The author says:
A murder mystery in a military setting, the story takes place in the present, but relies on flashbacks, 25 years in the past. The story is written for adults, most likely 35-yo and over, and would be rated R.
The cover concept is a first-pass result.
Raymond Allen was the Commanding Officer of D-Company, and he had the responsibility of molding the minds and bodies of the freshmen cadets under his command. But something went wrong, and he lost sight of his future plans – to fly fighter jets in the Air Force – becoming a sadistic leader instead; consumed by the corrupting influence of absolute power over the lives of his young charges. The freshmen suffered; their numbers steadily dwindling and their futures disappearing. Until they finally took matters into their own hands, kidnapping Ray Allen and leaving him in the dense, piney woods of south-central Texas, never to be heard from again. A quarter of a century passed, the events of that fateful night intentionally forgotten, until suddenly re-emerging into the present with the discovery of human remains just south of the school’s campus. They had survived once before by relying on the indivisibility of the bond between them, forged by common misery and hardship. But had their past deeds finally caught up with them? As each layer is peeled opened and exposed, as each piece of evidence is unearthed, will their determination, their resolve, their lifelong friendships be enough to get through it this time? Will their pride endure once again?
Nathan says:
You’ve thrown a lot of elements together, but you don’t seem comfortable with how they relate to each other.
The most striking covers have one overarching focal element, and make clear to the viewer that everything else is subordinate to that. In this case, the best candidate is the solder-and-flag combo: make it big enough that the stars run off the cover on the left, and the soldier’s left arm runs off the right.
Tighten the leading (the between-lines space) on the title, so that it’s more of a unit.
A personal rule-of-thumb is “never use more than one silhouette on a cover.” Maybe you should find an old photo print or Polaroid of two friends together — let bleached-out colors and general wear convey that this is a photograph of the past.
Switch out the font for subtitle and byline; it’s so lifeless it sucks the life out of the stuff around it.
Other sugggestions?
Aside from the issues that Nathan points out, one of the major problems is that the cover really doesn’t convey anything specific about the book. It certainly doesn’t suggest in any way a murder mystery let alone the setting of the novel. In fact, if the cover didn’t explicitly say “A Mystery” it could just as easily be taken for a non-fiction book, a memoir or a history perhaps. You need to come up with an image that conveys to the potential reader something more specific about the book, its nature, theme and idea.
From both the thumbnail and the “full” cover (awfully small in my opinion), my guess would have been “military-themed political thriller set either in the near future (if fictional) or in the recent past (if real)” sort of like this submission from two years ago. Enduring Pride sounds a lot like a code name for a military operation anyway: think of that “Operation Enduring Freedom” moniker the military is currently using for what some of us used to call the Global War on Terror, for just one example. Even with your mention that this is “a mystery” in the subtitle, it being a murder mystery set in a military academy would never have occurred to me; until I read your description, I was fully expecting the “mystery” to be something like “Whatever became of that elite unit we sent out for Operation Enduring Pride, why has access to all the documentation for that venture been so heavily restricted that the records might as well have been destroyed, and why is everybody pretending none of the individuals in that unit ever existed and the whole operation never happened?”
A more personal “sins of the past” story focusing in on how the sympathetic co-conspirators in a murder-by-abandonment scheme deal with their past crime potentially being brought to light so long after they had apparently successfully covered it up is certainly not what this cover would lead me to expect at all. You’ve allowed the title and imagery pointing us to the military setting to overwhelm any hint that the actual plot is supposed to be a “sympathetic criminals” story more in the style of Dolores Claiborne. In fact, to run with that analogy a little further, it would be as if Stephen King had titled that story Maine Eclipse: A Mystery and the cover designers had put a picture of a full eclipse over a Maine shoreline on the cover: if they had done that, would you be guessing it’s a story about a woman who got away with murdering her husband (by getting him to tumble down a well in his pursuit of her while everyone else in her neighborhood was distracted with a full eclipse taking place at the time) having the full story come to light a couple decades later when she’s being accused of a different murder she didn’t actually commit?
As such, I’d recommend changing the cover and title for your book to reflect more the actual crime than the setting in which it was committed. Something as on-the-nose as Raymond Allen, D.O.A. wouldn’t be out of the question, but some sort of wordplay or double entendre like e.g. Private Matters or Committed Cadets might work. A vaguely intriguing tagline like “Whatever happened to Raymond Allen?” or “Why did Raymond Allen have to die?” wouldn’t hurt either.
That’s not to say you can’t have a little military imagery on your cover to go with it, just that the emphasis should be on what the military characters did than on it specifically being military characters who did it. In keeping with what some of the book covers for Dolores Claiborne did (a shadowy worm’s-eye-view of her staring down the well at her soon-to-be-deceased husband), I’d recommend some vector graphics with a shadowy shot of the cadets in their fatigues or uniforms (or whatever they were wearing at the time when they abandoned their sadistic instructor to die in the forest) gathered in a semi-circular huddle beneath some trees and all glaring out through the “fourth wall” at the reader. Artistic license permitting, you could even blank out the rest of their faces into silhouettes and make their eyes “glow” cartoon-style in order to keep the prospective reader focused on their hostility; that plus the vague tagline tells the prospective readers everything they need to know: that this is the last the victim ever saw of his cadets (and maybe of anything), and that to find out why these cadets turned against him and what exactly they did to him, they’ll need to buy your book.
You could do something, perhaps, with this: https://depositphotos.com/v/zt9qkm-53alm . Not perfect, but…getting someplace and at least it has atmosphere.
And yes, the font…that’s gotta be fixed. There are lots of solid military-looking fonts. Capture It, or Take cover; Gimme Danger has a lot of feeling to it; Bronx Bystreets.Covert Ops will never be mistaken for anything but military in nature.
Good old Bebas Neue is great for Mystery, Action/Adventure, etc. Baron Neue too; Cinematographica and Bison are both good if you need a condensed font for a longer title.
I also think that the red brick (?) background you’ve used is not doing you any favors at all.
Good luck. I know we’d all love to see your next iteration.
Loved that picture! I now want to play with and make the cover…lol I shall resist but it’s hard!
I know you. You’re not resisting, you’re just not posting it here, Savoy! LOL
(I agree, that pic ROCKS. Even if I do say so myself, having found it…)
Hitch
“From both the thumbnail and the “full” cover (awfully small in my opinion), my guess would have been “military-themed political thriller set either in the near future (if fictional) or in the recent past (if real)””
Honestly, if it didn’t say “A Mystery” I wouldn’t even have guessed it was fiction.
By the bye, each branch of the US military has an image archive containing high-resolution images that are free to use.
Some other things issues: First, the sheer amount of empty red space. Whatever imagery you go with needs to fill the space. Second, that unsightly brick texture. Third, the white line around the top and right side.
The image seems very cliche. Both it and the name would fit a sort of America, Hell Yeah! -narrative that the blurb doesn’t seem to match at all. (This is the main problem, it would be OK design for some other kind of book. Not perfect, but OK.) This seems more like Donna Tartt’s Secret History, but in a military setting.
I would also question everything else about the design, like the texture, and the amount of red. Good to pick a colour scheme, but there is a lot of red background with the picture elements also tinted red. Some brighter areas would pop a bit better.
Does it have to have the tag ‘a mystery’ on cover? This tends to be mark of an amateur it seems to me, though not as bad as ‘a novel’ in the cover. Rather have some exciting byline, like “They had survived once before by relying on the bond between them – had their past deeds finally caught up with them?” Could be too long but you get the general idea. When the book is placed for sale, in the bookshop or in digital marketplace, it will be shelved and tagged accordingly, so ‘a mystery’ is not necessary; unless it says it is part of a series-mystery, or something else a bit more descriptive.
I would look at designs of other mystery novels, rather than other military novels, for inspiration. The suggestion of an old photo, like a polaroid, seems like a good start. It would tell the story takes place in the past. Having the photo as a physical object in the picture could hint at memories, two layers of time that the story operates in, now and when the photo was taken. Photo could also be wrinkled, or dirty or even partly covered with earth, as in past best left buried. Other idea would be to have some indication that it takes place in a military academy specifically, image of training exercises or cadet graduation ceremony etc. I would take a ‘normal’ font in that case, as it doesn’t need to be hammered in that military is involved, but maybe have it if the imagery doesn’t tell it. Image could after all also be of the gloomy woods where the body was found, or something else not so clearly military – the cover should establish a mood, not be illustration. Also the current fashion seems to be for giant lettering with the picture elements as background. That said, none of the fonts are very good, and I would play around with their placing as well. Some books go for the centered look, like a tombstone, but with various sizes and lengths of lines, others for the ..jagged.
lines….
..like so
….look.
Which to me seems a bit more unsettling. More fitting for a plot-twisty mystery novel.
There does not seem to be an awful lot of crime mystery or thrillers set in military training settings, (which surely is good news for the book otherwise) so there are few direct comparisons, but spy thrillers could be another source to look at as they combine often military themes with general mystery feel.