The author says:
The protagonist of Bump changes based on who is last touched, then changes again with that person’s next physical contact. The point of view changes to reveal the lives of dozens of different characters within one novel. Several genres are included in Bump, and the tone of the novel will change constantly as the story takes on the lives of various characters. The characters face loss, love, death, and the challenges of youth. Bump cannot be classified as either a romance, horror, crime, thriller, action, or adventure specifically, as it contains many elements which vary based on each characters narrative. There are happy endings, and not so happy endings, and some that are bitter sweet.
Nathan says:
Sounds fairly experimental. There aren’t any hard-and-fast rules about this as there are about specific genres, but I don’t think your present cover does the job — it’s technically well done, but doesn’t say ANYTHING about the story.
The first idea that came to me was a series of overlapping photographic faces, chained together by overlapping eyes, thus:
It might convey the idea of several protagonists or viewpoint characters as being one of the central conceits of the book.
Beyond that, I’m open to suggestions. Anyone?
a tagline might work here
a novel
followed by a catchy phrase that encapsulates the idea of the book.
or maybe the addition of a butterfly? to allude to the butterfly affect that our smallest interactions impact others in ways we can’t foresee. I think you need to be clear that the character changes isn’t one soul inhabiting multiple people, which is why adding a novel would probably help. (Especially if you go with the overlapping faces idea)
I’d also remove just a hair of space on the title, so it isn’t quite so close to the edge.
PS. My first impression on viewing the cover was that it was a story of a man stalking his pregnant girlfriend but that could be just me. Switching the woman to be behind the man might help but maybe 2 men would be better?
Yup, preggers. First thing I thought and the stalker aspect second.
My immediate and first reaction was that this was a book about an unwanted pregnancy. Still not sure it isn’t, honestly.
The very last thing I thought, after reading the “can’t be categorized” disclaimer, was that it was experimental, effectively-short-story-fiction novellas (if not short stories) in a collection/omnibus. I mean, the hand-off idea is clever, but…it’s X stories about Y people, right? All different? Collection?
So…to convey the idea, at least initially, that’s being presented here, I would strongly rethink this cover.
I have to agree with Nathan: technically nicely done but it says absolutely zero about the book, its nature, theme or idea.
It sounds like Fallen, but the cover suggests an office stalker or a guy planning to ‘bump’ her into oncoming traffic.
I need a clearer idea of the book before offering suggestions.
Yes, I considered Fallen, too, but there’s no supernatural element here, apparently. Just the idea that when Character X bumps into Character Y a new short story or novella or? starts. There doesn’t sound as though there’s any continuity or overarching storyline to them, unlike the body-jumping demon in Fallen.
Honestly, it would be an easier cover if it did have a body-jumping demon.
I took a stab since I have no idea what any of it is about.
I agree with the others that this photo looks more like a stalker than bumping to change POV. (Unless the bumping is intentional?) If it’s random, then maybe a blurry crowd image might be better:
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/lobby-rush-hour-made-manner-blur-160796117
And as Shelley said, the cover really needs a tagline to give it context.
If I have any understanding of the book, this would be a good image to explore.
I took a wild and random stab:
https://i.imgur.com/N28QYpS.jpg
Well, it’s equally as vague, at least! I mean….don’t get me wrong, I find it more interesting than the submission, by far. But neither really tell us anything, do they?
I LOVE that image on Shutterstock. There is a series of them, so one more relevant to the book itself may be available. If one of those could be used, at least some visual interest could bestirred.
I don’t see a way forward for this without a tag line to be honest. The concept isn’t really tricky–X short stories/novellas, joined by this imaginary collision between two people, that exists solely for that purpose–effectively a “story fleuron,” telling the reader that “here starts a new story.” I’m not sure how any cover will ever convey that idea. And if there’s another theme here (“X stories about loss”) or the like we don’t know what that is.
It’s called “I have no idea what it’s about so I’ll try randomly bold”.
An appropriate tag would help a lot. Mine makes it seem like a tale about serial killer victims.
The space from the P drives my symmetrical brain nutballs. ‘BUMP!’ would work well to satisfy my selfish needs.
Well, yes: for a concept like this, an image can only convey the basics. A tagline would help make things a little more specific. Even so, part of the whole point of a tagline is to intrigue the prospective reader without giving away any spoilers.
Assuming this is indeed about some kind of body-surfing (probably not body-swapping, however, as the summary seems to indicate people remain in their own bodies even once the protagonist moves on from them), I’d probably go with something reflecting how the protagonist feels about the situation, such as:
You don’t know what you’re like.
It’s not easy being you.
I’ve walked miles in your shoes.
I know who you are; do you?
Oh what a tangled web you people do weave…
You can fool yourselves, but you can’t fool me.
I’m into you.
Eh, my guess would have been “horror novel about a stalker” from viewing just the cover image. Even after reading your summary, it seems like that as a general plot thread running through all the other stories within the story wouldn’t be out of the question. In particular, your summary makes me think of the character Doro from Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed who was somehow cursed to have his soul take up a new residence in some other poor soul’s body every time his current body died, thereby permanently displacing the original occupant and killing that individual; his gaining control of this power so that he could abandon his current body and jump to another at will just made him and his whole situation even more despicable and horrible to contemplate.
While your protagonist’s power might not be so dreadful as all that, one does have to wonder how exactly his/her/its transport from one person to another is affecting the people who pick up this spiritual rider/possessor. If we’re looking at something like a Quantum Leap story here, having such an entity temporarily (and—unlike Doro—non-fatally) taking over your life might not be so dreadful in the final analysis, but while it’s happening? Well, how much would you enjoy having some total stranger taking control (or maybe struggling for control) of your life, even if only for a limited time?
Turning the question around, how much would you really want to be that stranger forced into perpetual body-surfing? As Doro could tell you, there are worse fates than death, and his fate—never being allowed to stay dead, forced to go on living in his victims’ bodies unless and until humanity itself goes extinct on some distant doomsday—is certainly one of those. While having the same enforced immortality without being forced to kill people wouldn’t necessarily be so dreadful to anyone else, it could still be rather existentially dreadful to be permanently trapped in this temporal world with no way to leave no matter how bad one’s situation ultimately gets; the dreadful prophecy in Revelation 9:6 that many people will (somehow) be trapped here in this temporal world with even death eluding them and forbidding them any escape is considered dreadful for that very reason (though it certainly won’t help their situation that some kind of weird scorpion things will also be physically torturing them the entire time as well, if this prophecy is to be believed).
Ah, yes—the cover. Well, my point in all this existential philosophizing is that while the story as a whole may contain as many genres as you say and more, I still think horror must inevitably overshadow all the other genres for the protagonist, and that your cover must ultimately reflect this being a horror novel. While your first cover draft is rather unsettling for the reasons other critics have noticed already, it looks to be unsettling from some point of view other than the protagonist’s: specifically the woman in front looks like she’s imminently going to be the new host while the man behind her appears to be the current host. While I presume your protagonist to be a benevolent soul who won’t hurt her—at least not deliberately—and the man in the image is therefore harmless, what’s unsettling is that she—and your prospective reader who hasn’t come to your sales page to read your synopsis yet—doesn’t know that; the only horror this cover inspires is the viewer’s generic and mundane fear for the woman’s safety, i.e. that man behind her might be about to rob, rape, torture, and/or murder her.
Since (I again presume) the protagonist’s hosts are not in any such danger from him/her/it, that makes your cover extremely misleading, and could well justify your buyers’ attempts to return your book and demand a refund from the sellers while leaving a nasty review on your sales page to scare others away from buying it. (Incidentally, you can probably save everyone a lot of confusion over pronouns if you do as Octavia Butler did and pick a default gender for your protagonist; Doro considered himself to be a man even at times when he happened to be inhabiting a biologically female body—such as his little sister’s in a truly tragic moment in his backstory—because that’s what he was back before he died for the very first time and thereby discovered his horrible circumstances.) To make it clear to your readers the real conflict driving the story is something to do with the protagonist’s very existence, you should focus on him/her/it to the exclusion of all these other characters; using silhouettes to represent these other characters as CC Participant’s revised draft does is fine, but the protagonist should be front-and-center on the cover and better defined and detailed than anyone else to ensure the prospective reader knows this is the main character whose (mis)adventures in body/soul-surfing we’ll be following.
To that end, it seems to me a better way to convey the protagonist’s bizarre situation on your cover would be to do something like the “Now, sink into the floor” scene from the 2017 horror movie Get Out. If you haven’t seen that movie (and scene), basically what happens in it is that we viewers get our first taste of the story’s true horror when the protagonist is hypnotized and has his conscious mind pushed down into his subconscious mind. The way the movie portrays this is to show him tumbling backward into an endless dark abyss and watching from there what his eyes are seeing as if through a distant window or view screen.
For your cover, such imagery would likewise be very effective for conveying that the protagonist is not in his/her/its own original body. Particularly effective would be if any identifying racial and/or sexual aspects of the protagonist looking through the host’s eyes at a distance in this manner do not match those of the host, e.g. if the protagonist happens to have originally been a black man like the one in Get Out, have the current host be a little prepubescent white girl who happens to be standing in front of a bathroom mirror combing her hair or brushing her teeth or something like that. Whether your prospective readers have seen that movie (and scene) or not, they should instantly be able to pick up on the concept: “This is what I’m seeing from my body, except not really; actually, it belongs to someone else and I’m only a guest watching the view from in here.”
Even if your protagonist doesn’t actually have an original human body, e.g. is a sexless angel from Heaven or an extraterrestrial from a race that propagates itself asexually or something like that, this should work fine—or even better, since the protagonist’s original body on which the spirit portrayed is based will look nothing at all like the current host’s. All your cover needs to convey is “Somebody familiar to you ordinary people is out there, but somebody very different is in here.”
That’s a great analysis, RK, but I wish to God that I knew where you and a few of the others are getting this entire plot undertone that for the life of me, I don’t see/feel/hear from the description, etc.
IF indeed this is more like Wild Seed, then damn, yes, this cover has gone off the rails even more than it seems and is woefully inadequate to the task, because there is a supernatural horror element being thoroughly ignored and unplumbed.
But…my impression of the “bump” is that, as I stated above, it’s naught more than a fleuron, effectively. Suzie Bumps into Natalie and the next chapter/novella is about Natalie. No conscious entity driving the meat puppet; no demon body-jumping, nothing like that. Nothing to diminish what the author’s done, but effectively a plot device, rather than (fleuron) “the end” at the end of each story to say “yup, done here, moving on to the next story/protag/plot.”
Without knowing more about that, it’s hard to know what could work here. IS there a supernatural plot element that hasn’t been described? Is there a single (or multiple) malevolent entity, jumping with the bump? Is there anything else here that we need to know?
Honestly, without “more,” I feel like we’re banging our heads.
I hate to say it, but if the author can’t describe their own book I can’t help feeling they did a poor job crafting a succinct and engaging set of stories with clearly defined characters. Either that or they haven’t written it yet and are trying to describe it based on the their idea list rather than the final draft or even a clear outline.
Well, if there’s no sentient entity doing the jumping at all, just a Pulp Fiction-style narrative that jumps from character to character, then the obvious image to use would be of a fist bump. Of course, if that’s what’s going on here, the author should have used “narrative” in place of “protagonist” in the summary. The little green marble which is effectively the villainous protagonist of Heavy Metal (1981) also “changes based on who is last touched” and yet remains a villainous little green marble throughout; in Pulp Fiction (1994), the narrative jumps from character to character, making each the protagonist of his or her own chapter, though it does more or less remain a unified narrative to the end.
The reason I suggest a fist bump specifically is that if the title is a play on words, then the image ought to play on the word too. Case in point: the title of Megan McCafferty’s novel Bumped (oddly relevant here, don’t you agree?) plays on how “bumped” can be a bit of slang for “had sex” or a short informal way of saying “got pregnant and now has a baby bump” or “got discarded and replaced by someone else” in certain settings. In fact, all three of these meanings are ultimately applied within the story. (Since everybody’s going sterile around the time they turn eighteen, fertile young teenagers are encouraged to “bump” each other early and often, the most socially successful teenage girls are those who’ve got—or have lately had—baby bumps, and one of the co-protagonist twin sisters accidentally “bumps” the other one from her scheduled impregnation and takes on the job herself.)
While it’s difficult to come up with any imagery that universally implies the characters will be “bumping into each other” as in encountering each other by chance, a fist bump is rather casual (which implies the encounter that led to it is rather casual too), and certainly a form of “physical contact” as mentioned in the summary. I could also imagine a Pulp Fiction or Run Lola Run-style movie using just such a casual greeting as visual shorthand to tell the viewer “…and this is where we switch to a new protagonist.” If one can find an image in which the hands doing the fist bump are a different color/size/gender from each other as well, that’s even better for establishing that the protagonist of each chapter in the book will typically be handing the narrative off to someone completely different for the next chapter.
https://i.imgur.com/TLMTeFr.jpg
Yes, well, that’s getting somewhere, at least. I think the tagline has some legs, although I would nuke the quotation marks around bump and replace it with simple italicized text, IF there is an italicized face for that font. It’s possible there isn’t and you’d need color, or whatever, but…you know what I mean. I’m not quite yet “down” (ha!) with the color scheme, but that’s fine-tuning.
At least it seems to be getting closer to the storyline as we understand it, which is, as we’ve all said, something that is currently eluding us.
@Nathan: how do submitters learn that their work is featured here? How do they learn that there are comments? Is there anything automated about it, or…?
Yeah, I’m still throwing lawn darts in the wind here.
How about something like this? (I used my Shutterstock image from before.) The cover absolutely needs a tagline, though something better than what I used:
https://donaldcaponebooks.files.wordpress.com/2022/10/bump.jpg
While not super fond of the typeface, I really like the overall concept. “A Novel In Stories” is pretty good.
I’ve never been a fan of having people on book covers, particularly indie books that can’t afford to contract models for that specific cover. Silhouettes, people with their back to the camera, and blurred images solve that.
I like it better than what’s been submitted.
BTW, it’s “whose” for “whose story,” not “who’s” which is the contraction for “who is.” Not trying to be critical, I swear it, trying to help.
I suspect the backward ‘u’ may not be helpful. Gang?
Of course, whose. Oops lol. Needs a better tagline anyway.
The backward letters are actually part of the font. I’m not in love with it, just wanted to try something different.
Yeah. Y’know, one of my “hidden talents” (calling it a talent is absurd, to be clear) is the ability to readily and easily read not only backward but upside down. Dunno why some folks find it valuable, but…it’s true that I’ve scooped a lot of data that way over the decades–but the reality is, I find that font a bit off-putting that way. If I’m finding it…IDK disorienting or grimace-y, then maybe it’s really not the right font.
But can you write backwards? When i was a dispatcher I’d often write out instructions and announcements on the window next to my desk so the drivers could read them without me having to get off my lazy ass and walk to the other side.
Never tried. Hmmmmm….