The author says:
Sara Glen just received wonderful news from her at home DNA testing kit. At least that is what the company personally called to tell her. An emerging disease is robbing children of their memories leaving them shadows of their former selves. She has the key to curing the horrible disease before it becomes a plague but doing so will end her life.
Nathan says:
The synopsis sounds like a medical thriller; the cover seems more like SF-flavored lit fic. I don’t know which one to believe.
On a pure design note, the type is completely unreadable against that background in thumbnail, and doesn’t really please the eye in full size; you have plenty of contrast in the hues used, but the value (light and dark) is so close that the eye rebels.
Other comments?
It really comes close…
But the choice of color for the title and minuscule size of the other text shoot it down.
I thinks it’s a miss. The coloring isn’t right for a sci-fi thriller type of novel. Combined with the romantic slightly old fashioned looking woman it says romance more than anything else. I’m not sold on the quality of the woman’s image either.
Maybe try making the entire thing black and white with red title text, white subtitle and black author name.
I be tempted to put a DNA strand in there somewhere too…lol
Ooh interesting. I should start by praising the craftsmanship. This is slick graphic work and you have something that looks a lot like it;s getting towards a high-end literary cover. The problem is that is looks like a high-end literary cover published more or less exactly 6 years ago!
You see the design tropes used here are all a bit 2015. Here’s a Casual Optimist blog post about the then-popular trend of rotating photos by 90 degrees http://www.casualoptimist.com/blog/2015/05/26/today-in-micro-trends-rotate-90/. And here’s a couple of examples of another popular trend from the same year – blowing up vintage illustrations to the point you could see the halftone printing and overlaying or counterpointing them with bright modern colour: https://static.wixstatic.com/media/61b1ee_27035daaa77f41d58faa85396bd14324~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_1248,h_464,al_c,q_90/61b1ee_27035daaa77f41d58faa85396bd14324~mv2.webp
The latter isn’t exactly what we see in this design, and I’m ruling out this technique altogether.
But there are issues beyond the tropes just being outmoded. The most important is that the cover doesn’t actually do the job design is there to do – communicate anything about your book.
It’s hard to be sure by the synopsis exactly where your book sits in terms of genre and audience. Like Nathan says, it sounds like it could be more ‘medical thriller’ or more ‘near-future SF’. By your current cover choices I’d make a stab at it being more a literary novel that includes some such genre notes a la Murakami or David Mitchell.
It’s true that book covers at the more literary end of things pull further and further away from being literal in its imagery. They affect a kind of casualness about selling themselves.
But they do still signal their broad setting and/or topic, and they do get across an atmosphere and tension. They use metaphor and allusion a lot to get across a broad feeling or sense of topic or theme.
Your imagery doesn’t speak to the content you describe at all. The use of a vintage image implies a historical setting or at least some theming to do with history but that doesn’t seem to be the case for the text at all. There’s nothing at all that hints at the actual major ideas (according to your synopsis, medicine, dilemma, pandemic, near future, memory, realistic apocalypse). It’s possible that the image you’ve chosen makes sense once one has read the book but of course book covers needs to work upon people that haven’t.
I wouldn’t even be quite be confident that the cover belonged to a novel. If I had to make a guess at content given only the cover with subtitle/tagline eliminated my best guess might be for a non-fiction history book about some past epidemic.
I’m afraid this will need a rethink to get to a cover that actully speaks to the right readers.
Here are some covers that are worth checking out for some inspiration, that either have similarities of content or nail the ‘literary SF’ vibe:
https://static.wixstatic.com/media/61b1ee_1cfdc146428848ceb019dccd8af56ee4~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_1248,h_945,al_c,q_90/61b1ee_1cfdc146428848ceb019dccd8af56ee4~mv2.webp
I do want to add one thing to Kata’s as-usual, excellent analysis of this cover and that’s this:
We all talk about LitFic, all the time. We say that LitFic has covers that are “about nothing” that don’t try to sell themselves, etc.
And you know what? That’s freaking great, if you’re Ta-Nehisi Coates. Or Annie Lamotte, or any of that crowd. I mean, for a self-published author, isn’t that The True Death, however? It’s not hard enough, getting a self-published book done, out the door, ready for print, in ebook, etc. but you also have to shoot yourself in the selling foot, so as not to be (GASP!) mistaken for something other than LitFic? To be (Gods Forfend!) down in the Literati Gutter of genre fiction?
I’m all for LitFic looking like LitFic–when it has a big publisher behind it, pushing it. Sending out 500 review copies to important bloggers, mag critics, newspaper critics, etc. With the promotions girls pushing it, the publicist, rounding up TV appearances, book tours, etc. Then you can afford to stand off and be aloof.
I feel strongly that self-published LitFic authors have to take a risk; have to take the chance that some other (trade-pubbed) LitFic author will look down their nose at them, or the like, and make sure that prospective buyers will see and notice their covers. That may mean being a little less “LitFic” than Random House might be.
LitFic, FanFic, GenreFic or whatever all else there is. You still gotta get the readers in the seats, before you can sell them the candy and the popcorn.
(That’s my $.02 and not worth what you’re paying for it.)
Thanks Hitch – and you’re right. If a book isn’t being supported by a megapublisher’s marketing, reviewed by the NYT, displayed face-out in shops etc – you can’t really afford to have an aloof cover.
That doesn’t mean everything has to look crassly mass-market, you can still have a cover which sends restrained ‘literature’ signals and taps into those LiFic design tropes. But you don’t have the luxury of being too obtuse.
I’d also point out that a lot of these high-end ‘LitFic’ covers really only exist on the hardback editions of books. These edgy aloof covers make a statement and a splash – and when the book goes to paperback they tend to get more commercial versions of the design (or brand new more commercial/explanatory designs) that give more of a clue of content.
So these kinds of covers’ whole job is to serve a stage of a book’s publishing life that isn’t relevant for self-publishing – i.e. media reviews, bookstagram, bookshop displays. And then they’re remade to actually be commerical a few months later.
I actually have a lot of sympathy for LitFic authors, for this very reason. I mean, hell, traditional h/c LitFic covers are tricky enough, but add in walking that genre line…man.