The author says:
Tatum Rolf knew there were things about her life that just weren’t right. It wasn’t right living in the human world as a wolf shifter. It wasn’t right to be the female head of a male household. And it certainly wasn’t right that she was taller than most of her male peers. Sure, she could provide protection, education, and a livelihood for her two brothers and great-grandfather, but she couldn’t offer them a traditional shifter life. The only solution? Find a pack that would accept them all. And when the entire shifter race is threatened, she’ll need to use all her strength and wiles to ensure their survival and prove to the male-dominated world just how important she is.
Nathan says:
I appreciate the efforts to harmonize the individually sourced figures into a coherent image. I think there are still spots where the different light sources are jarring — the left male figure’s face is a lot brighter than the others, and the right male figure’s right arm is so bright that it undermines the foreground female figure’s arm and gun, which is a more important detail.
By biggest complaint, though, is that in the thumbnail, all wolfish details to the cover are lost. Simply making the foreground brighter for contrast would go a long way.
Other comments?
Pretty much a catalog of sourced images. As Nathan said, a brave effort to make everything come together…but it falls short.
One thing that keeps everything from gelling are the mismatched light sources. They are not only coming from every direction, they are different for every figure. One thing that would go a long way toward making everything work together would be to have a fill light that spills onto everything consistently. For instance, there is blue illumination everywhere in the background…but it seems to be having no affect on anything other than the foreground wolf. Getting some of that blue into the figures—into their shaded areas or the areas opposite the main illumination in particular—would go a long way into integrating them into the cover.
Here is an example of what I mean: http://black-cat-studios.com/photocovers/Untitled_1/imag012.jpg When I added the figure to the background, I made sure to add the background illumination to the girl. This went a long way toward making the figure and the background appear to be one image.
It would help a lot to tone down the saturation in the figures: that sun-drenched color is a major contributor to the effect of the cover looking pieced together: Everything is moonlit but the humans.
The cover would be very much improved if there was a more obvious connection between the humans (who are doing nothing other than standing there) and the wolves—especially between the female character and the wolves. There is really nothing to suggest the actual nature of her relationship with the animals or the theme of the book.
There is also too much going on: three human figures, three wolves, a waterfall, trees, a moon and whatever that effect in the sky is. And then, just to ice the cake, sparklies on the title and a decorative device above the author’s name. The cover could very much benefit from being simplified.
I think this is a case where familiarity with the tropes of the genre is a necessity. The cover seems to be a shifter romance, in which case the figures don’t need to be interacting with each other: it’s coded as an M/F/M romance with wolf shifters and a female alpha.
However, if it’s not a shifter romance and is instead urban fantasy, then I think your criticisms are on the nose.
I dunno, I find a variety of signals here–what you refer to as coding, Augusta. For example, they’re shifters, but they’re wearing military-style camo, and she’s packing heat (in a location, btw, where 99% of women would never carry it, but…whatever; the geometry of the female form doesn’t lend itself to that position without it being unduly clunky). That implies some sort of military or paramilitary environment. But then…
She’s got her midriff exposed and yes, the male shifters are displaying all their presumed goodies, too–which, yes, seems to say the usual erotica stuff, shifter-multi-whatever. The visual is nothing like the description, which talks about brothers, unless that’s a euphemism, but then it also mentions grandfather, which presumably isn’t. That, to me, is highly confusing–is she doing these two, or not? If not, if they are her “kin,” then the cover is suggesting something very different.
Then you have what I call “the usuals,” the moon, the wolves…I think you have a basket of design options here and paring it down might serve this cover better. It’s very far outside of my usual reading milieu, so I’m not that familiar with Shifter “romance” and what’s typical for it. I do read urban paranormal fantasy and the like, but this particular arena, the so-called romance or romantica isn’t my bag. Not sure if this is right for that?
The signals are quite clear to me: this cover is saying it’s an action-adventure wolf shifter menage romance with a female alpha. (Whether that’s what the book actually is, I don’t know.)
The signals you absolutely want to put on the cover of such a book, if they apply to this book, and which are not clearly indicated in the title, are:
1) menage and the form it’s in, because people looking only for M/F will get angry and leave one-star reviews if they feel they were tricked into reading menage
2) shifter animal, because readers go looking for specific animal types
3) sub-genre–is it sweet, steamy, action, rom-com, alien, protector, etc.
4) If you can shove any more trope signals in there, awesome: firefighter, military, secret baby, huddling in a cabin for warmth, team, etc.
Self-pubbed category romance is ALL ABOUT and completely focused on the tropes: you want to call them out in the description and title as well as the cover.
Looking for rough mercenary alien invasion post-apocalyptic team romance? Gotcha covered.
Alien abduction cyborg gladiator romance? Boom.
Firefighting pegasus shifter team action rom-com with a secret baby? Here ya go. Disclaimer: I did that cover…and man, getting that baby and the helmet to merge in was a hell of a deal [the helmet originally held a puppy]. Still not happy with it, but the author’s a friend and I know her sales: it did not hurt them one bit. We pretty much allow the overall ridiculousness of the concept and design to stand for “rom-com.”
Protective cave bear shifter action team rom-com with FLYING KITTENS? Need you ask? I did this one also–“Zoe Chant” has several authors under it and I do about a third of the covers–and Chant readers respond well to this over-the-top ridiculousness. If you read the description, you can see the tropes in more detail: it’s not just a protective guy, he’s a supersoldier! An ex-Marine! A single father!
In all honesty, “over-the-top” and “ridiculous” are hallmarks of this genre. The authors and the readers laugh at it together–I host the Zoe Chant Facebook group and see how the readers respond to this sort of thing. We also sometimes test covers via the group–putting them up and seeing which ones make the readers talk about it more. (And also to check that we haven’t got a model who’s looking too young! Zoe Chant readers are not into baby-faced guys!)
We’ve also found that Facebook ads with an incongruous image make for more comments, which means that the Facebook algorithm pushes it out to more people, and it ends up with more clicks and more books sold.
I suspect something of the sort may also be going on with book covers. Certainly, everyone finds the photobombing animals hilarious. T.S. Joyce has been one of the top-selling authors for years and leans into ridiculous. Terry Bolryder, another of the top sellers, also crams lots of elements into the covers and if you know the genre, you can tell at a glance that the multiple dragons surrounding the woman, the saturated colors, and the surrounding arch signals reverse harem portal fantasy dragon shifter romance.
In short: it’s down to knowing the genre and knowing the tropes within that genre.
“Reverse harem portal fantasy dragon shifter romance.”
Well…you learn something new every day. If anyone had ever said that aloud to me, I’d have laughed. I admit to being boggled, but I guess…whatever floats your boat.
I do a lot of shifter romance covers, which means that I look at a lot of shifter romance covers on Amazon, and I can tell you that this is way better than 99% of them, and any changes to the cover will amount to tweaks. If it were me, I’d fuss over the light direction issue that Nathan and Ron point out, but there’s lots of designers who don’t bother. (although that separates the pros from the amateurs!)
I don’t even think there’s too many elements on the cover, because they’re all carefully placed in a hierarchy of size and emphasis. Just be aware that most of those details are invisible at thumbnail size. The wolves could be more prominent, to catch the eye of readers looking for wolf shifters, but the “Change” in the title certainly codes this as a shifter romance.
You could throw it up on Amazon as-is and be totally fine.
However…*is* this a shifter romance or is it urban fantasy? The cover codes it as an M/F/M shifter romance, but the description doesn’t even mention who the heroes are. If I go by the characters in the description, then the cover portrays the heroine and her two sexy brothers, giving it incest-y vibes, which makes it both targeted at a very specific audience and a no-go for Amazon.
If it’s a shifter romance, I’d say it’s time to stop fussing over the cover and time to start fussing over the description. If it’s not a romance, then you need to re-think the cover from the start, to place it more solidly in the urban fantasy vein.
The woman has a light coming from above and a little to the left. The left male has light coming from the far right, and the right male figure has it coming from the camera and looks like a little to the right. For me, the blue light on that wolf in front looks out of place, and super exaggerated. The humans figures only have that blue light like a vague halo coming from behind. So for me, I think that´s why the cover looks so cut and paste to me. Maybe if the background wasn´t so busy, the thumbnail would be easier to see.
For the content, though, the image fits the description well and plenty of eye candy.
Whether or not the cover fits the description is irrelevant—it’s putting the cart before the horse. The description should fit the cover. You shouldn’t have to read a description of a book for the cover to make sense. Worse, the cover shouldn’t lead you to expect one sort of book and have the description tell you it’s something else.
And if, based on the cover imagery, the genre or theme of the book is ambiguous—for instance, whether it is “shifter fiction” or urban fantasy or something else entirely—then the focus needs to be tightened. The potential reader needs to be able to tell at first glance.
Finally, while it is all well and good to cater to a specific audience who will recognize particular visual tropes, you don’t want to go so far that you mystify or even alienate potential readers who may be entirely new to a genre.
A cover should not be a puzzle for a potential reader to figure out nor should it depend on a blurb or description. It needs to convey the nature, theme or idea of the book with immediacy.
The cover looks generally right for certain kinds of werewolf-style fiction in its thumbnail, but up close, the details are really all over the place. The lighting on the characters, as others have already mentioned, comes from numerous directions; and I’ll add that the lighting on the wolves looks a lot like the old blue-screen lines one typically saw on characters in clumsily layered movie footage back in the 1980s. In short, you’ve cut and pasted a lot of the right kind of characters into the right positions for your cover, but that they’ve been cut and pasted (which is a big no-no on professionally done covers) is glaringly obvious.
Were the characters properly drawn or photographed to have consistent lighting, the other problem I see is that all the humans appearing on the cover are rather scantily clad, suggesting this is somewhat erotic fiction. Yet your description indicates those two stripped-to-the-waist beefcakes there behind the gal in a skintight midriff-bared camouflage suit to be her brothers; which either makes this incestuous erotica (which most sales sites outside of Smashwords refuse to sell) or means the book’s not erotica and probably ought to be advertised as urban fiction instead. Of course, nobody’s saying characters in urban fiction can’t be sexy or have a love life worth mentioning, just that you shouldn’t be advertising their sex appeal unless that’s the main subject of their story.
If this is erotica (in an urban fantasy setting; which has been done plenty of times before, so nobody’s going to complain about the genre mixing), then fine: beefcake and bared midriffs will serve nicely. If this is principally urban fantasy, however, then the cover’s false advertising. A cover for an urban fantasy ought to show the lycanthropes either mostly or fully in their lupine forms to emphasize that the book’s mainly about their political and social life as part of a pack of wolves.
In short, pick your genre and stick with it.
I think that Mies van der Rohe’s advice to architects applies equally well to book design: Less is more.
Although this might come close to beating this poor cover to death, it does underscore a couple of larger points that might be generally useful to anyone attempting a cover.
1. If there are multiple visual elements in a cover they should relate or interact with one another. They should not be simply stacked together like cans on a pantry shelf. There are many ways to make the different visual elements work together as a unit. Characters could be aware of one another, for instance. Eyelines could match, perhaps, or one character may be touching another. If they are close together, they can cast shadows or reflect colors onto one another…or have other objects in the scene cast shadows on them. Likewise, characters can cast shadows on objects or the landscape around them. Light sources can be major contributors toward unifying a picture. For instance, a street lamp can be casting the same color light from the same direction onto two different characters. This sort of thing melds everything together into the same world.
2. While it is all well and good to focus on the experienced reader of a series or specific genre I have always thought it a mistake to do so to the extent of not attracting or even alienating new readers. A good friend of mine (and the only author I work with directly) is strongly disposed toward wanting her cover art geared toward her existing readers. That is, those fans who are already deeply familiar with her work. This is something I am perpetually having to talk her out of. I am very much of the opinion that a cover should not require prior knowledge of the book in order to be appreciated or understood. By making a cover that is explicable only to those in the know, she is taking the chance of not attracting readers new to her books. We always try to find a middle ground, where the cover has elements that are meaningful to the initiated while at the same time not being a complete mystery to a potential new reader.
There is an example of this sort of thinking that I have quoted many times in the past. The cover of the book was a beautiful image of a rustic stone bridge over a pellucid country stream in a lovely wooded setting. It was the most pastoral thing you could possibly imagine—perfect for, say, a travelogue of rural England. But I knew the book was supposed to be a rousing adventure of high fantasy, so I asked the author what in the world he was thinking when he designed his cover. “Well,” he replied, “one of the main characters is a troll. That’s the bridge he lives under.”
Aside from the backwards thinking that requires reading the book first before the cover makes sense, perhaps there is an entire sub-genre of fantasy called “Trollfic” and its fans would immediately recognize the bridge for what it represented…but that leaves out every potential reader who might be new to the game.