The author says:
This is a YA dystopian where an 18-year-old named Mirari Vega is cryogenically preserved for 12 years in order to survive a deadly pathogen that is 100% fatal to women. When her scientist father brings her back, she is the only known female on the planet. While she was “on ice” men created artificial women called feminals for companionship. Mirari must pretend to be a feminal in order to avoid slavery or starting a World War (her fertility being most valuable resource).
Target audience: teen girls over the age 15 or anyone who likes upper YA dystopian stories.
Nathan says:
What’s missing is an instantly recognized SF element in the thumbnail. I understand that the gears’n’stuff are supposed to take that role, but (a) they’re barely discernable from the thumbnail, and (b) even at full size, their significance is unknown (plus, for good or ill, gears have become very strongly associated with steampunk, which means that it connotes an alternate past, not the future.
My inclination would be to move the model further to the right, and then fill in the space on the left with a SF-style background (like this, maybe?). Remember, your cover doesn’t have to accurately convey plot points; it needs to attract the attention of readers who would like the book.
Other comments?
Adding only this to Nathan’s analysis, with which I 100% concur–I’m not crazy about the font. I don’t think it says sci-fi/dystopian/future at all. I get that you are trying to convey the cryogenic angle, but I don’t think it’s serving you well at all.
Even sloughing off the sci-fi (for the font alone, I mean) you need something dystopian, at least. Trend Rough is a distressed, 3D font that might work. Skratch by Hanoded, might do it. It’s a bit out there, but it might do it. This Corrosion might work. I would need to experiment with it a while, especially once you move the doll or model to the right and use that now-empty space for a more sci-fi/futuristic/dystopian background.
I can only really second Nathan’s comments.
There is really nothing about the cover that suggests the story you describe. I realize that you are trying to suggest SF with the decorative elements, but they are far too subtle—and even if they weren’t, really don’t convey “dystopia.”
Hitch is right in saying that the title typeface isn’t working, but I think that is largely because it is at such odds with the cover image. The girl is simply too contemporary looking…let alone unemotional.
Try to avoid superfluous decorative devices like the little crown. They are unnecessary.
I’d recommend flipping the model to face the other way. Remove the gears and the special effects and instead use something like a shattered crown or something else that ‘says’ royalty. I’d also recommend a better background color, something more engaging than gray. If you could find a model with a more expressive face, that would be better.
You need a badass girl like this one
https://imgur.com/a/zkPXOUa
Or maybe go the other way completely and show one of those fembots. maybe a faceless crowd of men in the background blurred so you cant really see them or behind glass or maybe not even the fembot but just a part of one like a machine arm holding a woman’s leg or something
Well, I think the female doll is meant to be a fembot. I think that’s what he’s showing–but I agree it’s not really
saying that.
I like your mockup, other than the homonym error (rain/reign). 🙂
Whoops, I meant to post https://imgur.com/EifkFjW
but that cover has lots of tweaks needed. It was meant as an example of how much ‘stronger’ a cover is with a more active expression. Honestly, if it were me, I wouldn’t use a girl on the cover at all. I’d use something much more symbolic, like the aforementioned robot building machine. YA tends to have symbolic sorts of covers (except for the romances which always look a bit erotica…lol)
So, a story of a gal who’s pretty much the last woman on Earth? While not the first time I’ve ever heard of such a premise—Vault 68 from the game lore of the Fallout franchise comes to mind—this would be the first time I’ve heard of anyone fleshing it out into a complete story. The part about those “feminals” and the protagonist having to disguise herself as one also sounds a bit like something out of Woody Allen’s satirical 1973 flick Sleeper… so that’s at least two works from which you might draw some inspiration for how to advertise your work (especially that one poster showing Woody Allen in his robot disguise).
One thing you did do right with this first cover draft was keeping the imagery fairly simple and showing just one or two elements of the story: although—for the reasons our esteemed host and company have already explained—those gears don’t really work for advertising your particular kind of story, keeping the focus on the protagonist while avoiding cluttering your cover with too many plot elements at a time is probably the way to go. Of course, if you have an idea of how the protagonist should look when disguised as a “feminal” and where you might be able to find an image that looks like that, that’s one way you could keep your cover fairly clutter-free and focused on the protagonist while clarifying what kind of story this is. Alternatively, it occurs to me that a shot of her asleep in the cryogenic technology her father used to put her “on ice” might be a rather striking visual—and one easier to find some stock imagery to portray if you can’t draw it yourself.
In fact, considering that her father’s cryogenic technology is exactly what a civilization with only one woman would need to repopulate itself without that woman’s offspring having to pair off in incestuous couplings with each other, it might be such an important plot element as to deserve to be front-and-center on the cover. Portraying it also wouldn’t necessarily require anything too fancy: a simple chamber or pod with a view of the protagonist’s sleeping face through frosted glass might suffice. Best of all, even viewed through such a window, your protagonist would still be the main focus (and you can still show her without any clothes just as you do on this draft of the cover as long as she’s only visible from the shoulders up).
As to whether your protagonist should be “badass” as Savoy suggests, I’m figuring that rather depends on what kind of gal she is. Not every female protagonist in a dystopian future can be a Sarah Connor or Katniss Everdeen type, I suppose, and it might be a refreshing break from the conventions of the genre for this Mirari Vega to be more of a soft-and-sensitive girly-girl type who has to avoid direct physical confrontations and rely on guile and subterfuge to keep herself safe in a world where she’s what everyone wants but not everyone can have. If that‘s the kind of gal she is, showing a “softly” feminine gal (like the one on this draft) on the cover might be the right way to go.
I’m still sorta (sorta) interested to know how you repopulate a city, much less a planet, with the genetics of a single female. Presumably, that isn’t the plotline here–because how could it be?
As I say, the cryogenic technology is absolutely crucial. It allows you to put all those lonely young single men “on ice” until that woman’s daughters reach their childbearing years, whereupon each daughter can thaw out one of those non-blood-related young fellows to be her mate and provide her with daughters of her own. Rinse, lather, and repeat, and that single founding mother’s genes will soon be so diluted with the genes of all those different young men that her descendants should have no trouble finding genetically compatible mates among their distant cousins.
True, any sons said woman and her daughters bear would be somewhat problematic to this scheme, but—absent some further technology to ensure only daughters are conceived, and assuming the gals wouldn’t be such sociopaths as to murder all their sons and/or brothers outright—those boys could simply be put “on ice” for later as well. By the time a few generations passed, those frozen boys would be no more closely related to any of the latest generation’s eligible young ladies than any of their third cousins. Basically, having the technology to put people’s lives “on hold” allows you to put a lot of medical and social problems (such as an absence of women in the population) “on hold” too.
Of course, considering the protagonist Mirari Vega is an eighteen-year-old girl, I doubt she’d be thinking that far ahead in this story. (After all, how much were you speculating about your civilization’s future when you were eighteen and had just graduated high school?) I’d be surprised if her father who invented this technology hadn’t been thinking ahead a bit about possible uses (and abuses) for it while he was working on it, however.
Then again, if something unfortunate happened to her father and the girl’s on her own… well, maybe she‘s not too wise and doesn’t care to think very hard about all the things she can do with her father’s technology. Still, it seems to me somebody—some colleague of her father’s, or maybe just some far-sighted philosopher who happened to find out it existed—would be looking into the staggering social implications of having such a technology available and thinking of how to exploit it to his advantage. No society of any significant size lacks its share of innovative deviants and mavericks.
Also, the book’s title and tagline speak of the protagonist’s “reign” as the world’s “final queen” somehow; something it strikes me would be very difficult to achieve for a newly minted young woman all by herself among billions of boys (minimum age twelve) and men—unless she had some kind of advantage over them. From whence that advantage? I’m thinking it would necessarily have something to do with that technology; probably something to do with persuading the guys to put themselves “on ice” so they get to have a shot at mating with real women and having families of their own someday.
If enough males took her up on that offer, they would indeed be improving their future social prospects as promised, but this “queen” and her “princesses” would pretty much be the ones calling the shots when deciding who gets thawed out and who stays in cold storage (or goes back into cold storage if his “princess” decides her “prince” isn’t to her liking). As I said, the protagonist has what everyone else wants, but not everyone else can have. It’s a seller’s market for her—if she can find a way to make the “buyers” pay for what they want from her instead of simply taking it.
Well, the only way you could control all those men–I don’t care if it’s 20 or 2 million or 2 billion or on and on–around the Queen would be if yes, she were disguised as a Fembot. Once she’s known to be flesh, the game is over. There is almost no stronger imperative, especially in the male, then reproduction. It’s why we are here, all the woo-woo metaphysical stuff aside.
One of the characters in the book (the scientist father) mentions the Woody Allen movie “Sleeper” so it’s cool you mentioned that, too. Before the pathogen, Mirari is a beauty pageant wanna be who enters a lot of contests and never wins the crown. That theme runs through the book in a humorous way.
Yeah, I can imagine a bit of the (mildly dark) humor that might arise from a former washout in beauty pageants being awakened from her cryogenic slumber to discover that she’s now the most beautiful woman in the world. Another relevant work I remember is the short story “Choice” by Lawrence Watt-Evans in which (with a little help from some sex-selective spermicide technology) population control experts managed to get some third world nation’s explosive population growth under control by helping its parents have all the sons they wanted (but never any daughters). As the narrator explains to a visiting American feminist, what few girls and women there are in the nation these days (including the visitor herself) have to be either concealed and secluded or heavily guarded (by four bodyguards with semi-automatic rifles in her case) to keep all the lonely sex-starved men around them from attempting to “seduce” them using methods that are (as he puts it) “indistinguishable from rape.”
Something else he points out to the reader near the end is that his feminist visitor was rather middle-aged and kinda pudgy and squat and therefore not particularly attractive by her own society’s standards, “but that didn’t matter here.” To those sex-starved men, anyone with a pulse and a working vagina was attractive. As I see it, your protagonist’s pretty much the same way: she may not have won any prizes in those beauty pageants, but to all those lonely guys with only sex bots to keep them company in bed, that doesn’t matter anymore.
I’m guessing clones.
Something more like this
https://imgur.com/QpSXtl0
might work better.
Just a general feeling of hordes of anxious people waiting for a robot
That one is just freaking creepy, Shel.
https://imgur.com/mnUZzjU
tweaked
Xenomorph drill press. Nice.
I liked the design, but I didn’t like the typeface of the title—I get the ice thing but it’s too cartoony for me. When I read the description, however, I didn’t really expect that. As something geared towards adolescent teenagers, or a woman having power oven men—instead I see this beautiful woman with generic sci-fi elements. It’s not bad, the image looks professional to me, but that would be my criticism.
I think if there’s one thing you can’t afford to lack in YA covers especially, it’s an atmosphere, and that’s not here unfortunately.
I’ve written up a bit about how I’d go about starting to get together a really effective cover and some rough examples of options I’d come up with: https://www.kathrynrosamiller.com/post/cover-advice-freezing-reign