The author says:
Life in the Wreckage of the Sexual Revolution — It is 1983 and Troy Stevenson, former college football legend and corporate executive, has it all — a rewarding career in moss-draped Verona, Georgia, a comfortable suburban home, an adoring wife, and two beautiful kids. For this coal miner’s grandson who grew up in a mobile home, life looks abundant and serene as far into the future as the eye can see. But when an employee who is romantically obsessed with him is stung by his rejection, she files a sexual harassment complaint. His world begins to crumble as word of the incident spreads like wildfire through the small Southern town. His reputation is tattered, his position in the community tarnished, and his family mistreated. Does the future now hold social and career ruin and the inability to provide for his family? Or can he prove his innocence, right the wrongs and restore his good name?
Nathan says:
The problem here is that there’s no drama. None. You’ve got four unrelated stock models who look like they’re taking headshots for their profiles on the company website — only the one of the far right looks even a little apprehensive. Your color scheme is muted and passive. It just doesn’t look interesting.
Use shadows. Use high contrast colors. Use images that can mean rejection or betrayal — crushed flowers, turned backs, whatever. Give the person who sees this cover a reason to want to find out about the book.
Other comments?
I agree with Nathan. The cover could just as easily as be for a book on corporate management or the biography of a young executive. In short, there isn’t even any real clue that the book is fiction.
Everyone looks as calm and pleasant as can be, in spite of the book’s theme being the devastating effects of a sexual harassment complaint. The central figure hardly looks as though his world is beginning to crumble as his reputation is tattered.
You probably need to go back to square one and rethink the cover from scratch. It needs to much better convey a real sense of what your book is actually about.
Given the subtitle and the way the women are vanishing into the background behind him, I thought this was going to be a Fifty Shades-esque erotica about a bad-boy business executive and his many sexual conquests. You know, one of those books that pretends you’re supposed to be outraged but you’re actually supposed to enjoy it?
But I agree with everyone–this cover is dull. More than half the cover is a gray void. He’s not even behind a desk–he’s cut off by more gray void.
There are technical issues, too: The fonts are aliased, the figures aren’t trimmed very well, and there’s a light gray artifact on the left edge.
Overall, a do-over.
P.S. While I agree with Nathan overall, I’d take care to avoid imagery that might make this look like a tragic romance or romantic suspense, since that would be an easy way to mislead people.
About as timely and needed by the world as a thriller about a heroic white cop who shoots a menacing black thug and has his perfect life ruined by a bunch of uppity BLMers bawling for his arrest for murder, or a heroic young white executive who discovers evidence that climate change is a hoax and has to go on the run with his perfect young white family from a Zionist socialist cabal bent on scaring voters away from coal and capitalism.
Sincerely, someone who was accused of being “romantically obsessed” and “stung by his rejection” when I was sexually assaulted at 19 by my 40+-year-old boss, and still has nightmares about him more than a decade later.
…Other than that, yeah, the cover needs more drama. 🙂
So what you’re saying is, YOU’RE not the target audience.
Hmmm… This book’s not the kind I tend to read a lot, but one thing that strikes me about your description is that it’s remarkably reminiscent of Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe. In that story, a wealthy white stockbroker makes a wrong turn in the Bronx, runs over a lowly black hoodlum trying to rob him (and his mistress) there, and runs afoul of New York City’s racially and politically charged “justice” system. In fact, he gets in even more trouble than your protagonist, as his wife also abandons him and takes the kid.
So what to do with the cover? I’m not entirely sure, since your name (of course) is not as well known as Tom Wolfe’s. However, you do have two possible styles to serve as pointers: here’s the book, and here’s the movie. Other than showing a sleepy suburb rather than a big sprawling metropolis, I think these might give you some idea what to put on your cover and how to arrange it.
There is going to be more than one? OK OK not the point here, let me bite my writing hand… It surprises me how often people think that overlapping a few stock photos makes it seem like the humans depicted somehow exist in the same space – or in any way look good: It doesn’t seem to ever work. It could be that there are some so good I never spotted them, I guess, but this is not one of them, and other examples of the same issue do dot these pages as well as the lousybookcovers.com.
That aside, as pointed out the colour scheme is unaccountably dire, this is what I noticed first. By all means use dark colours, just not uniform brown, please. Then, the supposedly distraught ‘victim’ seems rather happy, and not just a little bit smug. An ‘I did it but I got away with it’ -face if ever I saw one. Besides not creating any drama, neither does it help putting any sort of sympathy towards the protagonist – not that this is necessary, but it is a bit of false flagging if the prospective buyer thinks she is getting a depiction of suave and handsome SOB who wraps women around his … let’s say pinky, but instead the book is about something completely different. The women also seem to think he would look like a tasty nibble, if they existed in the same universe, not people either sexually harassed nor about to wreck his life for their own nefarious feministic reasons.
So: Drama! Not that it needs a man being clobbered with tits or something, but neither the people, the colours or the layout convey any of it. I like the staid, clear cut fonts, and perhaps they needn’t be jazzed up but the centered layout also exudes calm and respectability, rather like a menu in a posh 200 year old restaurant.
The story rather reminds me of the movie https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109635/mediaviewer/rm3517004800 – see how there is tension between the actors? Helps that they could just tell two talented people to pose, of course, but surely stock photos exist of more distraught subjects. Also while this is very static as a composition, the way the text is narrowed and that stripe make you feel the man is being squeezed.
OK I stop now or the innuendos will eat me alive.
I wondered why this cover looked familiar, then realized it was the same one that we’ve been discussing over at Indy Cover Project and Does my Book Cover Suck on Facebook.
I love the suggestions by Tuula and RK to take inspiration from works more similar to your genre like Bonfire of the Vanities and Disclosure.
But at the very least, ditching the three women in the background and giving him a more architectural background broken up with some golden light like in the rest of your planned series would help.