The author says:
I’m working to brand this series and would like feedback on these design choices before I extend the banner concept to the rest of the series. Friendships serve as a cornerstone to a rich life. Each of these twenty-four accomplished authors shares authentic stories that consider the meaning of life affirming, sometimes life saving or gut wrenching, and fun realities of investing in each other: Think chicken soup with adult beverages.
Nathan says:
By “banner concept,” you mean the diagonal stripe of handwriting? I have no problem with that. I can offer some other tweaks, though.
- Both the blurb from Midwest Book Review and the medallion from The International Review of Books are extraneous. Readers only care about accolades from sources they’ve heard of, and I think (and hope) that readers are getting tired of awards proudly displayed that don’t really mean anything to them. Save both of those for the back cover or Amazon description. (Yes, that means your top half is empty. I’ll trust you to come up with something for that.)
- My inclination is to have the title in a less formal script font. I think of friendship as something casual and intimate and sometimes messy; a more casual handwritten font would work better for that than something you’d see on a wedding announcement. (Not as casual as the background handwriting, though, as that’s hard to read.) Of course, my best friends aren’t representative samples of the population, so I’ll let the commenters hash this one out.
Other comments?
The cover is a nice idea but it needs more focus. There is really nothing that dominates: it’s all kind of piecemeal. Probably the main thing that would fix this would be to make the shoes significantly larger.
The diagonal strip with the writing doesn’t come off too well. Partly because it’s not particularly evident that it is writing and partly because the strip would look much better if it appeared to be a piece of torn paper rather than something seen through a hole torn in the blue area.
And Nathan is quite right in suggesting that a more handwriting-like typeface be used. I would also close up the line spacing on the tagline, which could also be a little larger and a little bolder. I do not know why “companionship” is italicized and in a different color.
Eliminating the blurb and medallion would also go a long way toward avoiding the random look of the cover.
My challenge with this cover is that if I try the Miller Test (yes, indeedy, named after our esteemed CC.Com commenter, Ron Miller), and change out “Friends” for some random word in Martian, as in “Ixpligitz,” I have no way of knowing what on earth this cover is telling me, without reading the tagline. Is it Literary Fiction? Is it a novel about some friends? Is it…? (The Miller Test tells you to imagine that all the text on the cover is in a language that you don’t speak; do you know, even unable to read the text, what genre or area of interest the book speaks to and whether or not it’s “right” for that genre/area?)
And there it is. I don’t know to whom this cover would appeal, because it’s not saying anything to me, other than, it’s mostly nicely composed; it’s decently done, from a professional, graphics-manipulation standpoint, but that’s about it.
Even when I do read the tagline–voices on the gift of companionship–I’m not really clear about what’s on offer here.
So…my take is, it’s not strong enough. I don’t have enough wonder or interest to click on it, out of idle curiosity (and don’t rely on that for clicks; the average person won’t), or because I think it’s “for me” as reading material–simply because I cannot tell. Clickability is the most-important thing; not if people “like” the cover, but if they would click on it, if it came up in a search, or on their FB page, etc. That’s the real test of a cover, before anything else and I don’t think this has Clickability.
Other than the comments already made, I would add that the color scheme combined with the strip of paper kind of makes this look like a patriotic book at first glance. I actually thought the writing was going to be a strip of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. There’s nothing wrong with a patriotic color scheme, but it may cause readers to expect a certain feel or angle to the essays, so it might be better to do something less evocative of red/white/blue.
Another thing to consider is that for English readers, the eye more naturally follows the diagonal from the upper left corner to the lower right. Your cover bucks this trend with a strong reverse diagonal. This causes the eye to instead follow the white paper strip and title right off the right side of the cover. There is nothing to draw the eye back in. Ideally, you want a cover design that causes the eye to bounce around to the main elements.
A minor note, the heart shoelace is lost against the white strip. Perhaps try reversing the direction of the white strip (if you keep it at all,) and moving the shoes up so the colored part is against the white, but the shoelace heart is against the blue?
I agree with others that the title font isn’t the best, but there seem to be too many fonts and styles in the cover over all. “Companionship” does not need to be italicized, for example. The subtitle does not really feel like part of the title.
I didn’t even notice the heart shape until it was pointed out to me.
Ditto. No idea it was there AT ALL.
THAT should be the image that dominates the cover.
I agree about taking off the pull-quote. For me it’s not that the source doesn’t sound impressive enough (I could convince myself I’ve heard of the Midwest Book Review!) but that it’s a pretty lukewarm-sounding endorsement. Mostly it’s just articulating what the book is about, and you already have a tagline better placed to do that.
And I definitely agree about the award roundel. It takes away more than it adds.
With regards to the banner concept being consistent across the series, I’m not wholly sure that’s an advantage. You’ll want some cover elements to remain locked in place across any collection this part of. E.g. you’ll want your byline in the same place and style on every cover.
But I think making books like this look too matchy makes them look thoughtless and churned-out, undermining the vibe which is most important to their appeal.
So I wouldn’t cling too hard to the banner concept, especially as its dominance is making it difficult for this cover to do anything of its own.
There’s nothing absolutely wrong with the actual cover design you’ve got – but there’s nothing exactly right about it either.
For example, the font. It’s… fine. It doesn’t feel wholly inappropriate to the subject or tone, but neither does it feel like it’s saying anything particularly helpful as a choice.
None of the elements speak to each other. The graphic of the two sneakers with the tied shoelaces speaks of something youthful and innocent but that’s not picked up in the font choices or handwriting strip.
As this cover has clearly been created with a good aptitude for the design tools and skills needed, I’d say you’re well placed to do something a lot better. You’ve shown you can get it looking neat and with a professional finish, but the basic ideas in play aren’t quite there yet!
I also meant to say – collections of essay usually put a selection of the authors’ names on the front. Not all necessarily, but a few.
So the tagline might be revised to something like, “Stories on the value of friendship from authors including…”.
Your contributors might or might not be well known and a selling point, but either way it clues people in that they’re looking at a collection, and it doesn’t hurt to look proud of the contributors.
I had overlooked the part of the description that said that the book was a compilation of essays by “twenty-four accomplished authors.” If indeed any of these names would be at all recognizable, it would be a very good idea to include them on the cover. I have created the covers for a large number of anthologies and that is exactly what has been done on all of them. https://www.baen.com/pub/media/catalog/product/9/7/9781625791382-lg.jpg
The general format looks professional to me – you have all the right words in the right places, as well as awards, the little star badge that always gets put in best-selling books, etc. My major criticism on that aspect is that “Voices on the gift of companionship” has too much spacing, as someone else mentioned, and the typeface for “Friends” looks unprofessional.
I believe Midwest Book Review is a paid review, as is International Review of Books, which means you can’t use it on Amazon. Though your potential buyers won’t necessarily know that, I would put it on the back cover. That star speaks of a quality that the cover design doesn’t necessarily reflect, though it could be improved.
MBR is not, in fact, a paid review. Not in the Amazon definition of that type of service. At least, not the last time I checked. They did paperback reviews for free.
What did happen to them, though, is that they had an increasing level of requests, for e-book reviews. The MBR reviewer pool–like many, mind you, of similarly legitimate reviewing and assessing entities–resells the paperbacks that they receive. In other words, the reviewer gets both the pleasure (hopefully) of reading the book without paying for it and the nominal financial bonus of reselling the now-used book once the review is written.
(Disclosure: I’ve been a paid commercial book reviewer, in the past, in the early 90’s. While I never resold books, most of the other unpaid reviewers did. It was part of how they justified investing that much time in being unpaid reviewers, effectively, for online magazines and the like. I’d receive boxes of books, every week; I could never read them all. I certainly wouldn’t have made enough to make it a full-time business, but for someone stuck at home, with small children, let’s say, or illness, I can see how it could add up over time.)
With eBooks, the MBR reviewers lost that financial benefit and thus, they were declining the opportunity to review eBooks. MBR instituted the eBook fee, to offset that loss. That’s what the owner of MBR told me some years back.
I’ve never heard of an MBR review being rejected or pulled by Amazon, because it doesn’t go in the CUSTOMER review lane. Talking about paid reviews and rejection is conflating two different areas and paid reviews are absolutely not prohibited by Amazon for either the cover art or the Editorial Reviews. If Amazon did that, it would put MOST “editorial review” entities out of business.
Hey thank you for posting this, I did not know this at all. I had heard some cases where authors got MBR reviews rejected, but it may have been for other reasons. That makes a lot of sense about selling paperbacks – honestly it’s a lot better to resell them than to rip the covers off, as happens all too often in bookstores.
I see this trend in newspapers as well. Online news seems to be moving more towards paid subscriptions or donations, where before it was always free.
You’re welcome. While I’m not a self-published author, my line of work is largely in self-publishing, and I had an opportunity to speak with and refer my customers to, MBR, ages ago. Seriously, must have been…I dunno, 2013-2014, when I had that discussion? Anyway…glad to be of service.