The author says:
A polite and soft-spoken pedophile discovers that every time he dies, he will awaken at any previous point in his life he happens to be recalling at the time, from several months before he was born on up to a few moments before his latest death. Finding himself seemingly freed from the consequences of his actions by this strange form of immortality, he uses it to indulge all of his worst impulses. However, that he’ll never go to Hell doesn’t mean Hell can’t come to him; for having to live with the evil desires of a desperately wicked heart for all eternity can be a most infernal consequence unto itself.
Working from suggestions you posted in response to my previous submission, I’ve thrown together these two silhouettes symbolically portraying the villainous protagonist’s perversity and his soul’s distress at being entrapped therein. Thanks to everyone again for your excellent suggestions, and in advance for any further improvements you may recommend.
[original submission and comments here]
Nathan says:
Don’t take this the wrong way, but there’s an artlessness here that I don’t think any amount of advice from us will correct. I’m just not seeing the instinct or experience to know what imagery or combination thereof works.
That’s not a comment on your intelligence, your skill as a writer, or your worth as a person. The writers also can design; some can’t. Some designers can write; some can’t. The most important trait for a self-publisher isn’t design chops, it’s realistic self-assessment, to know that some things need to be outsourced.
I think the best option here is to work with a designer to come up with a cover which can advertise and promote the book in such a way that the likely target audience will want to look closer.
I don’t think that this is by any means the worst cover I have ever seen…the problem is: is it the cover for your book?
Probably not.
Even if you were to want to go with this, there is a vague cartoonishness about the silhouette of the little girl—to say nothing of a pretty distinct impression that she is in fact some sort of Firestarter-like demon-child tormenting the man. The fact that her face is a complete blank–let alone the casualness of her pose–just exacerbates the impression of some sort of Bad Seed from hell.
That being said, when you say that “these two silhouettes symbolically portray the villainous protagonist’s perversity and his soul’s distress at being entrapped therein” I think you really underscore the fundamental problem with the cover—and that is the lack of objectivity. The symbolism of these things is clear to you because you already know what they are supposed to mean. The uninformed reader is not going to know any of that…and, I think, is going to get an entirely erroneous impression of your book.
Actually, to be fair, I was the one that suggested the idea of the girl’s silhouette with the guy trapped inside. I agree that the execution is tough, but we shouldn’t blame her for my idea.
Yes… but… there is a sassy pigtailed girl with the man from the migraine pill ad trapped inside. I’m not sure your idea would work, frankly I cannot picture it, but surely one should see that this did not work?
Symbolism wise, the idea was also wrong – the man trapped inside seems instantly the weaker party. If the child was in some sort of sad pose, maybe. But I strongly doubt it.
Firstly, as I said, yes, the execution lacked what it needed. No argument.
Secondly, I dunno, she’s written a book in which the pedo is the protagonist–no? Surely, one view of a pedo’s situation would be that he’s trapped by his desires, no? It seemed as though, done correctly, it could be a powerful graphic. Sure, we see the pedo as the predator and the child as the prey–rightly so–but given the viewpoint of her book, SURELY, the pedo is a victim of his own warped desires, no???? (n.b.–before this devolves into a flame war of some kind, I’m simply going with what seems to be the topic of the book. I feel sorry for people inflicted with those desires–I do–but I’m certainly NOT defending them.)
Thirdly…I simply felt that I should stand up and admit it was originally MY idea. Folks come to us to get help. S/he executed the idea I’d mentioned (in response to something with a silhouette, IIRC), and then s/he kinda got jumped on, and I thought I should at the very least say, “well, yeah, but, I was the idiot with the idea.”
That’s all.
https://imgur.com/a/E9CWG0p
you can have it.
Savoy:
I definitely prefer the one with the burning flames of hell, FWIW.
And a very nice use of color and contrast there, too.
You know, looking at the comments here so far, I can’t help wondering whether we critics are losing our objectivity. We know from reading the summaries (here and on the previous submission) that the protagonist is supposed to be a horrible person, but are the prospective readers really supposed to know that? I agree with both Ron Miller and Tuula that putting the man’s smaller silhouette inside the girl’s fiery larger silhouette makes her look like the aggressor and him like the victim (or “weaker party” as Tuula puts it); but are we sure that isn’t the point?
When I saw the first cover and read the summary there, something that immediately occurred to me was that it didn’t really have enough “creep factor” on it: since the little schoolgirl wasn’t curled up in a ball and cringing away from the protagonist, I could easily have mistaken the cover for a mundane scene from a classroom showing an elementary school teacher watching over one of his students as she did an assignment. Other than our society’s rather misandrist tendency to view all men in any position of authority whatsoever over young girls (e.g. babysitters, daycare workers, and teachers) with some suspicion, I just wasn’t seeing anything in the portrayed situation that raised enough red flags in my mind. Seems to me, if this is a story about the kind of criminal our society finds creepier and more loathsome than any other, the imagery on the cover ought to be rather creepy and disturbing and off-putting and unsettling and any other synonyms that come to mind for how the majority of our society typically views molesters.
Of course, after some feedback from the author, I rather figured Hitch’s idea of placing the perpetrator’s silhouette inside of the victim’s was a good idea, and I still think so. Something worth remembering about rapists of all stripes is that a hefty percentage of them have a tendency to blame the victim when called to account for their crimes. As George Carlin pointed out in his controversial “Rape Can Be Funny” stand-up piece, a lot of them will say things like “Well, she was asking for it!” even when such claims sound absolutely preposterous to us because the victims were not even remotely what the vast majority of us would consider to be sexually attractive (as in the example Carlin gave of one creep who’d been going around raping wrinkled-up little old grannies).
Take the typical portrayal of a perpetrator towering over his victim and flip the perceived power differential by having the victim tower over the perpetrator, and you may well have a credible portrayal of this twisted perspective from which the perpetrator rationalizes his crimes. “Well, if she didn’t want me to do it, why’d that little tart have to give me such a saucy look?” It also brings to mind the child-killer’s speech in Fritz Lang’s movie M about how and why he’s compelled to do all the horrible things he’s done; while he mainly identifies his own monstrous nature as the thing that’s compelling him, he also tells of being constantly pursued and tormented by the ghosts of previous victims and their grieving mothers, and how his only (very temporary) relief from this torment is to victimize another little girl.
While I don’t know whether I’d call the enlarged silhouette of the little girl on this cover “sassy” as Tuula does, that stance with her hands on her hips certainly is rather aggressive body language; what Europeans call the “John Wayne stance” whenever they see Americans doing it. It’s also reminiscent of the feminist artist Alice Neel’s painting “Isabetta” which shows the titular little girl in that very same stance—and stark naked, so I probably shouldn’t have to warn anybody here not to go looking that up while you’re at work. I also find it interesting that Ron Miller compared the little girl’s silhouette to the girls from Firestarter and The Bad Seed (Drew Barrymore and Patty McCormack, respectively): in both movies, those girls are the powerful ones doing terrible things to adult men, though Drew Barrymore’s character Charlene “Charlie” McGee in Firestarter is the hero of that story for turning the tables on the creepy government agency that held her and her father captive by effectively nuking its entire compound and everyone in it with her pyrokinetic powers.
Considering that the author/cover designer’s stated intent is to portray the villainous protagonist’s torment, that “John Wayne stance” might therefore be exactly the pose the little girl victim ought to be striking on this cover. Isn’t this story supposed to be told from the tormented perpetrator’s perspective? Also, is a prospective reader really supposed to realize from the start that she’s actually the victim and he’s the perpetrator?
Seems to me, if the imagery on the cover has prospective readers thinking of things like the movie Hard Candy (in which a girl torments a molester into committing suicide) and then they read the book to discover that it is about a man being tormented even though it’s not by the little girl (or at least not directly, if it’s his memories of her tormenting him like that child-killer in M), maybe the cover is actually doing its job? I don’t know; I feel like I’ve lost my objectivity from mulling over so many subtleties like these. Maybe we could use a fresh pair of eyes, like asking somebody who hasn’t read either of the summaries or engaged in any of these discussions to tell us what kind of story he or she thinks would be in a book with this cover?
I agree with pretty much everything Tuula wrote.
My criticism was really directed, on one hand, toward the execution: for one, there is a cartoonishness to the choice of the girl’s silhouette.
On the other hand, I think that the cover is misleading in that it suggests the kind of demon child one might find in, say, “Firestarter.”
The author says that the cover is meant to suggest that “these two silhouettes symbolically portray the villainous protagonist’s perversity and his soul’s distress at being entrapped therein”—and I don’t think that this is the impression that comes across at all.
If, as Tuula points out, the “story is supposed to be told from the tormented perpetrator’s perspective,” than who is supposed to be doing the tormenting? Is the little girl the active agent (which she appears to be since she A. dominates the cover and B. is filled with flames) or is it the protagonist’s own guilty conscience? Tuula may well be correct in suggesting that the cover might remind a potential reader of a film like “Hard Candy” (“in which a girl torments a molester into committing suicide”) who then finds out that the book is about something entirely different (a molester tormented by his own memories). In this case, the cover has not done its job.
I think that anyone looking at this present cover objectively would get entirely the wrong impression about the nature and theme of the book.
With due respect to you and Tuula, I’m the one who compared this to Hard Candy and noted the intended perspective. Also, the plot of Stephen King’s Firestarter is almost the complete opposite of Hard Candy; what makes it a horror novel is that the little girl burning lots of people to death (all of whom deserve it) in that story really is a nice kid who never wanted to hurt anybody. The other story that actually has anything like a “demon child” in it is The Bad Seed, in which the horror is that the seemingly sweet and morally wholesome little girl Rhoda is actually a budding psychopath who’d murder anyone for the pettiest of reasons, e.g. she drowned one of her little classmates just because she coveted a tin medal he’d won in some kind of contest at school and he wouldn’t give it to her.
Again, I do wonder whether we’ve lost our objectivity. It might be worthwhile to ask someone who’s never been “spoiled” by the summaries “Just from the cover, what kind of story do you suppose is in this book?”
Actually–that–asking someone who’s not read the synopsis–what they think it about is a GREAT idea.
Not sure that any graphic, anywhere, anytime, will actually convey THAT story–but it’s still a terrific idea.
Of course, if said unspoiled viewer says something like “Hmmm… maybe it’s for one of those cheesy niche-fetish erotica short stories on Smashwords?” then you know the cover’s irredeemably bad.
Seriously, though, we could use some fresh eyes.
Regardless of what the book’s trying to communicate about victim and perpetrator, the silhouettes chosen just seem wrong. I see “sassy sitcom kid” and “harried adult,” and I might even think it’s some kind of darkly humorous memoir about parenting through the Terrible Twos.
There’s also just a general lack of polish–the silhouettes aren’t very cleanly trimmed, the colors are too saturated, the font isn’t great, and the texture behind the font is out of place.
(To give credit where it’s due: The plot summary is WAY clearer now. So well done on that.)
Ouch! So I got the elevator pitch right, anyway? Talk about faint praise…
A few more ideas..
https://i.imgur.com/0vfnswO.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/DVCyRl7.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/2CXNVw3.jpg
BL: most of these girls look like teens, to me. The last girl (bottom link) looks to at least be a tween. My impression from the two submissions is that he’s attracted to much younger girls–and if you look at the silhouette, that’s a 5-y.o., maybe 6–not older. Those ponytails are definitely SMALL child, not tween or teen. That body shape is early childhood–before the growth really starts, when kids (traditionally, prior to the obesity epidemic) started to lengthen and lean-out.
I like two of your covers–but I don’t think that they are remotely relevant for this particular book, given this last cover made by the author herself–I mean, look at the silhouette, y’know?
I’m not sure why I have to keep stating these are mockups to suggest themes and layout ideas and not meant to be finished covers. If the author likes one of them they can then find the appropriate images to use.
I’m sorry for not being able to identify with a deviant.
The first one looks a little too cut-and-paste, regardless of other factors.
The second one’s awfully filteriffic, again regardless of other factors.
The third one’s another decent cover for one of those “sexual abuse from the victim’s point of view” story, but not a perpetrator’s story.
Maybe, per Gwen Katz’s advice, back to basics? The author did say something in a comment on the last section about the victim being part of an important subplot but not absolutely necessary for the cover. So, to focus solely on the protagonist’s torment, maybe this cover of yours with the guy in a slightly different pose? As I said at the time, looks to me like he’s walking into Hell; if he were in some other angst-y pose (e.g. crouching with his head in his hands, or head thrown back and screaming to the heavens, or fleeing from his own shadow), that might be enough all by itself.
Out of all the mockups you’ve posted, your very first one was the one that looked closest to being the right one for this book. Do you have a version without captions, or can you direct me to where you got the images for it?
I mostly use Pixabay for these mockups, but any image you use from there or similar sites must be properly vetted in spite of their claim of free commercial license.
There are a lot of talented artists on DeviantArt also, many of whom offer their work for commercial work either free or for very little money.
Sorry, but I deleted all of my mockups and individual elements.
Coral:
You might be able to find that image by downloading BL’s mockup, cropping it to the guy in the doorway and trying a Google or Tineye search for it?
https://pixabay.com/photos/human-silhouette-the-door-to-hell-1725041/
To be honest, I wasn’t too concerned about the age of the girl in the silhouette as long as she was clearly prepubescent. Also, that silhouette’s actually stitched together from two different girls’ pictures (one girl’s head, the other’s body) and I didn’t bother to check what age either girl was supposed to be. You may notice too that I cut the silhouette off at the waist; a full-body silhouette of any little girl, no matter how pudgy, never managed to take up more than half the width of the cover.
In fact, while I agree with RK about the problems with each of the covers, the girl on the third one looks like she might be 10 or 11, which is actually the age the victim in that subplot I mentioned was when the protagonist… encountered her. Suffice to say, that particular victim is one of his greatest regrets, but hardly the only one tormenting him. (I can’t say more than that without spoiling anything.) As Ron Miller says, though, this is the bad guy’s story, not hers.
I do hope Mr. Shumate isn’t saying I can’t make any more submissions. Steep as the learning curve on designing this cover has been, I think you and the other critics have come up with some very good concepts and rough drafts to inspire a better design for my next draft. Even if they’re not quite perfect for this story, Alley’s covers do seem to have the genre figured out, and RK’s ideas are starting to look workable.
Hi:
I can’t speak for Nathan, but I doubt that’s what he’s saying. Nathan, dear, would you like to elaborate?
We can certainly entertain another look, but let’s be honest: This is a toughie. This ain’t a simple “touch the bases for your genre” cover. I would HATE to be a pro designer tasked with coming up with a cover for this novel; it’s a hard sell as a novel, and conceiving a visual scheme which attracts potential readers while at least semi-honestly conveying the general tenor of the book is something that I’d consider above my skill-set.
I agree that this one is a mutha.
The first one is good conceptually. The girl would need to be younger and the man perhaps a little older and predatory-looking.
I don’t think the second works well for this book: it looks a little too much as though someone discovered a paint effect filter.
The third has a very nice feel to it. Again, the girl would need to be younger.
All of that being said, and as nicely done as these all are, I don’t think they really get across the real theme of the book as described by the author, even if there were changes made in the characters. There is more of an impression of thriller/mystery, perhaps, with a young girl being stalked by a mysterious, sinister figure. The idea as I get it is that the central theme is the personal hell the protagonist has created for himself and has to deal with.
I continue to think that there shouldn’t be a girl on the cover (regardless of age), simply because it doesn’t sound like there’s one specific girl who’s a main character. All these covers make it look like a girl is the protagonist and the man is only a vague antagonist.
I think just a haggard man looking inwardly tortured while contemplating a little girl’s toy or clothing item would work well.
I agree absolutely!
Maybe something like this?
Update: I had a further inspiration. Looking back over that famous speech from the child-killer in the movie M, what he said about being haunted by the ghosts of his victims gave me the idea of showing some little girls’ ghosts harrying the protagonist and pointing their fingers at him in accusation on this cover. Here is that revision.
For captioning, I defer to Hitch and Alley to suggest the fonts.
Oops! Forgot to close the hypertext link…
The evil protagonist fleeing through an Urban Hell? I’m starting to warm up to the idea. The background and the silhouette of the protagonist could use a little more refinement, but I’m liking both of these mockups. I’m not sure whether the cover needs two little girl ghosts on it, but I don’t see any reason for it not to have them either.
What say you, critics? Ghosts, or no ghosts?
I think that the general idea of a man being pursued through an urban hell by the ghosts of his crimes is a great one, but…
Ghosts are OK…but black silhouettes?
I know that I have a pre-existing prejudice against silhouettes generally. Aside from being blank holes, too often they seem to be used in lieu of something more detailed and meaningful. For one thing, they depend entirely on the gesture of the body…so in this case any sense of emotion and torment there might have been expressed by the man’s face—and even his clothing—is lost. The sense that the girl(s) are ghosts haunting him is also lost…if for no other reason than their color. Real girls—rendered ghost-like, reaching out to the man as he runs from them—would be much more effective.
Well, letting the body language do the talking makes a lot of specifics easier to portray for a guy making a mock-up on the cheap. Finding a stock photo of a man running toward the camera is easy enough, but do you know how hard it is to find one of him running toward the camera with a look of abject terror on his face? Likewise, finding a stock photo of a little girl pointing is not too difficult, but have you ever tried finding one showing her pointing in exactly the right direction (difficult) with an appropriately sour expression on her face (nigh-impossible)?
As Jennifer Rothnie helpfully reminded us, there’s also the question of whether those stock photo sites would allow photographs of their child models to be licensed for the cover of a book about child abuse. If this author does try to hire a professional cover designer on the cheap, I certainly don’t envy that designer the hassle (s)he’ll face trying to find and purchase the appropriate artwork for the job. I wouldn’t be surprised if that designer ultimately decided to use silhouettes too.
Pretty much everything regarding the difficulty of finding ready-made, off the shelf stock photos really underscores what I keep saying about being overdependent on them. If you think about it, how hard would it really be to find someone to pose for these images? The man can be posed as if running by simply propping up legs and feet, the props being removed later in post-production, and a little girl pointing would be 100 times easier. When you ask if I have “ever tried finding one showing her pointing in exactly the right direction,” my answer is that I have never had to. I get someone to pose exactly as I want them to and take my own photo. Even a cell phone today is perfectly capable of taking a high-enough quality photo for use on a book cover.
I’m not digging Urban Hell. To me it looks like Run, Lola, Run. Running inherently makes him look like he’s fleeing from an external threat (and the more terrified he looks, the more true this is). And, notwithstanding that these ghosts look like cute genies, ghosts will just make it look like he’s being chased by actual ghosts.
That’s why I’m gunning for “haggard man with his head in his hands”: because that evokes inner conflict.
I agree!
https://i.imgur.com/QDjB6HV.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/Gzoa0DM.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/NCGeF7M.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/zo3PtYt.jpg (probably with a silhouette of a girl above him)
The first two are really nice! A spot of color somewhere would be worth trying, though, and I would perhaps get the figure of the man a little further above the author’s name in the second example. But other than these minor things, great ideas!
The second one might work if it were more obvious that the shard is a mirror (which is what I assume it is meant to be).
The last one is very nice, too, but I would avoid using a silhouette. What might work better is making the image of the girl part of the swirling pattern, as though she were embedded in it.
I was thinking the hand holding the shard belonged to the girl. Perhaps add some youthful fingernail polish and a bracelet.
I tried adding a girl’s face into the swirl but was unsuccessful. I can do these all day but I’m still not an artist.
Actually, I was thinking of it maybe being the other way around: a very obviously masculine hand looking into a broken mirror and seeing the face of the girl.
I think your swirly cover is pretty cool! Maybe I’ll try to see what I can with adding a face…
I don’t know; it seems to me that either image would suggest it was a story about a transsexual. It would be, you know, like a “mirror shows your true self” kind of motif. So if the “true self” in that mirror shard is the opposite sex from that of the person whose hand is holding it… (That’s assuming anybody even notices which kind of hand is holding the mirror. I sure can’t remember the last time I looked at someone’s hand to determine the age and sex of the person in question.)
Well, at least the tone of these cover mock-ups is starting to feel right. I particularly like the pose of the guy on the fourth one, since that’s the intended effect of my cover draft. (Did you ever see that one trailer for the Watchmen movie that begins with Dr. Manhattan howling in agony as he’s disintegrated? That’s the level of emotional suffering I had in mind for my villainous protagonist to be showing here.) On the other hand, aside from looking a bit like he’s been computer rendered, don’t you think that guy also looks a little… pre-industrial (as in, he could have wandered out Sherwood Forest a few centuries ago) in that outfit?
The guy apparently weeping into his hands on your first and second covers is particularly appropriate in another way, specifically in that he’s got his face covered. A somewhat important “conspicuous by its absence” theme in this story is that as he’s narrating this story, the protagonist deliberately avoids describing anybody’s looks too specifically, his own included. That’s partially because unlike many an amateur author (especially female authors), I have no compulsion to fill pages with detailed descriptions of characters’ physical attributes and what they’re wearing; but also because it suits his characterization in the story: unlike the child molesters in “stranger danger” dramatizations, nothing about this guy’s appearance or behavior in public ever tends to raise any red flags in people’s minds.
Just as no one can tell he’s a molester by his appearance, neither can anyone discern who his preferred victims would be just from their appearances. One reason I’ve been using outlines and silhouettes on these covers is because I prefer to let the readers’ imaginations fill in the details from the more general descriptions I provide. Consider, for instance, the victim in that important subplot I’ve mentioned: all the protagonist really tells us about her is that she was one of his more vulnerable fifth grade students at a truly horrific inner city elementary school where he was teaching (and where he got killed a couple of times due to gang violence).
Now, from that general description, can you guess her appearance? A little girl from a ghetto full of violent gangs is rather likely to be a racial minority, but could just as plausibly be “poor white trash” instead. You can probably guess that since she’s living in poverty (everyone who could afford to move out from the ghetto having already done so), she wouldn’t have much in the way of nice clothes to wear either; but other than that, I haven’t really told you much of anything about her looks, have I?
Anyway, while this doesn’t mean anybody shown on the cover needs to be a silhouette or outline, it does mean I appreciate anything that obscures their physical appearances, such as the fellow having his face in his hands. Leaving his victim off the cover altogether works, but so would displaying her from the back in dim lighting, or showing several victims at once. The only portrayal that doesn’t work so well is making the perpetrator and/or victim too easily identifiable by physical appearance; so scratch the concept from that third cover mock-up.
I find it fascinating that of all the covers, in all gin joings in the world, this cover hadda walk into ours–and it’s interesting to see how hard everyone is working–on this tale of a horrid human being–to figure out just the right cover for it. Cover Critics, assemble! 🙂
I know, right? I’m starting to get creeped out at how creative we’re getting. On the other hand, I suppose this all just goes to show how there’s nothing like a challenging project to stimulate the artistic intellect.
https://i.imgur.com/fRMZnDn.jpg
You know…that’s not great, but I kinda LOVE the kid on the swing, nonchalantly swingin’ along while the protag suffers…That could have real legs.
I thought placing them in a surreal environment would make the subject matter more palatable. There is a teddy bear in the rubble but I covered it with the byline. Perhaps most of the rubble could be toys. Also, the clock could be more visible to suggest the time loop.
Again… mockup. The “human” would need to be done a lot better and an primary image found that fits the cover dimensions. I totally fudged the ceiling and part of the bottom to make it fit.
I agree! A very eerie, very disturbing cover image that should certainly be developed further.
One thing I would do would be to move the little girl further into the frame. I don’t think it’s ever a very good idea to leave the center of a cover empty. The eye naturally goes toward that area and there should be a visual payoff. She doesn’t need to be dead center—perhaps her head beneath the first R in “Forever.”
Something else to perhaps think about: you may want to suggest in some way that the girl is not literally there in the room with the man.
I am not so sure that anyone would get “time loop” from the presence of an alarm clock somewhere in the cover image. That may be far too subtle and may depend too much on someone already knowing what the story is about. Nothing wrong with it being there—but if you really think that the idea of “time loop” is important to convey, I would try to think of something a little more overt.
Even though you say that the cover is only a mockup, you did a great job of putting everything together and getting your idea across…especially the parts you had to “fudge.”
Honestly, I think other than duping the old “Time Tunnel” TV series swirly cone o’time-travel, or The Doctor’s Tardis/Callbox, conveying “time loop” is pretty freaking hard.
I mean, time-travel is hard enough. Time Loop? Sheesh, gimme a break. About all you could do would be to find some sort of tag line that would work with that…I mean..something like
“Sin * Don’t Repent * Die * Resurrect
Lather, Rinse, Repeat.”
Forthe “resurrect,” you’d want whatever you have for the pedo’s rebirth, or undeath, or…? I dunno, “undie?” Nope, that doesn’t suit, lol. Un-die? I dunno.
Yeah…it might be best to just let that aspect of the book go so far as the cover is concerned.
Jeez, I sure read “undie” differently at first…
EXACTLY, that’s what I was laughing about. “undie”…PANTS!!! What a bunch of juvenile delinquents we are, but it’s patent that “undie” won’t work. You’d have to at least use a hyphen, or something.
For that matter, is anybody really even going to care whether something about time travel is on the cover or not? Take a look at the original cover for James P. Hogan’s Thrice Upon A Time which is very much a “time loop” story, and you’ll see there are no clocks or swirls or really much of anything to indicate it’s about time looping. If anything, the boxy 1980s computer in the medieval-looking setting might have you thinking it was some kind of Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court-style story (which it most certainly was not).
Furthermore, as I recall, the author described the protagonist’s time travel as being “not a stable loop” in this story. (That’s another reason why I bring up Thrice Upon A Time, which didn’t involve any stable time loops either.) The story also seems to use this form of time travel as nothing more than a plot device in a similar manner to the short story “Closing the Time Lid” by Orson Scott Card, in which a bunch of unethical thrill-seeking revelers abuse a fail-safe device on a time machine in order to experience violent suicides without actually dying. If I were selling that story as a booklet, I wouldn’t show anything about time travel or what that titular “time lid” looked like on its cover; my focus would be more on portraying someone gleefully committing suicide by throwing himself in front of a truck while also including a background shot of the truck’s horrified driver, because those are the parts of the story of primary interest to a prospective reader.
Likewise, for this book’s cover, I think we should focus on the protagonist’s torment and ignore the part about time travel: stick with an image of the protagonist weeping and tearing his hair out in distress, with maybe some flames or other infernal imagery and/or a victim or two pointing an accusing finger at him in the background.
Funny you should mention a short story from Orson Scott Card: another one of his short stories, “Clap Hands and Sing” was where I got the idea of a character time-traveling by going back through time in his mind. It even had its protagonist molesting an underage girl in his younger body (though a plot twist at the end revealed that a much older version of her also happened to have traveled back in time to take control of her body for their encounter, so technically they were both adults at the time).
I agree. This was mostly a composite I found on Pixabay. I only added the man and tweaked the aspect ratio.
To further distance her from reality I’d place the girl on the swing in the middle and give her a light glow while reducing her opacity slightly. A ‘ghost’ of one of his victims haunting him.
I’d prefer to have the man on his knees with his hands on his head, making his anguish more obvious.
In spite of resorting to the spiral-timey-wimey thing for Relative Age I am not a fan. Perhaps a collection of clocks littering the space along with toys would convey a time element.
I think that Hitch is right in suggesting that it probably wouldn’t be the best idea to try to include the time loop concept. There probably is no real way to do that…and clocks, no matter how many there may be, is not going to get the idea across. I think sticking to one central aspect of the book is sufficient.
I WANT CLOCKS! CLOCKS I SAY. CLOCKS.
Not bad! I especially like how both the victim and perpetrator are shown from the back. With all that junk around them, though, don’t you think this mock-up looks just a bit too cluttered?
While I know the title and byline fonts are just placeholders, I should also point out you’ve just demonstrated the problem with using pre-distressed fonts: the duplicate letters are all obviously distressed in the exact same way. I’d prefer to use a plain font and then do the distressing manually.
Other than building the virtual set and setting up lights to get a partial silhouette of the man, these are typically minute covers to suggest ideas. I agree about the fonts, preferring to use a normal one and add texture to the cover version. That way they typeface can be preserved for other promotional material. I also prefer that the title and byline match, leaving the byline more plain, but that’s me.
Staying with this theme, I’d prefer an empty room with dirty, broken dolls scattered about the floor and the characters back-lit but three-dimensional to avoid specific features as you suggested. It’s an uncomfortable subject, which is why like the idea of making the girl slightly translucent with a soft glow to suggest she’s not really there but instead representing a haunting memory. Perhaps the space is where he carries out his atrocities.
As others pointed out the clock isn’t enough to clearly suggest the time travel element, but there’s also no reason not to include one as an Easter egg of sorts for the reader. Leave it subtle but reverse the face or leave off the hands to suggest time for him is broken. If someone happens to notice then consider it a bonus, but if not they won’t be missing out. If we can’t have fun with our work then what’s the point?
I also agree we sometimes get caught up in character descriptions. For Relative Age I tried not describing them beyond gender and general build (even then only suggested by their activities), allowing the reader to fill in the other details. It worked so well i wish i had done so for my previous books.
Yes, and you’ve done some excellent work so far. I even recently located an ultra-large copy of that picture of a guy with his head in his hands you were using (though I may choose a different model; a search for “weeping man” turns up a lot of super-large images of guys in that same pose). I’ve also taken to heart some of your font suggestions, though after seeing the negative feedback for my “cracked and parched mud in a dried-up lake bed like Mel Gibson’s portrayal of Hell in The Passion” font-distressing on this cover, I’d have to ask exactly what way I ought to distress it.
From what you’ve said about the background, it seems maybe I need to clarify a point about the villainous protagonist’s atrocities. When I say he’s a child-molesting pedophile, I don’t mean this in the sense of “The moment he got her alone, he clapped his hand over her mouth and dragged her off to a place where no one could hear her scream!” like the guy in M. What I mean is that he’s like the protagonist of Lolita, with the setup being more “It started with giving her excuses to linger in his classroom for a few minutes after the other students were gone; little by little with kind words and the occasional ‘tender’ caress, she became first the teacher’s pet, and then his dirty little secret.”
In a lot of people’s eyes, you see, statutory rape can actually be worse than the forcible kind: even when forcible rape ends with the victim being murdered, it ends. Catching and punishing the perpetrator brings definite closure, and if the victim is not murdered, it’s still fairly simple to counsel her through her trauma by pointing out “It’s not your fault: he was bigger than you, he tricked you just as he’d tricked us all, and there was nothing anyone could do about it other than what we did.” In contrast, the trauma from statutory rape can linger on for a lifetime even if the perpetrator is caught and punished, and it’s not quite as easy to convince the victim that she didn’t contribute to her “seduction” in some way (eagerly accepting candy from him when he offered it, enjoying the extra special attention she got from him, feeling he appreciated her much more than her ne’er-do-well parents ever did, etc.).
In a way, the victims he left alive likewise haunt the villainous protagonist even more than they would if he’d murdered them: he knows the damage he’s done, even though he tries to tell himself that it doesn’t matter anymore once he’s “reset” the timeline. Your ideas for various “empathy dolls” (as they’re called) would actually still work pretty well with this concept, though the kind of time traveling the protagonist does in this story obviously doesn’t allow him to keep any “trophies” from his victims. It’s just that you should be thinking of him as being more like a sexual swindler than a serial killer.
So, you know, think of the settings for his crimes being places like the classroom at the inner city public school where he taught rather than the grungy trash-strewn dilapidated room in an old abandoned building in the middle of nowhere you used in your latest mock-up. Also, while I agree a clock might be a good Easter egg, have you considered that a calendar might work even better? A large percentage of the time travel in this story is through years and decades rather than hours and minutes.
Anyway, you critics have all given me plenty of new ideas, so with Mr. Shumate’s permission, I’ll see if I can’t come up with a superior rough draft.
Sometimes an image can inspire the perfect idea, even when that image isn’t appropriate.
If a classroom is more accurate, perhaps him in anguish in a dimly-lit classroom with cubicles full of toys and the ‘ghost’ of a girl haunting him. Perhaps color shift it and have an odd-quality light streaming through the windows, suggesting the image is a dream or memory. A kid-friendly giant calendar on the classroom wall with the months torn off and flying around the room before settling onto the floor.
If it’s a classroom, make it look like an abandoned school. Cover the floor with broken dolls and have a stick figure little girl drawn in chalk on a blackboard, half wiped off with a smeared handprint. In other words, fill the room with visual symbols of his transgressions against children. All of the rest of the comments about the position of the girl and man are great. (And, as you say, leave the matter of the time element as easter eggs. Don’t let it get in the way of the rest of the cover.)
“You mean like Detroit?” Seriously, though, I’m not entirely sure it even has to be abandoned: public school itself has always seemed pretty loathsome to me even though I was never physically or sexually abused there. (Arguably, I suffered more than my share of verbal abuse there as a kid, but that’s the kind of thing that’s hard to quantify.) Just a plain empty classroom might suffice.
For “visual symbols of his transgressions against children” as you suggest, maybe something quite appropriately inappropriate on the chalkboard? Since we’re talking about a statutory rapist here, how about stick-figure drawings of the man and little girl holding hands, a heart drawn between them and “I luv U Teacher” unevenly scrawled beneath it… I mean, would that be creepy or what?
Like this?
That’s more disturbing than my doll
That is kinda creepy, but I’m not sure that I’m quite getting “guilty pedo” from that. Yes, RK, I see the “I wuv you teecher” behind him, but…maybe. Maybe it works.
Of course, if it’s creepy doll faces people want…
Having the floor covered with broken dolls is a really nasty idea. I love it.
Second the broken dolls.
Did someone say dolls?
https://i.imgur.com/8Xm3ugF.jpg
THAT is a seriously creepy cover.
That would give Chucky nightmares.
Like a malevolent clown running through the pet cemetery and the cornfields of a damned village while carrying a murderous doll.
I can’t reply to RK any longer, after his “if it’s creepy doll faces people want…” yes, that’s got some creep, but truly, the guy in the classroom is more…haunting. More disturbing, to my way of thinking. The doll with him in her eyes is too blatant.
Here’s a variant on that teacher-in-the-classroom cover.
I’ll admit it’d be easier to caption a cover like that and the calendar on the bulletin board looks a little more three-dimensional, but other than that and the much-improved stick figures, I rather liked your previous version better. In fact, I took the liberty of altering that one just a little to add improvements from your variant and reflect a few details and nuances from the story you wouldn’t know. Check out my revision here. (That’s a very nice site you’ve chosen for posting your images, by the way; I think I’ll use it for all my image-posting needs too from now on.)
With your permission, I’d like to use this modified version as my cover once I’ve got it captioned… please?
I’d be surprised if RK said no; but I do feel as though that could be anything. A repentant drunk; a drug-addled teacher; a guy cheating on his wife…anything. Yes, if you pay attention to the blackboard, you might decide that it’s somehow related to the kids, but…
Even as is the image needs refinement, and my brain can’t process the off-center chalk and bulletin boards. The calendar doesn’t suggest time loop any more than my alarm clock, so I’d center the chalk board as a background for the title. I’d like to see more shadow and contrast in the image also. It needs more creep factor.
The calendar is just intended to be an Easter egg, though, right? We mostly agreed that symbolizing time travel—especially when it’s just a secondary plot device—is too much of a bother, didn’t we? My primary intent in adding that bulletin board with the calendar on it was to enhance the overall creepy implications of there being an inappropriate “romance” between predator and prey; hence the calendar being set to February with imagery suited to Valentine’s Day and pasted on a bulletin board amid crude paper hearts.
One interesting subtlety about that calendar I’ve noticed is that if you open my original image and the author’s enhanced version in separate tabs on your browser and spot the changes by flipping back and forth between them, you can see that the author not only changed the picture-of-the-month on that calendar, but rearranged the dates as well. Though the year doesn’t show, my version of the calendar (with Valentine’s Day falling on a Thursday) was set on the current year of 2019. According to my computer’s calendar, the author’s version (with Valentine’s Day falling on a Wednesday) is from 2018… or 2007, or 2001, assuming it’s set to somewhere in the past within this millennium.
So… maybe there’s something important about the configuration of those dates? While not very useful for initially attracting prospective readers’ eyeballs, a subtle detail like that would certainly be suitable to an Easter egg.
Yes, that the calendar is off to the side like that and its year doesn’t show is one reason why I preferred your first mock-up to your second. As to why I rearranged the dates, that’s just a little in-joke: I published the book in which the protagonist’s victim first appears as a character back in 2016, and it started with her all grown up and getting married about nine years after she had her tragic encounter with this guy. If one assumed everything in that story were taking place in the present (though I never actually stated it was), that would place her tragic encounter with him sometime back in 2007 or so.
For all that, this entire cover is something of an exercise in artistic license, since the book doesn’t have any actual scenes like this in it: every time someone finds out what he’s been doing, the protagonist never hangs around long enough for people to come after him with their torches and pitchforks. I figure the cover’s done its job as long as it conveys his inappropriate “relationship” with a student and his general misery over his situation to the viewer. Anything else is a bonus.
My early book covers depicted scenes from their respective books and they failed miserably.
Indeed, I figure book covers need not show actual scenes from the book. Movie posters are the same way: a lot of them don’t show actual scenes from the movie, and some don’t even show the actual characters! None of the people on the poster for the 1986 movie The Wraith, for instance, look anything like the actual characters in the movie.
Go for it!
Thank you!
It’s a compelling image. Very graphic, very simple. I’m not 100% sure, though, that it really conveys an immediate impression of what the book is actually about. As Hitch suggests, it could be almost anything. Perhaps the teacher just lost their job…perhaps they just had a very long day.
It may need just a little more focus. At the moment there are probably a few too many visual elements: everything on the right-hand board in particular. The color and busyness only serve as a distraction. I would abandon it entirely. (That white box on the desk is also a distraction.) The most important elements—the teacher and the drawing—are too small within the picture frame to have an immediate impact. I think you need to zoom in just a little bit. I also think there needs to be an unambiguous relationship between the drawing and the teacher. A book cover should not be a visual puzzle that the reader needs to linger over in order to figure out. It needs to convey its message in a glance. The drawing could perhaps be larger and partially behind the teacher…and perhaps there could be something about the drawing that suggests something wrong. Maybe something as simple as it appearing to have part of it having been smeared by a hand—I don’t know.
Perhaps, Ron, the drawing needs to itself suggest the wrongness of it? A clinch, or…something that you wouldn’t normally expect to see in a little kids’ drawing? Yes, yes, I know, the victim is a tween, but…we need props here because, as we’ve discovered, this depiction ain’t easy.
Ummmm…would the liddle kiddy on her knees…nah, can’t go there.
I’m not a creative. I need you right-brainers to come up with something.
That is exactly the sort of thing the drawing should show…without, perhaps, being too explicit. So, yeah, the little stick girl on her knees might be a little much…but perhaps she could have her arms extended so she is touching the teacher figure’s crotch. https://ibb.co/4fxGHj6
The drawing might even be made to look like it was a message left deliberately for the teacher for the affect it would have on him…but that might not be an easily achievable subtlety.
The classroom idea, which is a great concept, just needs to be focused a little more. Anything extraneous to the main message—such as the bulletin board, should be discarded. The teacher, enough of a classroom to set the stage and the accusatory drawing on the blackboard are all more than enough.
I dunno, dude. Crotch is pretty “going there” too.
I wonder if there’s any way to make the two figures look amorously attached (NOT like a conjugal thing, but) in a creepy way that doesn’t say father/daughter? I mean…fathers hug their daughters, that’s normal.
What’s a pose, that would put an adult male together with a female child, that isn’t grossly explicit, but at the same time, creepy?
Standing behind her with his hands on her shoulders, or leaning toward her offering a lollipop. The crotch thing is willie-inducing.
What if the chalk board is covered with words related to being a pedophile with an arcing swipe through the middle? He discovers it and slumps over the desk out of guilt and shame of being found out.
Yeah, that’s… “going there” for sure! Ironically, I could probably put a picture like that in the book without any trouble. As Scott Adams once said about some of his naughtier Dilbert comics, you can get away with a lot more in a private medium like a book or movie than in a public medium like a newspaper comics page or a television show (or a book’s cover) because people are understood to be assuming the risk when they buy the product.
While I’m planning to cover most of the top of the cover with the title anyway, the placement of the everything in the classroom in this image is actually pretty accurate to what I remember elementary school being like when I was a kid: a few teachers put the desk up front in the middle, but most of them insisted on putting it off to one side so that the chalkboard or whiteboard in the middle would be easier for students to see. To make the board easier to clean, there would also typically be a bulletin board right next to it for anything that needed to be pinned (or taped, or stapled) up long-term—such as a calendar. I agree the cover shouldn’t be too cluttered, but I don’t think one little Easter egg off to the side like that (and partially covered up by the title) should be a problem.
That last idea is good…but it does require someone reading the text on the blackboard before they get the idea. (And this might also mean that either the cover could not be used if the book were ever to appear in translation or a different version of it would have to be done for every language.) It’s certainly worth a shot if the words are large and immediately and easily readable…but I think the imagery should be kept as visual as possible.
Then perhaps multiple non-graphic sketches rather than words. Maybe several drawings of parents and law enforcement surrounding him while yelling and pointing fingers, as though the chalk images came to life to persecute him.
What is wrong with “wille-inducing”? An uncomortable creep factor is certainly part and parcel of what this book seems to be about. I don’t think it should be shied away from. One may not want to get too expicit on the cover but by the same token you don’t want to get so subtle that the point is lost.
As I say, “appropriately inappropriate” is what we’re seeking here; ideally, something as non-explicitly explicit as the cover for Alissa Nutting’s Tampa showing just a buttonhole on a pink shirt remarkably reminiscent of a woman’s… you know. Just as stock image sites have various policies limiting how their pictures may be used, every at-all-respectable self-publishing site from Amazon to Smashwords has some kind of policy governing what can and can’t be shown on a book cover. Stick-figure illustrations have the benefit of bypassing any controversy about using a child’s photograph in association with child abuse, but even something as simple as a short line sticking out from the male stick-figure’s crotch to represent his manly parts could draw an obscenity complaint from the site’s customers for being too explicit, leading to the book’s sales page being taken down.
In view of that possibility, showing the stick-figure girl with her hand on the man’s crotch (even without also showing any manly protrusions there), or on her knees facing it, or bent (forward or backward) over her desk, or straddling him cowgirl style (even while still wearing her dress) are all out of the question. Has it occurred to you, however, that just showing the man and girl holding hands with a heart in the air between them might be sufficient? While it’s nearly impossible to find any “innocent” image so reminiscent of a male protrusion as a buttonhole on a pink shirt is of the female counterpart, we have the advantage that just about anything suggesting romance between a man and a little girl is bound to be deemed rather inappropriate (and therefore unsettling) in our culture.
A stick-figure drawing of a girl and man holding hands has three very appropriately inappropriate implications:
1. She was obviously the one who drew the picture (and that’s obvious even without the poorly spelled love note beneath it to hammer this point home).
2. They’re making physical contact (albeit just the “innocent” holding of hands).
3. The girl’s precocious crush on her teacher—which most people would think “cute” and “adorable” in most situations—is being reciprocated—which most of those same people would consider to be “creepy” and “disgusting” in just about any situation.
Of course, you do have a point about translations, but I should also point out that other countries’ cultures’ sexual mores are about as different from our country’s cultures’ as their languages are from ours. In Europe, a lot of the “artistic” intellectual class are always turning up their noses at Americans for allegedly being too “hysterical” and “Victorian” about all sexual matters—including child abuse; south of the border, meanwhile, Hispanics and Brazilians tend to be a bit more “relaxed” about full-grown men pairing up with adolescent girls we would consider to be jail bait. Basically, any story about inappropriate relations between a man and an underage girl is necessarily going to have to be targeted primarily to an American audience.
That said, I’m not opposed to adding more stuff; there’s plenty of space on the chalkboard. Adding anything from anybody else would likely involve some artistic license, however: graffiti disagreeing with the girl’s love note and/or denouncing the teacher as a pervert brings up the question of why the last messenger didn’t simply rub out any previous messages he or she deemed offensive. In addition to keeping the innuendos low-key, we should try not to overwhelm the viewers’ minds with too many messages at once.
What if we have the pic of the two stick figures holding hands and the heart (or whatev) between them…and above them, in very large text in chalk, is something like “Kiddy F*****!,” with everything but the F in (you know) being ERASED?
So, he erases it, and now he’s weeping at his desk? Yes, sure, the logical brain says, “well, he woulda erased all of it,” but the quick-look brain gets the idea–which is all we care about?
Of course, the man himself could be used as a censor for things like that (although frankly, I don’t think Amazon is necessarily going to mind some salty language on a book cover, and I know Smashwords isn’t). As it happens, though, there’s a perfectly effective bit of clean—if not particularly clinical—vernacular currently in use in our culture. Check out this 30-second revision of the cover.
Oooh, yes! THAT is a great idea. Not the kiddy-diddler (Isn’t it diddler, not fiddler? As in “Kiddie Diddler?”), but I’m all for the “ucker” in the word disappearing behind him.
Wouldn’t “pervert” convey the same idea without being so direct? You tell authors not to create covers which much be read or deciphered, so why not a single word that can’t be mistaken but is less graphic?
Well…sure, that would work, but isn’t that a lot more fungible than “Kiddie-f****” or “Kiddie-Diddler?” I mean, Perv could mean almost anything. Dogs, sheep, horses, other people of the same gender (depending on the person speaking the epithet, I mean), shoe fetishist..and on and on…
Nothing is to say that this is THE solution, anyway.
Of course, we could just have something like “Burn in Hell, you Kiddie-(blanked out by body)”
I dunno. This is, bar none, the toughest cover I’ve ever seen. A time-traveling, time-looping Perv.
Sheesh.
A much better version of this is what I envisioned…
https://i.imgur.com/EFiH8L6.jpg
Nice idea, but probably too subtle. For one thing, there is no real suggestion as to _why_ the silhouetted people are apparently accusatory and angry with the teacher. I think that needs to be more explicit: a cover is really no place for subtlety—a potential reader may give it only glance and it has to convey its message in that split second. And I think there is probably too much ambiguity in just what those silhouettes are: drawings on the blackboard?
I think that RK may have misunderstood slightly my objection to using words. Filling the blackboard with words and phrases that need to be read might be problematical on several counts, but having a single large word or short phrase might certainly be workable. RK’s suggestion https://i.ibb.co/8Dx4Gsm/HCWF-Further-Revision.png is in the right direction—I would make absolutely certain, though, that the added writing look like an adult had written it. Hitch’s suggestion of reducing this to one succinct, angry phrase—with part of the word wiped away—smeared by someone’s hand perhaps—would be very much to the point.
(By the way, maybe instead of “I luv U teecher” have “Teecher luvs me”—that reverses the direction of affection. Even though it might violate my “keep it simple” rule, perhaps “Mr. Smith luvs me”…with a prominent “Mr. Smith” name plate sitting on the desk.)
Can we go back to Revenge of the Exiled now?
I agree that text and more text (as the Lousy Book Covers tag refers to it) is a massive violation of the old literary “show, don’t tell” rule (which applies even more to the book’s cover than to its contents). The reason both the drawing and the writing are so crude is that I used the computer’s mouse. If neater handwriting is necessary, I could always write something on a piece of paper and then scan it in and use my image editor to blend it into the cover draft; as you point out, however, more writing on the chalkboard is hardly necessary and might actually be counterproductive.
In fact, I didn’t seriously mean for that revision to be used; it was just my example of a plausible response to the drawing and love note that would avoid engaging in so much artistic license and salty language. As stated, I think the stick-figures drawing is already pretty effective all by itself, with the love note just helping clarify the little girl is supposed to be the one who drew it. Your variant on the note sounds interesting, though in my opinion either “direction of affection” in the note works just fine with the drawing, and neither is at all effective without it. (Fun fact: I got the idea for the drawing from this scene in the Spanish short film Elefantes Sobre Una Telaraña (2009); you’ll notice it never shows what exactly that girl was writing under her drawing, and doesn’t need to.)
Pictures being worth a thousand words, I suppose we could always add another drawing or two to the chalkboard. As with too much writing earning the cover a text and more text tag, though, too many drawings might leave the cover without any clear focal point and earn it a busybusybusy tag on Lousy Book Covers. So basically, let’s try not to overdo the chalkboard graffiti.
In my experience, “kiddy fiddler” is a fairly well known pejorative on the web and the streets. As I understand it, both “fiddler” and “diddler” denote a molester/pervert, but “fiddler” connotes one who “fiddles” with his fingers and/or naughty parts, while “diddler” connotes one who typically uses his tongue for similarly perverted purposes.
Really? YICK. Man, I learn something new every day, but I could have gone the rest of my life without knowing that.
But, thanks, RK, for the clarification. I genuinely thought it was diddler only. Bleeack.
This has been another edition of… The More You Wish You Didn’t Know™.
By these definitions, my protagonist is a fiddler and not a diddler, then. One of his personality quirks is that, for all his perversions, he openly despises all oral and anal sexual activities and wants nothing to do with any of them. That being a trait he shares with Humbert Humbert from Lolita, I guess readers could think of that as my homage to Vladimir Nabokov and his (in)famous novel.
One of my books has a dying fetus on the cover, remember? I’m merely exploring where the line might be.
Indeed, that such imagery passes muster with the censors is quite instructive as to what kind of covers books (and music albums) are permitted and are not permitted (except by a kind of grandfather clause) to display to the public.
Gotta love the Scorpions
I’ll ask this again: does anybody have any advice on how to distress the text on this cover? I have a preliminary mock-up of the cover showing where everything is supposed to go, but the title and byline clearly do need some kind of enhancement and nobody liked my previous attempt at that. Anybody have any ideas how to enhance the title and byline?
Did you see my mockup with the doll? (https://i.imgur.com/8Xm3ugF.jpg) That began as plain white text and I added the texture and drop shadows (although I should have textured first and then drop shadowed.) Since I use layers for each element, when I added noise to the title it only applied it to the letters and not the empty background. I then tweaked it with color and blur enhancements.
Another way is to apply a texture to a layer below the text and then make the text transparent (or translucent) (https://i.imgur.com/E6MMseN.jpg).
You can also make the title a 3D element and texture it before rendering, as I did with the question mark on the cover of Identity (https://i.imgur.com/fWc42Q0.png)
By “how to distress” I meant “in what style to distress” it. I already know how to do layers and drop shadows, though 3D elements would be trickier for my image editors. Layering is how I got the distressing for the posted cover: found a nice big image of a dried-up lake bed in a desert, whipped up the plain titles, and then layered them over the desert image; the only problem was that nobody liked that.
Layering is also how I made this flame-themed mock-up just now. So, how does this stylization grab you?
I think we have a disconnect, in language and usage here. What you’re doing is creating a background of whatever type and then putting what are effectively cut-out letters OVER it. I can’t speak for BL, but my guys and gals do their distressing OVER the text, not behind it. To me, you’re using colored backgrounds, rather than really distressing or grunging the font. If that makes sense?
Maybe something more shattered and splattered like this, then?
Asking the question in need of answering is always helpful. I’m also sure Hitch’s “guys and gals” don’t limit themselves to one technique. I listed three in my previous post: the first distressing the text directly, the second using an inverse mask, and the third using 3D graphics.
Is this what you’re after (concept, not specific elements)?
https://i.imgur.com/WqdGwih.jpg
You can also rasterize the text and distress it by hand in Photoshop (or some other drawing/painting software).
Imma gonna leave you designy types to your font distressing. I have to confess some horrible sin here–I use pre-distressed fonts and then tweak repeated letters, ever-so-slightly, to make them a bit different than each other. I know, I know, this will get me banned fersure!
Yes, that “cracked dried mud” effect was more or less what I intended with the titles initially, though with slightly brighter earth tones to make the dried mud look absolutely parched. As I say, though, most of the critics didn’t seem to think too highly of that concept anyway. Maybe that reception had something to do with how the text was overlaid on the burning silhouette of a little girl.
At present, since there’s nothing burning in the scenery in these drafts anymore, I’m thinking the title and byline ought to have a more infernal theme to them, like showing hot rocks or lava or something burning hot. Here’s a “lava titles” draft I did just recently.
Not bad, though your byline’s a little difficult to read in the thumbnail (which is how most of your prospective readers will first encounter your cover).
https://i.imgur.com/tOamIBM.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/pa5ICQe.jpg