The author says:
Genre: Dystopian, Adventure, Satire
All of humanity disappeared in the blink of an eye. With constructions and monuments gradually losing place to nature, a mixture of domestic and wild animals fight for survival in a strange, new environment. A group of animals in central Brazil, with the lead of the mutt Tobi, tries to discover what happened to their old masters. Will it be possible to even survive to find those answers?
Target Audience: Distopy readers, Young Adults/Adults, readers of fictions that relies on contemporary issues and thoughts.
Nathan says:
The description sound intriguing. Unfortunately, none of that intrigue shows up in the cover. At best, a potential reader would guess that there’s something to do with animals in this novel, but your target readers will be more attracted to the other books they see that more firmly proclaim, “This book is for you!”
Using the “print” motif, my idea would be to have human tracks (footprints and tire tracks, for instance) with animal prints criss-crossing and covering them. But even that would have to contain some of the hallmarks of dystopian book covers, like textures and a distressed typeface. You’d have to invest to get that kind of custom cover, naturally, but it would definitely increase the potential sales.
Other ideas?
Well…
What I got from the cover sure wasn’t what I expected from the description!
I think that the only real thing to do here is to back up to the starting gate and rethink this entire cover from scratch. This cover simply does not work on any level for the book described.
There is not one iota of a suggestion of dystopia, a future setting, the mysterious disappearance of humanity, domestic and wild animals fighting for dominance, a Brazilian setting…etc. etc.
(Even at that, it is over-designed with the animal silhouettes and art superimposed over the title.)
And what is “distopy”?
I don’t get any impression of fighting for survival. Looks like a cute book about pets, even something informative or a picture book. There is some cool art out there about decaying, overgrown dystopian cities and that kind of thing. So before looking at the design and the page, get more options, look at the art and photos teenagers like, come up with a more interesting title, make it less for little kids and more for teenagers. Your description, on the other hand, sounds interesting and for the right age group.
And another vote for, “got nuthin’ ‘dystopy’ from this cover,” here. (Whatever, “dystopy” is; it appears, on the part of a few people, to get cute with the spelling of dystopia, to dystopya, and from thence to dystopy. sigh.)
I agree, this looks like a happy-happy joy-joy book. Something like the movie about all the animals that find their way home, after being lost 2500 miles from their houses, or the like. There’s nothing here that says fear, danger, dystopia, fighting for survival…nothing.
And I’m with Nathan and Ron on the silhouettes inside the pawprints. It’s not understandable at thumbnail size, and let’s face it, today, thumbnails are simply everything.
Sorry, but…as cute as this might be, if it is, it’s a cover for a different book, IMHO. Not the book that’s been described here.
Yeah, no… I’m not really seeing any hint of the stuff in the pitch on the cover. Even assuming one would notice the silhouettes of the animals in those paw prints at thumbnail size (which is highly unlikely), my guess would have been that this was some cutesy book of LOLCats-style memes involving a variety of domesticated animals. Your story’s biggest themes of humans gone missing, our former dwellings overgrown, and our animals left to fend for themselves are nowhere to be seen.
For best results, I’d suggest you go with Joey’s recommendation: there is indeed a lot of cool art out there showing what some of our cities (in particular) would look like in short order if we weren’t around to maintain them. If you’re not too picky about making the overgrown dwellings in question look specifically like they’re in Brazil, you can probably acquire one of those pictures for your cover (so long as the picture doesn’t include any other city’s recognizably famous features, such as the Space Needle in Seattle or the Empire State Building from New York City or the like) relatively cheaply. If you do want something more specific to Brazil (like Brasilia or Sao Paulo or Rio De Janeiro or some such), for a little more money, you can probably find an artist on DeviantArt.com to make up a picture of something like that for you.
Get the artist to throw in some shots of your story’s protagonist animals crawling among the ruins (or shop them in yourself if you know how; I can’t emphasize the last part of that phrase strongly enough), and you’re good to go for a cover image. While I don’t know whether there’s anything “distopy” (a better term than “distopian-ish” I guess) about that, this should suffice to establish that humanity is gone, has been gone for quite some time, and the animals are on their own; which are the only plot points your prospective readers need to see there. For other details such as whether these animals are anthropomorphic (e.g. capable of speaking to each other like the ones in Felidae or Watership Down or Plague Dogs or the like) or not, those readers can check out the “look in the book” feature virtually all mainstream bookseller sites have these days. Once you’ve got a decent image, then we can discuss what kind of lettering to use for your title and byline (and tagline, if necessary).
And to add to what RK suggested, about custom art–please, please, please make sure that you tell the artist that you need “dead space” on the artwork in which you will put the title, subtitle/tagline, byline and all that. I cannot tell you how many times I see darling art, or fantastic imagery, and the cover is utterly ruined because there was zero space allotted for that pesky text. 😉
Let me underscore what Hitch just said. It is something I harp on in my book cover blog: leaving space for text when doing a cover illustration. A professional should be expected to do this…but it sure wouldn’t hurt to take Hitch’s advice and include a gentle reminder. I, for one, would not take the least offense. Besides, it really does help the illustrator to know what the title of the book is and more or less how much space to allow for it.
(One reason, I think, that one sees so many great illustrations on covers with the titles jammed into the margins and corners is that an author will simply pick an illustration they really like out of a catalog…when the art itself may never have been intended for use on a cover.)
Like the others say, I’m afraid this cover is in entirely the wrong ballpark for the book you describe. It looks like a light non-fiction book, a pet memoir or guide.
Though it’s not the business of this forum I’ve also got to say I think you’ve got a title that is going to pull in the wrong direction however good your cover gets. The word ‘paws’ just works against anything serious. It’s cute, hardly appropriate for a survival adventure.
But back to the cover, you haven’t communicated anything of the actual hook of your story, or its genre or vibe. You’ve only got across that it’s about animals in some way.
On the bright side, you have a strong hook and a strong sense of audience.
The most important thing you can do is check out the covers of other books in the same area as yours. You’ll pretty soon see that this is nowhere near the direction taken with other books of the same type.
If you go to Amazon and narrow down the categories Books/Science Fiction/Dystopia you’re going to get quite a lot of books which aren’t applicable. For a while recently, ‘dystopia’ became a byword for a setting where society has been rebuilt around some premise and needs to be taken down by a feisty teen heroine and that’s still what makes up a lot of the listings.
That sub-genre obviously doesn’t speak to your book, you’re in the immediate post-apocalypse with a survival narrative. But dig through and you’ll find those that are more relevant. E.g. the ‘Gone’ books whose premise is all the adults disappearing
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51UulL4a7vL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
Or The 5th Wave
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51KH7n7tOlL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
Etc. So based on these kinds of covers you need to be looking for atmospheric digital illustration and impactful typography for the title. You want a cover which clearly signals the post-apocalyptic/dystopian nature of the setting, and because your animal protagonists are the USP of your particular book you certainly want to include that note.
So here’s a couple of rough examples of the kinds of imagery, layout and font I’d be thinking of. You see the post-apocalypic scene firs and the detail of the animal second. https://www.kathrynrosamiller.com/post/cover-advice-paws-and-stones
Font-wise you probably want something a little grungy or hand-made for the genre and the sense of the ‘primativeness’ of the protagonists.
What Mies van der Rohe said about architecture applies equally well to book cover design: “Less is more.”