Cooties

I think your best bet is to sit down with someone who understands cover design from a marketing perspective and figure out how to convey a grade-school romance without attracting a grade-school audience.

Uh, with due respect, I kinda thought that’s what this site was. You’re saying you people don’t understand cover design from a marketing perspective?

May I ask you this, submitter? When you envision your perfect reader–the person that you envisioned and to whom you wrote this, whilst working on it–who is it? Is it a 13-y.o.? A YA audience, which is 12-18? You’re straddling two categories here–Middle-Grade readers are for 8-12 y.o.s but YA is 12-18, in trade publishing.

Your definition of your marketplace seems to be for adult readers, not YA and not MG. Especially when you say PG-13, that skews heavily toward YA, but I can honestly say that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a YA novel with 10-y.o. romance protagonists. It’s hard to sell 12-y.o.’s on reading novels about 10-y.o.’s; YA typically tends to have mid-teen and older protags.

So, if you could tell us about that perfect reader, that perfect buyer, so we better understand who it is that you’re targeting, it would be enormously helpful on cover design.

As I said in the pitch, Hitch, I was specifically thinking more of the Y.A. crowd, albeit the kind who are mature enough for PG-13 material. (So yeah, it might be a bit much for 12-year-olds, although maybe not: with some of the crap they’re getting from public schools and our highly sexualized popular culture these days, kids tend to be a bit more desensitized to sex and violence at younger ages than they used to be.) It’s meant to be a sort of retrospective insty-nostalgia for teens old enough to understand the facts of life and have a little experience with being in romantic relationships, as in “If you’d known then what you know now, would you have gone for a full-blown romantic relationship back when you were just starting to think maybe the opposite sex wasn’t so bad and you might like them after all?” I’m thinking that particular crowd is probably aged about fifteen or sixteen and up.

Perhaps an important detail, since you and the other critics here seem to be getting a bit hung up on that PG-13 rating: that rating’s not coming so much from anything the protagonists themselves do in this story; for all their precocity, they don’t really do much more while “making out” than lots of hugging and kissing while remaining fully clothed. What sex and violence there is (mostly sex, though there’s a little violence due to their peers bullying them) all comes from the adults and children around them. Much of the comedy in this romantic comedy comes from a lot of the people who think them strange to be dating each other at such a young age being awfully freaky themselves, such as the butch female coach (never openly stated to be into lesbianism, though she’s pretty heavily implied to be) asking the boy at one point “Aren’t you two a little young to be deciding to be straight with each other already?” (Boy’s response: “Well, why shouldn’t we be honest?”)

These jokes are kinda like those “parental bonuses” writers throw into family friendly books and movies to keep the adults in the audience (who have to read the books to/watch the movies with the children) from getting bored. There was some stuff like that in that movie Melody I mentioned: for instance, a scene in which the ten-year-old protagonist Danny is at a dinner party with his parents and they get to joking with their friends about a certain Catholic gal they know who tries to use prayer as a method of contraception. “Not her hands she has to put together,” his father remarks. The difference in this story is that those references that fly right over the children’s heads (specifically the protagonists’) are targeted more at those mid-teens-and-up readers in the target audience.

Maybe something more like this?
https://imgur.com/a/2aIjT0w
with more ‘adult’ type art? it might be cool to add some hand drawn doodles, but then again you don’t want it too fussy. Black and white is really in right now, which the simple art like this lends itself to.
This one is a real challenge… lol
this artist has a bunch of nice drawings here:
https://depositphotos.com/similar-vectors/36348149.html

I agree with RK: that looks kinda like cover art for Diary of a Wimpy Kid—although that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I’m thinking maybe to try using this image: https://st.depositphotos.com/1793489/1876/v/950/depositphotos_18766175-stock-illustration-valentine-doodle-boy-and-girl.jpg What do you think?

Contrary to what our esteemed host says, while stock photo sites might not tend to focus on preteen romance specifically, any decent image search engine can turn up loads of stock images of prepubescent boys and girls (aged anywhere from two to twelve) doing various romantic things like kissing, hugging, giving each other valentines, etc. In fact, using just such a search engine, I turned up a certain awfully familiar-looking stock image of a little girl quite enthusiastically hugging and kissing a little boy; am I right in guessing you cropped this particular image and rubbed out the watermarks before cutting and pasting it on some other stock image of an abstract sparkles-and-valentines themed background? If so, not a bad cut-and-paste job, I must say; though our esteemed host and my colleagues here might be right when they say it’s not quite what your book cover needs. (For one thing, the little tykes look to me more like they’re seven or eight than ten-going-on-eleven, though—full disclosure—I’m not exactly an expert at guessing children’s ages.)

D’oh! Busted! Yeah, that’s the image, and that’s more or less what I did with it.

As for guessing their ages, the secret for guessing when they’re preteens is that when boys and girls are nearing puberty (which is happening younger and younger for some reason; the average age at which a girl’s menarche commences these days is just four months past her twelfth birthday), the girls typically get a growth spurt first, making them a bit taller on average than the boys. Once the boys hit their stride—usually somewhere around thirteen—they’ll shoot up past the girls and be taller on average for the rest of their lives. Until then, though, if a young couple are indicated to be the same age and the girl is the same height as the boy or just a little taller, they’re probably preteens. (See: the protagonist couples in all three of those movies I mentioned in my pitch.)

Concerning the lettering, our resident typesetting expert Hitch here could probably help you out on that; but as she says, she needs to know a little more about your target audience too before she can determine what’s appropriate. Oh, and by the way: Cooties sounds like it might be a pretty fitting title for this kind of story, but I don’t think we caught your name anywhere in the pitch? What name do you plan to use in your byline?

Oops! I forgot you wouldn’t know that since I didn’t put my byline on the cover yet. Silly me. Well, now you know, right?

As for my target audience, it’s as I said in my pitch: “anyone who likes “puppy love” romantic comedies like Melody (1971) or Little Manhattan (2005) or Moonrise Kingdom (2012).” You say you saw and liked them all; and I presume you’re over fifteen years old and experienced in romantic relationships by this point? So yes, I guess you’re one of my “prospective readers” there, RK.