The author says:
BLOODLINES is a new adult, upmarket fantasy novel (part one of a duology). It follows two protagonists in the same city: Rorri, a refugee, drug addict, and hopeless romantic who falls in love with his magic tutor (which is where most of the cat-related things come from); and Pak, an outcast orphan boy with a tragic past, a cursed weapon that makes him do terrible things, a love for animals, and a crush on his only friend. Both are haunted by the distant antagonists in an ongoing war (people called the Duen) and both are subject to racial/class prejudice. Rorri has a secret (he screwed up bad), and Pak is searching for answers relating to the weapon, which ultimately ties to Rorri. Also they’re elves but like, lowkey elves, not Tolkien elves. Elevator pitches are hard 🙁
Target audience is 20-30 year old queer and neurodivergent fantasy readers (I plan to do targeted marketing via Facebook), people who like the Magicians Trilogy by Lev Grossman. It is both plot heavy and character motivated which is why I’m saying it’s upmarket.
I made the cover, my biggest concern is that the cats will throw people off. They’re mostly symbolic in the book, not necessarily a hard plot point.
Nathan says:
The problem isn’t the inclusion of the cats (although it took me forever to realize that the bottom cat was the reflection of the top one), it’s that nothing says “fantasy.” Cats can certainly be magical, and there’s nothing wrong with using them as your central image, but just including a cat doesn’t tell the reader that it’s a fantasy novel, and the typeface you chose has nothing fantastic about it either. Remember that, at the very least, your cover needs to immediately signal its genre.
This is something you could easily solve with (a) a different typeface, and (b) maybe a border.
But while you’re at it, please lose the posterizing filter — it adds nothing, only detracts.
Other comments?
This isn’t the right cover for this book. You need to show the magic. Maybe try a rainbow swirl of magic with a cat looking on. A pretty swirl of rainbow magic going to the cat. it doesn’t matter if your magic is rainbow color. the magic is just there to entice the reader with a clear visual. I’d use pink too probably, maybe in sparkles, maybe text, that’s the sort of thing you need to play around with. but using clear LGTB identifiers will appeal to your audience.
Maybe something more like this? https://imgur.com/KeQFthc
This has a real fantasy vibe that might be all wrong for your book though. You might need something a lot ‘tamer’ if this more of a literary novel. I’ve never seen a fantasy story labeled – a novel before. So Something more like
https://imgur.com/Gcg9I0K
might work better.
I don’t mean use that exact thing. I picked background at random. You could pick symbols that further sell the book instead.
Yeah, sorry, this one is simply a “No.” It’s the wrong cover for the wrong book and certainly the wrong cover for this genre (fantasy). LitFic aspirations or not, it’s wrong.
Forget the elevator pitch–which as you say, is really not good–what is your one-sentence storyline? For example, to mooch from Randy Ingermanson’s Snowflake Pro, about the first book in the HP series:
Do THAT exercise, if you haven’t already–if you have, tell us here what it is–and then think about your cover. Is it primarily LGBT? Is it Race/Class prejudice/bias? Is it the fantasy element (magic)? What, in short, is the book about? What is the market? While we’re not “elevator pitch critiques” here, we need something…stronger, more targeted, to know where to tell you to go with this.
When you closed your eyes, when you started this manuscript, and envisioned your perfect reader, who was he? (For example, readers of “The Cat Who…” series might be rightly construed to be mature cat-loving and cozy-reading women, right?) Was it 20-30-something gay men? LGBT in general? POC? I mean…this elevator pitch is, indeed, all over the place, which makes it very hard for us to help you, other than simply saying “nope, that’s not it.”
Shelley’s given you some ideas, which are good jumping-off points for an academic charette. If you can give us your one-sentence storyline, or something akin to that, we can probably help you a LOT more. RK will be spectacularly useful, if you can give us a better feel for the book. My thing, generally, is fonts, but…I need something to start with, for font advice.
Eh, my one thought as I was reading through your “elevator pitch” was “OK, but what exactly do all these characters with these exotic problems in these exotic settings actually do in this story?” I’m reminded of the late P.J. O’Rourke’s description of his experiences with Russian literature in college: Tolstoy was yammering on for pages about how a certain peasant gal’s sexual relationship with one of the main characters in his novel was all symbolic of yakety-yakety-yak, and all O’Rourke could think the whole time was “Leo, why’d she f*** the guy?” That’s basically the same problem you (and we) are having here.
Ah, yes; we’re supposed to be talking about the cover. Well, a cat on your cover is not inherently a deal-breaker (we’ve had covers with cats on them here before), but—since none of your prospective readers have actually read your book yet—having a cat there as a symbol of something or other doesn’t really provide them with any compelling reason to give your book a second glance either. As we’ve told many an author before you, focusing on a symbol that doesn’t mean anything outside the context of your story is putting the cart before the horse; you want your prospective readers to have some idea of what they’ll be getting just from looking at the thumbnail before they even go to the sales page.
As the matter currently stands, however, neither your cover nor your pitch has offered us any clues as to what your readers are supposed to be getting. Again, I have to ask: what is it your characters actually do in this story? Go on a quest/try to bed their love interests/try to dispel the curse on that weapon/try to win the war/all of the above?
There’s a lot riding on the answer to that question: basically, if you can tell us the plot in one paragraph or less (one sentence might not be enough if it’s a really complicated story), then we might be able to give you some ideas what to put on your cover. At present, all you’ve given us in your description so far is the setting and the characters. What you haven’t told us is what the story’s central conflict is: what are these people trying to achieve, who or what stands in their way, and how might they hope to overcome these obstacles?
To give an example of how to write one of these summaries, consider the very complicated and tragic story of the anime Saikano: having seen the entire series myself, I can tell you it’s got lots of exotic characters and settings and technology just like your own story. For my elevator pitch, however, I can summarize the whole thing in just one (albeit somewhat long-winded) sentence: “Seventeen-year-old high school senior Shuji has to deal with the personal and social fallout when his frail young girlfriend Chise agrees to participate in an experimental new military program that turns her into a living weapon of mass destruction so she can fight for Japan in World War III.”
[Takes a deep breath.] Now, do you see what’s not in that pitch? I could give you reams of information about the setting (most of it takes place in and around a military town in Japan during frickin’ World War III, for crying out loud!), the characters (Shuji and Chise both have rather shady and tragic pasts, and there’s a lot of sexual skulduggery between them and many of the numerous characters in the supporting cast), the fantastic/sci-fi elements (e.g Chise’s being turned into a flying cyborg girl who can level whole cities with a sweep of her hand), and the moral gist of it (“No matter how awesome your new military technology may be, World War III is still gonna be Hell on Earth; so let’s not start that war, mmm-kay?”), but I don’t. All you need to know is: high school boy is main viewpoint character; his protagonist girlfriend gets transformed and goes off to fight in the war; he suffers all the consequences of this along with her.
That, basically, is what we need in your pitch: who are the main characters, what do they do in this story, and what’s the central conflict motivating their actions? Until we have those primary elements, we can’t really tell you what your cover needs on it because we don’t really know what kind of story it is. If and when we do, then we should be able to tell you whether your cover needs a cat with dichromatic eyes and where to place it if it does.
Amen. That’s exactly what I was endeavoring to say, but said far better. Thanks, RK.
(I like the Ingermanson Snowflake Pro 1-sentence summary approach slightly better because it forces the author to distill it all down. Yes, a one-paragraph summary is good for us here, on CC.com, but a one-sentence line makes them discard all the frippery and decide–“what the hell is this book about?”)
P.S. RK:
If one-sentence isn’t enough–then the story isn’t too complicated, it’s not adequately clear in the author’s mind. It’s inadequately defined. Every story–every one, no matter what–is distillable to one sentence.
(h/t Randy Ingermanson). Ingermanson is hardly the only writing or how-to coach that tells every author on earth–genre or LitFic–to do this. EVERY writing coach does. It’s an exercise that every writer goes through, if they join courses, seminars, etc.
Sure, there are other elements–POTC has a drunken lout of a captain (who makes the film) and there’s a love interest and yadda–but the bottom line is, that’s the plot.
It may not even be easy to do it–but it can be done. If he can’t do it–he hasn’t targeted his ideal reader and he may not yet really even know what his plot IS. We need to know that, to help him use his cover to find them and weasel them out from the crowd, to find HIS book.
My $.02.
Well, when I say one paragraph, I mean we the cover critics might need that. One could indeed distill even something as complicated as the original Star Wars trilogy down to a one-sentence summary: “A bunch of heroic rebels fight to overthrow an evil galactic empire which is oppressing them.” If we’d been around back in—say—1975 and Alan Dean Foster (or one of the other novelists George Lucas hired to novelize his movies) were pitching the whole story to us with just that one sentence, however, I think we’d want to know a little more.
Specifically, we’d want to know the genre, the target audience, and what visual elements of it might appeal to that audience if shown on the book’s cover. (Author: “Well, it’s a space opera with both science fiction and fantasy elements, and it’s fairly clean and wholesome family entertainment despite having a little sexual content—mostly just kissing, mind you—and a lot of violence. As for visually appealing stuff, how does this montage of a handsome young guy with a laser sword, a pretty young gal with a laser gun, a massive metallic moon-shaped battle station, a robot built like a trash can, and a wholly black-clad bad guy in a cape and mask milking the giant cow grab you?”)
Turning the analogy around, I’d say the author’s pitch we got here contains everything but that one sentence about the plot. It’d be like if our hypothetical Star Wars novelizing author were to slap a picture of a pair of hands holding a light saber on the cover, and then tell us about the main characters, the Force, the light sabers and other futuristic technology these characters use, the Jedi (“from whom we get most of the light-saber-related stuff in this story”), and how these characters’ interactions will give rise first to a love triangle and then later to some disturbing revelations about their familial heritage, among other character developments. Then he would skip right to the part about this being family-friendly fare intended for a fairly broad target audience without happening to mention that… oh, yeah… there’s a friggin’ galaxy-wide civil war going on in this story that motivates nearly everything every one of the main characters does.
So, y’know, this “elevator pitch” isn’t all bad: it did at least tell us about the genre and the target audience. It’s just missing that one little all-important detail about what the main plot is. If he gave us that, I think his elevator pitch could be a three-sentence paragraph:
1. “This is a new adult, upmarket fantasy novel (part one of a duology).”
2. “The protagonists Rorri and Pak are trying to [main plot that motivates everybody’s actions], and [the antagonists whoever they may be] are getting in their way because [conflict driving the main plot].”
3. “The target audience is 20-30 year old queer and neurodivergent fantasy readers, and especially people who like the Magicians trilogy by Lev Grossman.”
Yes, okay, I’ll defer to you on that. You’re right–and that’s sort of where I was (clumsily) trying to get to–where’s the beef? What the hell is the actual plot?
Not plot elements or subplots, or character arcs, or the like, but…what’s the damn gist? If you did have to give an elevator pitch, in a busy elevator to a harried entertainment executive, what, exactly, is the High Concept line?
Or is it all Low Concept? Even if the latter, we still need the main plot. Can’t do much, cover-wise, without that.
I agree with everyone else that the overfiltered cat is just not the right cover for this book, but also, without knowing what it’s about…I can only suggest something like this:
https://imgur.com/qLXlNGW
I am hoping you’ll come back with more info on your plot!
I swear, @Sydney, that mockup reminds me of a cover from the 80’s…dang, it was one of those novelists that wrote the women’s books, like…Judith Krantz, or one of those. Anybody else? Seeing/remembering it?
Definitely a Sidney Shelton vibe.
https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/9806373-L.jpg
https://www.publishersweekly.com/cover/9780517561102?w=204
I had to Google, but neither of you are wrong!
And you had to google because we are old.
Speak for yourself, Mr. Decreptitude. 😀
I do agree that the cat isn’t the right subject for the cover. After all they are elves after all. Sounds sort of fantasy dystopian novel maybe. I did a mock book cover for a book I was thinking of doing and I put two characters in profile looking at each other from the edges of the book. Maybe this would work if we could see your elven characters. I think the elven aspect and magical aspect could be featured here. I know sometimes
the author dosent want to give away the look of the characters, but I think in fantasy it’s ok. Maybe have someone do some good character drawings of your characters. Characters expressions and what they are wearing can give a feel for the plot scheme and characters. I always like to see my sci fi characters on a book cover. Just some ideas.