Revenge of the Exiled

The cover is indeed lifeless. It is also much too obviously pieced together from unrelated elements from unrelated sources. The mix-and-match of styles is not helping, either.

While the cover does convey a sense of science fiction, there is a listless non-specificity to it that really tells the reader nothing at all about what sort of book it is, what its themes or ideas might be. It’s just a figure watching a spaceship.

I have to agree with Nathan that you need to either go back to square one and re-think this or find someone to help you out with a custom cover design. (I only say that since I am no more a fan of premade covers than I am of the use of stock images, and for much the same reasons.)

Eh, it’s pretty dull. Granted, considering your summary hints that this is a story about a bureaucrat stuck in a frustrating office job (albeit as a high-ranking officer in a galactic government’s halls of power), he might actually find his job to be incredibly dull and soulless despite (or even because of) the far-reaching impact everything he does is likely to have on the entire galaxy. However, just because your protagonist is bored and frustrated doesn’t mean your prospective readers need to be.

Since you list Star Wars as one of the franchises inspiring you, a good place to look for pointers on what kind of imagery to have on your covers would be the prequel trilogy, which focused a significant percentage of its running time on the bureaucratic wrangling going on behind the scenes in both the Senate and the Jedi Temple on Coruscant. While fans’ opinions of this emphasis on politics were rather mixed (and remain so to this day), one thing boosters and detractors alike tend to agree is that they liked all the visual world-building taking place in these scenes. Little as the characters themselves seemed to appreciate the opulence of their settings for all the political wrangling going on around them, viewers enjoyed seeing how an entire planet covered with urban sprawl might look.

More to the point, such imagery could provide you with some pointers as to what you should be showing people on your cover. Rather than what looks like an abstract cityscape from not very far in the future at all (and in fact could be a blurry camera shot of present-day New York City if not for the solitary vaguely futuristic ship in the sky), I’d recommend showing your protagonist with several of the other bureaucrats in a vaguely futuristic conference room with a nice big window overlooking whatever kind of futuristic cityscape they have on their planet. The effect you’re seeking is to make things that are awfully mundane to them (e.g. the style of clothing they wear, the way their room is constructed, the architecture and traffic of the city beneath them) seem awesomely strange and novel to us.

Of course, I’m not for a moment saying you have to copy Star Wars for determining what kind of cityscape to show. As your other inspiration Firefly demonstrated in numerous visuals, other space-faring civilizations might well have very different ideas from Star Wars‘ Evil Empire concerning how its architecture and traffic should be structured. If the empire in your story has gotten the seemingly crazy (but perhaps workable) idea to govern the galaxy from a mostly rural planet, for instance, having your bureaucratic characters’ conference room overlooking a flourishing high-tech low-traffic “farm city” (a concept the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright admired and drew up some plans to implement, though our current technology hasn’t made such a thing feasible as yet) would provide you with all the futuristic imagery your cover needs.

Of course, your story may be something entirely different; that’s just an example. Whatever you do, the main selling point for your cover is to make mundane circumstances in a mundane setting from the future seem completely novel and unconventional by present standards for your prospective readers. A futuristic image of a solitary spaceship apparently coming in for a landing can no more grab anyone’s attention than a present-day photograph of a commercial jet arriving at the airport; if you feel you absolutely must focus on the arrival of some kind of transport, at least show us a hovering platform (as in the Star Wars prequel trilogy) or a landing pad on a futuristic skyscraper (as in Blade Runner) or a spaceport in a city suspended over an ocean (as in an episode of Firefly) or something futuristic like that about the place where it’s docking.

I agree with others about the cover being a miss and pretty lifeless, but I do want to mention a couple things I like about it.

– The black, smoggy yellow-orange, and blue are all pretty common colors for sci-fi. That’s not a bad start for a color scheme, but ditch the white. Have it all be one integrated image, no bars with text.

– The Sans Serif font you picked for the series tag and author name is nice. You could even make that your title font and be genre appropriuate (though sci-fi lets you be a bit more creative if you want.) Don’t space the letters quite so far apart.

– The underlying concept of a spaceship flying through a near silhouetted dawn sky is fine, but if you go that route you need to go full out and make it an integrated scene. White space and text bars are not your friend here.