiction, be sure to follow the conventions of your story’s genre when designing the cover.
If these “intelligent species and marvelous creatures” your African-looking protagonist were venturing forth to meet were basically just other races of humans and their domesticated animals with maybe a little mythology layered over them (e.g. “The pale giants who live to the north of us use something they call ‘horses’ to plow their fields and propel their carts instead of our oxen, while the dusky dwarves to our east use their oddly-shaped ‘camels’ for similar purposes for their caravans across burning deserts.”) then it might make sense to cast your protagonist as a kind of African Ulysses or maybe Aeneas. If your protagonist is going out to meet truly radically different peoples like elves, leprechauns, faeries, halflings, and/or mermen and mermaids, however, it’s time to start looking more to the aforementioned Tolkien and Martin’s book covers for guidance; also more specifically to the covers for those Drizzt novels you mentioned to see how they appeal to the same target audience you’re seeking to woo. Even if your protagonist is decidedly African in bearing and appearance by our world’s standards, it makes no sense to focus on a bronze casting of his African face and features on your cover if he’s on a completely different world from ours where there’s no Africa.
Since your summary suggests this story is set in another world decidedly different from our own, I suggest you pull back and give us a fuller picture of what that world’s like: fantastic creatures in the sky or hanging from the trees or crawling on the ground ahead of him, and maybe an early-bird appearance of some person from one of these other fantastic species he’s going to meet. Try to give your prospective readers an inkling of what kinds of novelty your protagonist’s going to be experiencing so as to encourage them to want to join him on his journey so they can have these same experiences vicariously.